Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks [1 ed.] 9781614728702, 9781614720713

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BERKSHIRE CLASSICS “A one-man commando squad and independent operator, Marvin Mudrick was the most maverick literary critic of his time and ours—ferocious, funny, and fearlessly honest.” —James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

Mudrick Transcribed

“I can’t imagine a better book on how an inspired teacher’s mind works; Mudrick’s easy rhythms make you aware of how he arrives at the humor that shoots up, geyser after geyser. You know at once why his students would be swept along by his words—he’s thinking on his feet, getting high on his thoughts.” —Pauline Kael, New Yorker Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks exists only because of the diligence and ingenuity of a student, Lance Kaplan, who recorded some of Marvin Mudrick’s classes on cassette tapes. After Mudrick’s untimely death in 1986, Kaplan began to transcribe and edit the recordings. “Transcribe” and “edit” are, however, inadequate words to describe the creation of this extraordinary book, which is a kind of miracle of attention. It is entertaining, freakishly smart, and full of love—a love of life, books, music, and people. The transcriptions include a class on eighteenth-century English prose, a class on the writing of narrative prose, two interviews about the College of Creative Studies, and talks on literary criticism, artistic response, genius, and the craft of teaching. The only volume that has never been commercially published, this may well be the gem of the Berkshire Classics Mudrick collection.

Mudrick Transcribed

classes and talks Edited by Lance Kaplan, with a new introduction by James Raimes

Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986) was a prominent literary critic and founded the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This book was republished to coincide with the College’s 50th anniversary.

BERKSHIRE CLASSICS

MUDRICK

Literature, Modern—History and criticism LCCN 2017015058 | Paperback ISBN 9781614720713 | Ebook ISBN 9781614728702 LCC PN85. M776 2017 | DDC 801/.95—dc23

Mudrick Transcribed CLASSES AND TALKS Edited by Lance Kaplan Introduction by James Raimes

Marvin Mudrick

Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks

Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks

Marvin Mudrick

Edited by Lance Kaplan With a new introduction by James Raimes and foreword by Alan Stephens

A BERKSHIRE CLASSIC published 2018 by Berkshire Publishing Group, by arrangement with the estate of Marvin Mudrick. Copyright © 1989 by Marvin Mudrick. Introduction copyright © 2018 by Berkshire Publishing Group. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information retrieval system, without permission in writing from: Berkshire Publishing Group LLC 122 Castle Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230-1506 USA www.berkshirepublishing.com Tel +1 413 528 0206 Fax +1 413 541 0076 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mudrick, Marvin, author. | Kaplan, Lance, editor. | Raimes, James,   writer of introduction. Title: Mudrick transcribed : classes and talks / by Marvin Mudrick;   edited by Lance Kaplan ; with a new introduction by James Raimes. Description: Great Barrington, Massachusetts : Berkshire Publishing Group, 2017. |   Series: Berkshire classics: The Marvin Mudrick collection | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017015058| ISBN 9781614720713 (hardcover : alk. paper) |   ISBN 9781614728702 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Criticism. | Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. Classification: LCC PN85. M776 2017 | DDC 801/.95—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015058 Cover illustration by Mike Solomon shows Marvin Mudrick reading a student’s story. Watercolor and ink on paper, 9 × 12 inches, © Mike Solomon 1977, www.mikesolomon.com.

Table of Contents Life on the Page by James Raimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Reading with Marvin Mudrick by Alan Stephens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Preface by Lance Kaplan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv “Why in the World Else Would You Be a Lit Major?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Week One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Week Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Week Four . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Week Six . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Week Seven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 From a Class on the Writing of Narrative Prose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FALL 1983 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Week One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Week Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Week Seven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SPRING 1983 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SPRING 1985 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Week Six . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Week Nine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Week Ten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

130 131 131 148 154 156 174 174 191 210

Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 “Teaching Is My Hobby” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell . . . . . . . . . . . 264 Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 An Interview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 From a Class in Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 A Debate With Susan Sontag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 A Heretic in the University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328 “Ikey, Ikey, What’ll Ya Learn in School Today?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

v

Mudrick Transcribed A Commencement Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 Genius and Anti-genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 Appendix: List of Publications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Return of Marvin Mudrick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . About Marvin Mudrick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . About James Raimes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vi

377 387 391 393 395

“A freewheeling, earthy entertainer.” —Kirkus Reviews “. . . A literary curmudgeon, a randy iconoclast, and a delight.” —Washington Post “Masterful is what Marvin Mudrick unmistakably and invigoratingly is.” —The Times Literary Supplement “. . . the Mickey Spillane of Belles Lettres.” —Village Voice “Who the hell is Marvin Mudrick and what gives weight to his pronouncements anyway?” —New York Review of Books

BERKSHIRE CLASSICS The Marvin Mudrick Collection Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by Karen Christensen On Culture and Literature (1970) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by Kia Penso The Man in the Machine (1977) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by William Pritchard Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? (1979) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by Jervey Tervalon Nobody Here But Us Chickens (1981) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by James Raimes Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks (1986), edited by Lance Kaplan, with a new introduction by James Raimes

Find out more about this series and Berkshire Publishing Group’s revival of selected authors at http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/classics/

viii

Life on the Page James Raimes

G

ood for Lance Kaplan. I think this every time I pick up this book. Kaplan asked Marvin Mudrick whether he could tape his classes and talks, and Mudrick said yes provided Kaplan didn’t reveal when the taping was happening. The result is a book that makes me think of Samuel Johnson and Orson Welles. I’ll explain. This is how Mudrick, in Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is?, summed up one of his favorite books: The only life ever lived is Boswell’s Life of Johnson, because only Johnson lived so fully in unpremeditated words [my emphasis] and only Boswell, besides being so forward in provoking so many of them, had the genius, the love, the attentiveness, the perseverance, and the opportunity to gather so very many of them. And in My Lunches with Orson, subtitled Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, this is what Peter Biskind, the book’s editor, says of Welles, who had known he was being tape-recorded but had stipulated that the recorder should be out of sight: Because Jaglom was not interviewing Welles, but conversing with him, we have a Welles unguarded and relaxed, with his hair down, unplugged, if you will [my emphasis again], willing to let fly with all manner of politically incorrect opinions-sexist, racist, homophobic, vulgar (let’s be kind, call it “Rabelaisian”)—driven, perhaps, by the impish pleasure he took in baiting his liberal friend, offending his progressive susceptibilities, or just by native, irrepressible ebullience. The more perverse Welles’s views, the more fiercely he argued them. His antic wit, stringent irony, and enormous intelligence shine through these conversations and animate every word, making it difficult not to love the man. In Mudrick Transcribed we get a different Mudrick from the great reviewer, essayist, and critic who wrote in every issue of The Hudson Review for decades and collected his pieces in four books, two of which I got a huge kick out of publishing. ix

Mudrick Transcribed Here he isn’t the writer, he’s the unfiltered, unpremeditated, very engaged, very serious teacher, heavily disguised, like Welles, as an outrageous entertainer. Boswell did an amazing job remembering Johnson’s conversation and then hurriedly writing it down as soon as possible after he had been part of it, but all Jaglom and Kaplan had to do was surreptitiously press the “play” button on their tape recorders to capture their heroes talking. Their heroes obliged, and we are the beneficiaries. We don’t get in these books the intimate Johnson or the private Welles or the real or true Mudrick. All three were showing off to a very small group of listeners, knowing the sort of thing their listeners wanted to hear, but at the same time all three were being spontaneous—they weren’t editing what they said for the ages—so in each case we feel we are closer to the living person than when reading his writings. It’s what happens in the letters and diaries of great writers—who reveal more about themselves than in their crafted works because they aren’t fashioning their thoughts for posterity. They are recording their lives, or, in the case of Johnson, Welles, and Mudrick, their lives are being recorded as they are being lived. We feel them living today, even if we may be reading them tens or hundreds of years later. They, like we, don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Meanwhile, this is them, now. Just as Van Gogh was as great a letter writer as he was a painter and Monet as great a gardener as he was a painter, Mudrick was as great a teacher as he was a reviewer and essayist. The evidence is here. Mudrick Transcribed was privately printed and got almost no reviews, although it was noticed very generously by his fan James Wolcott and it received a notable mention in The New Yorker by the magazine’s big-gun movie reviewer, Pauline Kael (whom Wolcott knew and admired). Kael was reviewing the Peter Weir movie Dead Poets Society in which Robin Williams plays John Keating, an iconoclastic teacher who, like Mudrick, is more respectful of his students than of the school’s administration. “I saw the movie,” Kael wrote, right after reading the just-published Mudrick Transcribed, a collection of talks on literature by the late Marvin Mudrick, recorded by his students. I can’t imagine a better book on how an inspired teacher’s mind works; Mudrick’s easy rhythms make you aware of how he arrives at the humor that shoots up, geyser after geyser. You know at once why his students would be swept along by his words—he’s thinking on his feet, getting high on his thoughts. And that’s what Robin Williams shows Keating doing. (The New Yorker, 26 June 1989) As you read the book, you can feel yourself in the classroom with Marvin enjoying himself at his little desk at the front. It’s the essence of what Mudrick the critic always wanted to find in books: life on the page. I wish I had had him as a teacher, although I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the classes on fiction writing, with him reading all stories aloud and then commenting on them. Unless, of course, I had written a story he liked. He could be merciless, but this book shows him loving some of his students’ stories. What an encouragement to hear x

Life on the Page your tough-as-nails teacher say, after commenting in detail on your story, “Lovely story, lovely story. Beautiful, very delicately managed, it seems to me absolutely convincing from beginning to end.” What always convinced him was “the sense of lives being lived.” “If a writer can do that, he or she has done the most important thing to be done with the writing of fiction,” he once said. Which I believe is right. In the same class, Mudrick gets into the difference between fiction and criticism, and again I think he’s right: Essentially criticism is just talk. It’s talk about something, that’s all it is. If you want to ask me the difference between criticism and fiction, well, fiction tries to set up a kind of alternative to life. Fiction dramatizes. The only difference between fiction and criticism is that fiction dramatizes and criticism doesn’t. Criticism talks, fiction dramatizes. Fiction pretends that there’s a world. And then, of course, within the fiction criticism is occurring because people talk, they express opinion. Talk is criticism, fiction is drama. And that’s really all there is to it, and I don’t know any better way to define either. He trusted the talents of his students, and he wanted them to trust themselves and not fall dutifully for any of the modish critical or theoretical stuff that they might encounter in other college literature classes. He founded the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on principles that, as he explains several times in his books, were outright heretical. And in case anyone should think that such a place would doom its students, he explains, with percentages, how successful his students have been, both in the arts and the sciences. What I have taken from this book can be summed up in some of the statements, like “criticism is just talk,” that boil his philosophy down to three or four words: Art is statement, it is not ornament. Art is Entertainment that Stays Entertainment. Anything that Depresses you is not Art! Literature Is Not Religion. Those are very simple ideas, but they are decidedly radical. Together with something that he insists on again and again—namely, that he always aims to write outrageously, above all to entertain, to be a comic writer—those ideas lie behind what to me is the most interestingly radical idea in the whole book, just as it was in Nobody Here But Us Chickens: that Shakespeare isn’t a god, he’s a devil. In Chickens his objection was moral. Here it’s still moral but it’s broader, it’s stylistic: I have it in for Shakespeare, and I take every opportunity to say nasty things about him. And one thing I think about Shakespeare is that his kind of writing is likely to arouse a false enthusiasm; that is, it uses techniques of literature which are vulgar. I think the excessive use of metaphor and imagery in literature is vulgar. I think that Shakespeare encourages a tendency to show off, like the way people like to spout soliloquies. And they are wonderful mouth-filling xi

Mudrick Transcribed statements, I mean you can speak them and you don’t have to think about what they mean at all. They are just words, and they are such marvelous, mouth-filling, creamy words. “Art is statement,” Mudrick tells his students. “It is not ornament. Ornament is incidental to art, and the less the better.” And when Shakespeare is going on about ‘Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts’ and Milton is going on about [breathlessly] ‘Him the Almighty Power Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition; there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms . . .’ that seems to me, in the highest and most majestic sense, bullshit. [Laughter.] Just bullshit. I mean, Milton is trying to get away with something! He is trying to pretend that poetry is as big as the universe. And it isn’t. It just isn’t. Right there, in those few minutes, he’s made the case that Shakespeare and Milton were malign influences on subsequent writing. They wrote too beautifully or too elaborately or too artificially. Whether you agree with such an outrageous point of view or not, that, surely, is why Mudrick didn’t write about poetry generally, except for Chaucer, who in his best poems was writing novels about people. Poetry was all wordplay, and when fiction or any other type of writing indulged in it, he was turned off. Of course, you could accuse Mudrick himself of wordplay, but I would answer that his was always in the service of accuracy or laughter or both. Truth over poetry. Entertainment over art. Statement over ornament. Those principles certainly guide me whenever I open a book, whether it’s a classic or a new best seller, in whatever genre, high or low. But as for principles generally—people over principles. When I was sent Mudrick Transcribed, I learned that Marvin had died in 1986, five years after the publication of Chickens and two years after having been dismissed from the provostship of the college he had founded in 1967. (The chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Robert Huttenback, who had forced Marvin out, was himself forced to resign in 1986 when he faced charges of having embezzled from the university to renovate his home.) I’ve read Mudrick Transcribed several times, smiling always as I hear his funny, cantankerous, ebullient, impatient, but always serious involvement with his students. But the first time I read the book was as soon as it arrived in the mail. I took it with me on a trip to Dallas, where I was attending an American Library Association conference. I started reading it at La Guardia Airport. The waiting area at the gate gradually filled up and became noisy with people bustling around me, but I was oblivious xii

Life on the Page to the hubbub and so engrossed that when I looked up however many minutes later, the waiting area was quiet and empty, the plane’s door was closing, and the moveable bridge to the plane was being withdrawn. I’ve missed my stop on the subway several times reading novels, but this was the first and only time I’ve missed a plane reading a book. When I eventually arrived in Dallas and told colleagues what had delayed me, they couldn’t believe that the culprit was a college professor they hadn’t heard of, in a book of transcribed classes and talks to his students. They didn’t know what they had been missing. I had missed a plane, but for a good cause, and if I miss Marvin now, I know that I can always find him fully alive in the pages of this book. James RAIMES

xiii

Reading with Marvin Mudrick Alan Stephens

M

arvin had a low opinion of poetry, once you get past Chaucer and a few of the later figures. Donne, I remember, he said he liked. And he had an especially low opinion of Romantic and Modernist poetry and what came after. He called it “wall-paper” for a while there. Poetry hadn’t been about enough, he felt, for a long time. I think probably his analysis included the fact that fiction came along and took over big territories of subject matter, and left the poets without occupation in a good many literary respects. Poetry wasn’t about enough, and yet didn’t know it. So it put on airs, it indulged in naive egotism, weak, ready-made sentiments, dumb stunts, silly judgments, tricky rhetoric . . . the whole list would be a long one. There is lots of evidence for his position about poetry. I noticed, reading around in Hemingway’s letters the other day, that the young Hemingway agreed with him. Hemingway was not somebody whom Marvin cared a lot about. But Hemingway said that he’d found that he felt there’d always been good poetry, and with a little luck, we’d always have a little, but not a hell of a lot. And that’s maybe not a risky position to take. It was three days after Marvin’s death that I came on campus for the first time, and the place looked to me, as it must have looked to lots of you, very small, stricken, listless. The phrase that jumped into my mind was, “A big force is gone.” Force is not, maybe, the right word, but a better one hadn’t come to me. But I meant a big force of intelligence, a big force of personality, a big force of character, a big force of imagination, a big force of passion and talent and bounding energy. All that was gone. I propose a contest with the poetry lovers. I’ll take Marvin’s side. You cover a page with passages from your favorite twentieth-century poets, and let me pick a page full of passages from Marvin’s writings. Then we’ll see which can and cannot stand up to which. We’ll compare them for original wit, for rhythmic power, speed and compactness of expression, images, metaphors, for understanding, for imagination, for emotion. In short, we’ll compare them for art, and for scope (you know Shakespeare’s line: “Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope”) and for everything else. You’re saying, “Why, you can’t compare that way,” and I say, “Sure you can; it’s all writing.” I just want something to read. All I ask is to be smitten, as Robert Frost says. I think where I’ll beat you is in this: The poets have their lines to work with, and they have their images, and their rhythms and other sound effects; but the trouble is, they have to write in sentences, too. And it is well, it’s really immensely advantageous, xv

Mudrick Transcribed for a sentence to be saying something; and a sentence by Marvin says a lot, a lot. So there’s where I think you should put your money: on me. Now I want to talk about my long friendship with him. When I came to UCSB, the College wasn’t here but Marvin was. And I was a very green assistant professor from the sticks: hot-headed and overconfident, rigid with principle; the list there would be long, also, if I completed it. And in those days everybody shared an office. Nobody had an office to himself. And Hugh Kenner, who was the chairman at the time, put me in with Marvin. And I got direct warnings, and fearsome stories, from various people; and I even got a letter from a very distinguished professor from a university up north: “Watch yourself with Mudrick; he can tear you limb from limb.” Well, what we did was argue, after our acquaintance with one another was provisionally and perfectly pleasantly established. Wonderful arguments they were, and great fun. I had never encountered such a quick, strong, and resourceful intelligence. Marvin and Kenner were the two smartest people I had ever met. I hadn’t even imagined people that smart. And I learned, as you have if you’ve been in Marvin’s classes, that intelligence is infectious. It makes you smarter to be around it. (So is stupidity, unfortunately.) Knowing Marvin helped me become not as smart as he was—but at least I had a chance to become as smart as I could be. Those contests, those arguments, were sometimes spectacular, and Marvin was like Dr. Johnson in the heat of the battle: he would sometimes stop arguing in order to arrive at the truth, and start arguing to win, and throw every argument that he could lay his hands on at me. But what was exhilarating for me was that I never was afraid to blurt out any idea that jumped into my mind in the course of an argument. I knew always that Marvin would grasp it right away. When I tried this on other people, too often what happened was that my idea—I could see it—traveled in that person’s mind over to the nearest cliché, getting digested there. Very irritating. Not with Marvin. And also you’d notice that he’d understood not only that idea but the great big area around it that you hadn’t yet got around to looking into. With nearly all other academics, I’ve found, to argue is to quarrel; the herd instinct is very strong in our profession. Differences of opinion are taken very seriously. Not that Marvin and I didn’t quarrel. But really it was that I quarreled with him, and then he would bring me back to my senses. So I learned lessons in conduct from Marvin. I do remember once he got angry at me. His knee had been hurting him, and I suggested that he get a decent pair of running shoes, instead of wearing the seven-dollar sneakers that he had. They were a brilliant odd green color, and I think he had something like ten pairs of them. And he blasted me right out of the office, with one growl. Even back then, when I first got here, I knew how to read. That’s probably the thing I can do best. Anyway Marvin soon found out about this, and from then on, for over a quarter of a century, four times a year, right down to a few weeks ago, sometimes oftener if he was writing other things, I’d get a phone call from Marvin. I’d say, “Hello?” He’d say—it always went the same way—“Oh, hello Al. Al, I’ve finished a piece for The Hudson. Could you possibly look at it today?” And I would say, “Bring it right over,” as often as I could. And never was there a delay of more than a day or so, I think. xvi

Reading with Marvin Mudrick Well, here he’d come, with two copies, one for him and one for me. We’d sit down, and read it. Those pages would be typed solidly, and with margins—narrow margins—and the type was small, so you’d get the most words possible on the page. And the paragraphs—really big, massive things, like Aztec masonry. And then squeezed in between, in that tiny but very clear writing—really it was printing— would be the revisions and additions. And when there was a problem, I was always amazed how unhesitatingly he went to work on it, and how deftly, how soon it was fixed, usually. Once in a while it would be tough, and then Marvin’s tenacity would set in. And he might even have to leave our meeting without getting the thing fixed. But there’d be a phone call an hour later, and then another in a couple hours. And by the next day, he’d have it licked. He’d have it licked. But to watch the efficiency with which he moved, in clearing up the problems, was a great, great thing to see. Often as not there weren’t any problems, especially in the last five years or so. I’d just read it and tell him, “Its magnificent.” Often as not, too, of course, as I read I’d be half-blinded with tears of laughter, because they were often so funny in places; at the same time, they were producing other very complicated emotions and reactions. An awful lot goes on at one time in Marvin’s prose. People will describe him as a demolition expert. One thing to say about this is that the demolitions are always instructive. The weaknesses in the writer under review—failures of responsibility, dishonesty of one kind or another—Marvin depicts clearly; and the harm done, he makes plain. And his readers, who are likely as not themselves writers, read along, and they think, “Please, God, not me next.” This is really so. I remember my own experience with this (I was very ashamed of it) in graduate school, reading Pope—reading Pope on the literary life—and I’d think, “Jeez, this is awful good but I’m glad that he’ll never be around to take a look at what I have to write.” I saw this spring, in a letter from the leading international authority on a major figure in English literature, who had just published the book which crowned his career, the statement, “I hope Marvin doesn’t review it.” And these people of course forget the many celebrations of the works he loved, with their attractions all set out so brilliantly, and movingly. I think I’ve also hit on another reason for Marvin’s ogre reputation. You read into a piece by Marvin—and you know he never called them reviews, he never called them essays; it was always “a piece”—and very soon you sense the momentum gathering, and you find yourself after a bit, by way of a most delicately managed transition, right in the middle of a tumultuous crescendo, with rocketing metaphors, often made over from slang . . . voices, different voices (he was wonderful at mocking: suddenly you realize its not Marvin’s voice you’re hearing, but this fool author’s, or some hypothetical character’s); jokes—always good jokes—potent and original generalizations, coming out like bursts of light; those long, eventful parentheses . . . all of it carried forward on the rhythms of a very powerful, complicated emotion. And then you’re brought around and down firmly to the brisk conclusion. And you can say to yourself, “What have I read? I’ve read a review, and a very good review. A very thorough, just, and startlingly vivid review.” xvii

Mudrick Transcribed But more than that, it will be a review with an essay on the subject. And that essay will be backed by fresh reading in all the relevant literature, massive reading, so that you’re reading also an authoritative, scholarly assessment and set of reflections on the topic. But it’s something more than that, too, because other essays, other scholarly essays, and other reviews don’t read like this. And it does seem to me that what you’re reading is those two forms plus another thing, to make what Marvin called a “piece,” that he had developed on his own. A new art form, of which he was the sole inventor and practitioner. Hunting around in my mind for anything to compare it with, the closest thing I could come to, and I just came across it by chance, is Demosthenes, the Greek orator. Let me read you this description of what it was like to hear Demosthenes: “The smoldering momentum and the solid crescendo of his speeches, the range of his tones, the second-nature quality of his devices [that’s nice; his devices are second nature to him] make him a great artist, if any orator ever was. He mingles simplicity with complication, and the natural rhythms of speech with a vastly extended formal music.” (I wonder how many readers of Marvin realize how marvelously managed the rhythms are, in his prose. I used to watch the minute attention he would give the placing of a syllable, the location of a word, and its sound. Everything in that prose was inspected with such alertness.) “Sir Richard Jebb praises Demosthenes’s lighter gifts as if he were a Cambridge don in the late Victorian age . . .But Demosthenes is more formidable than that. Sir Kenneth Dover has shown the power of his deliberate tactics. Demosthenes at his most powerful is a compound of many talents and devices.” That, I think, is exactly right, of Marvin’s writing. It’s a compound of many talents and devices. All of them terrifying. Marvin used virtually all the resources and devices to be found in literary art. And his work has, in its own fashion, all the fearful, and delightful powers, of an art. I say fearful, and I think this strange phenomenon of Marvin’s writings made his fellow academics uncomfortable, or, really, afraid. There’s an old tradition of art hatred in our culture. It goes back to Plato; and Plato gave it its most formidable expression. And it comes right down into the present fads of literary criticism, which, I found the art critic Arthur C. Danto recently saying, “busies itself finding ways to keep art at a safe distance.” The profession is swarming with people like that. The other day, I heard a lecture on the new kind of criticism. . .the lecturer declaring that “we have now proved that a work of art is subject to endless interpretations.” And it just so happens that the Arthur Danto article that I had read had taken up that very notion. What he said about it was that “it is a way of not having to deal with what makes art threatening, and its experience important.” There’s a phrase in Paradise Lost—I just remembered how Marvin detested Milton, threw a strong light all over Milton’s work: very instructive!—anyway, there’s a phrase in Paradise Lost; it comes in a speech by Satan: “Though terror be in love / And beauty . . .” and I think the same terror can be inspired by art, and that everybody experiences it dimly or otherwise, because the demands made, like those made by

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Reading with Marvin Mudrick love and beauty, are very severe on the timid little self, waiting hungrily in its own little twilight. I think people feel fear the magnitude of the powers they encounter, when they read a piece by Marvin. You must summon up a lot, to respond adequately, to do it justice. From the beginning, you would feel, as you read from essay to essay, quarter by quarter, that Marvin was developing this or that value; it would emerge and reappear in various essays. And you could see his mind working on that particular value. Over the years, I think (this is just an impression, I haven’t reread his writings) there was a kind of gathering together of a set of values, ever more clearly defined, and reflected upon more and more, and these values are what come shining out, variously and so splendidly, especially in the work of, say, the last ten years. Here they are. They were set out by Marvin, in his characteristic straightforward way, in the preface to Nobody Here But Us Chickens. You must know this, but maybe you don’t, and if you do you’ll like to hear it again anyway. He says: I write .  .  . from the angle (with the bias) of certain at least theoretical choices of my own: either over neither, both over either/or, live-and-let-live over stand-or-die, high spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art [Amen!], private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle. Bravo. Bravo. Bravo. Alan STEPHENS Professor at UCSB and CCS Edited from a talk given in late 1986, College of Creative Studies, UCSB

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For my brother Howard

Mudrick Transcribed

Preface

T

HIS is a book of transcripts of classes and talks given by Marvin Mudrick, who taught literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1949 until his death in 1986. The transcripts come from tape-recordings, which I’ve transcribed word for word, making no changes. Most of the transcripts, however, are incomplete. Often the taping started a few minutes into the class (or talk), was interrupted so the cassette could be flipped over, and ended well before the end of the meeting. Some tapes, like those of the class on the writing of narrative prose, are fragmentary—sometimes only forty-five minutes’ worth of the two-hourand-fifty-minute period was taped. The transcripts of the narrative prose class meetings are incomplete in another way as well: I’ve left out blocks of class time which contain student stories that were too long to print. Generally, Mudrick wasn’t aware that he was being recorded. When I asked him if I might tape his class, he said yes, only I shouldn’t tell him when I had the tape recorder on. On certain occasions, though, when others were doing the taping, he did know he was being recorded: an interview and three talks were videotaped (“A Heretic in the University,” “Teaching Is My Hobby,” “Genius and Anti-Genius,” “Am I Enjoying Myself Yet?”), and on three occasions he spoke directly into a microphone (“An Interview,” “A Commencement Speech.” “A Debate With Susan Sontag”). Because the College of Creative Studies at UCSB is mentioned often in the transcripts, I should give some information about it. Mudrick founded the College in 1967, and was its provost until 1984. The College enrolls approximately 130 students, each of whom works almost exclusively in one of seven disciplines: art, literature, music theory and composition, chemistry, physics, math, and biology. There is no general-education requirement; nor are there lectures or letter grades in the College. Students meet in small seminars and receive from zero to six units of credit, depending on how much work they do. In the transcripts, bracketed statements in italics (such as laughs) usually refer to whoever is speaking, but the word laughter (also bracketed) means that at least several persons in the room are laughing. For example: “There is a sense in which a perfectly well-behaved person is always a nobody. [Laughter.] I can’t think of whether I know of a really first-class genius who was perfectly well-behaved, I mean even in rather ordinary matters of social intercourse. I guess it’s because ordinary people don’t think of anything but making a good impression in company [laughs], I mean that’s all that’s on their minds.” An ellipsis indicates not an omission but an uncompleted sentence or a pause. Ungrammatical sentences I have left unaltered.

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Mudrick Transcribed The titles of three of the talks—“Teaching Is My Hobby,” “A Heretic in the University” and “Why in the World Else Would You Be a Lit Major?”—come from the transcripts. The other titles are titles Mudrick had thought of prior to giving the talk. I should add that when I asked Mudrick if I might tape his classes, neither he nor I said anything about publishing transcripts of the tapes. Bob Blaisdell and Shawn White proofread much of the book; they also listened to the tapes in order to check the accuracy of the transcription. Alan Stephens, Max Schott. Ross Robins, John Wilson, John Ridland, and Robyn Bell did a good deal of proofreading, and I want to thank them for their suggestions and their encouragement. Caroline Allen, Mark Pisaro, Lisa Abshear-Seale, Jeff Abshear-Seale, Logan Speirs, and Steven Allaback helped proofread as well. Janie Mudrick and Ellen Levine provided me with photographs of their father and manuscripts of his notes. Provost Max Weiss of the College of Creative Studies and Provost David Sprecher of the College of Letters and Science provided funding for the book. Sasha Newborn at Mackintosh Typography taught me a lot about typesetting. Pat Breyman at CCS was helpful all along. I am grateful to my parents, Suzanne Carbotte, Sheri Kalbaugh, Kia Penso, and Ken Ellyson. L.K.

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“Why in the World Else Would You Be a Lit Major?” 22 September 1982

About 120 people were at this meeting for all students and faculty of the College of Creative Studies. Mudrick has just opened the meeting with an explanation of the grading system of the College. STUDENT: Could you tell me about the philosophy of why the school was created? I’m interested in the art program, but I don’t know too much background on the school itself. MUDRICK: Oh gee . . . [Laughter.] I’ll say it as briefly as I can, I’m sure some of you are so sick of this. I’ve been a professor of English for a long time, and like most people who teach in the university I have certain ideas about what is not as good as it might be in the university, and I was given this crazy opportunity as a result of the most incredible concatenation of coincidences in the history of the world. [Laughter.] And my feeling (which may be more pertinent to the study of literature than to the study of other subjects—you’ll just have to make up your own mind about it) but I have always felt, even from the time that I myself was an undergraduate, that in most subjects the first two years of the university are a waste of time and a disgrace to the academic profession. That essentially they either repeat work which you already did in high school, or they subject you to these massive lecture classes, introductory classes, from most of which the material would be much more readily available if you read a book, or even an article in the Sunday Times. The classes are very bad jokes, and their primary purpose by the way is revoltingly materialistic and mercenary and self-serving—that is, the intention is just to impress the legislature and layman with the student-faculty ratios that the University manages. I mean that’s why you sit dozing in a class in Campbell Hall, nine hundred students—a class in reverse-mesmerisms. [Laughter.] My first intention was to eliminate the first two years of university education, which essentially means a heavy concentration on the major—but which by the way, of course, is very much like the English universities. I don’t know whether many of you know this, but in the English university it’s assumed that you concentrate almost instantly on the subject that you’re really interested in. And if you wonder about a “philosophy” behind that, my own feeling is that 1

Mudrick Transcribed unless you know something well, you don’t know anything, and you will never learn anything because you don’t know what it’s like to know anything. I mean, to study things in a kind of supermarket lecture-class way is to learn nothing at all, to retain nothing, and to misunderstand whatever you’ve heard—if it had any value to begin with. Whereas if you learn how to know something, if you work hard in a particular area and seriously, you will learn what it is like to know. And once you know what it’s like to know, you will never mistake partial knowledge or ignorance for knowledge. And then you’re in a position to learn anything you want. I’ve never been able to understand why the American university has fallen for what seems to me the worst possible notion of what constitutes higher education. And of course we’re “getting back to it,” as they say. That is, I think they’re hotter and hotter for the general-education approach. They’re really frantic, because they don’t know what to do. I mean they’re aware of declining test scores and general illiteracy and so on, and they want to do something, and their only notion is to introduce freshman courses in Western civilization. I don’t believe in freshman courses in Western civilization. I’m not even sure that I believe in Western civilization. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: Do you think it positive or negative for freshmen, or people just entering the College, to take twenty or twenty-four units? MUDRICK: Absolutely. Since many of you spend five hours at the UCEN [University Center] everyday complaining about your lack of time to do the reading for the courses that you take [laughter], it would seem to me that you could spend at least part of that time doing the reading. There is no substitute for work in a subject to find out about it. I teach for instance a reading course every quarter, and the course that I’m teaching this quarter is some kind of crazy, American-history literature, mixed-up subject. But what it consists of is a number of books—I mean that’s the course, the course is the books! The course is not the “philosophy behind the books,” or “What is it you expect to do this quarter?”—what I expect you to do this quarter is read the books! I don’t know anything else to do. [Laughter.] You read the books, and you read a book a week. If you’re a lit major, the reason you’re a lit major is that you like to read and write. Why in the world else would you be a lit major? [Laughter.] And if you like to read, presumably you like to read big fat books. [Laughter.] When I was a kid, when I was seven years old, I could remember going to the library and looking with positive lust at big fat books [laughter] which would last me. I mean why would you want a book that wouldn’t last you? STUDENT: Is that why The Old Man and The Sea is not on the— MUDRICK: That’s one of the reasons I didn’t like The Old Man and The Sea—it was too short. Yes? STUDENT: How do the units work during the class [inaudible]? MUDRICK: The units—it’s a tricky system, and it’s difficult, and we get in particular trouble with non-CCS students who’ve heard about all those snap courses in CCS, some of them taught by students and just-former students who are easily 2

“Why in the World Else Would You Be a Lit Major?” intimidated into giving extra units if you threaten to kill them. [Laughter.] Theoretically, you can get anywhere from zero to six units for any class. Practically, I like to think that you’re working for four units because that’s the standard number of units for L&S [College of Letters and Science] courses, that’s what constitutes a course. And I myself almost never give more than four units, and I think that it’s a big mistake, generally, to give more than four units, and I think that students who ask for more than four units should probably automatically not be given them [laughs]—that it should be a surprise, like a present. I mean if a student turns in an enormous quantity of work, and doesn’t say one word about units, then maybe you can slip ’im an extra unit. But if he asks for it, NO! [Laughter.] Under no circumstances. That doesn’t sound very scientific. [Laughter.] Essentially it’s a grading system by grudge. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: Okay, I’m undecided and I have all these classes in L&S. Can I sit in on the first— MUDRICK: Oh yeah! That’s really one of the purposes of the grading system. I love to have students come in for instance to my writing class just to sit in and talk— they don’t have to turn in any stories. And if a student for instance attends regularly during the quarter and doesn’t turn anything in, I’ll give the student a unit anyway because I’m grateful for the presence and the contribution. That’s one of the advantages of the system, that you don’t have to take a full-fledged course. There’s something so rigid about the L&S notion. It really is practically like a carnival barker who’s getting you into this side show, and once you’ve paid your fifty bucks, that’s it, you can’t get out. I just don’t see that, I don’t know why students shouldn’t take part of a course. Suppose for instance I’m teaching a course in nineteenth-century English fiction, and let’s say I’m doing three novelists—say I’m doing Jane Austen and Dickens and Trollope—and it turns out that you’re interested in Jane Austen. So, if you’re polite, you come to me and say, I’m interested in Jane Austen. I really don’t have time to do the others. Can I attend the first third of the course? Of course you can. What do I have to do to get a certain number of units? And I talk about it, and so on. Then, maybe a third of the way through the course, you decide that you like it better than you thought and maybe you’ll go on to Dickens—nothing to prevent you from doing that. I don’t know why this shouldn’t always be so. Now I do know that there are subjects—and they are represented in the College—which are more cumulative than literature. I wanted to say one other thing in connection with my objection to the first two years of university education. I think that anybody who survives the first two years of literary study in most American universities—and I don’t mean just UCSB, I mean Harvard, Yale, Stanford, whatever—really deserves a medal. And when a freshman comes into Creative Studies as a lit major, fresh out of high school, I expect him to take the most advanced—the only courses that are available in the College, all of which I think of as advanced classes. Because I’ve been teaching literature for thirty-five years now, and I don’t know of any elementary way of teaching literature. I teach it the best I know how: I say as many 3

Mudrick Transcribed smart things as I can. [Laughter.] What in the world else could I do? How can you teach literature for kiddies? You can teach kiddie lit, which is another thing [laughter], BUT YOU CAN’T TEACH LITERATURE TO KIDDIES! Either they know what’s going on or they don’t know what’s going on. I’m perfectly willing to believe that there’s a kind of borderline: on one side there is knowledge and on the other side there is profound and hopeless ignorance. And let’s say you’re of a certain age and you simply haven’t had enough experience to make any sense out of this. And I am also aware that there are subjects—like music, for instance, which has a special language, the sciences, which have a special language—and yet, even when I think about those subjects, I think about how many people in those subjects have been producing miracles at the age of six or eight or twelve, or certainly nineteen. When I hear from the scientists, particularly, that I really don’t understand any of this, that what they have to do is to go from a to a + to b, and so on, right up the line, before they know anything at all, I’m very suspicious of that. I want to say something now which I’m sure will offend, and I don’t mean it to offend, but it’s true, and it’s something which can only be whispered about. Has it ever occurred to you that considering the enormous number of universities and colleges in the United States, and the extreme unlikelihood of extraordinary talent in all the arts and the sciences, how the entire profession essentially exists at a level of unproductive mediocrity? So the saddest thing that you have to understand about a university education is that most of your teachers are mediocre in their field. Now there’s nothing wrong, really, with being mediocre; it’s only if you try to cover up, try to pretend. One of the best teachers that the College has ever had (and who’s coming back this fall, I’m very glad to say)a, he said once to me, and I absolutely believe it, he said: “The sign of a great teacher is to understand when a student is smarter than you are.” And one of the hardest things for a mediocre person to acknowledge is that. One of the reasons I love to teach the Writing of Narrative Prose class quarter after quarter (after many years of agony with it, but now I enjoy it) is that it’s the place where I have to keep reminding myself that the students in the class do things that I couldn’t do if I lived to be a thousand. I mean they write stories which are simply marvelous, some of the time. [Laughter.] Well, it’s true, some of the time—if it were all of the time it would be a real miracle. [Laughter.] But it’s interesting, it’s fascinating. And moreover I can even pat myself on the back, telling myself . . . they don’t know it, very often they don’t know it, but they’re producing stuff which is much better than what’s being published. It’s very interesting. I think the human quality is intelligence. I really think that just about everybody has it. A lot of people get discouraged very early and they stop using it, and they begin responding by rote, or they don’t respond at all. I really think of the

Max Weiss.

a 

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“Why in the World Else Would You Be a Lit Major?” College as essentially an effort to take obstacles out of the way. It seems to me that that’s the way you have to think about education if you’re being serious about it. In order to get away from this perhaps unfortunate philosophizing which, I remind you, I didn’t introduce [laughter], another thing that has always bothered me about the College is that the students don’t associate across the disciplines, that there is so seldom any acquaintanceship across the disciplines. I don’t know why this is, except the very obvious reason that people get to know the students they take classes with, and so on. I think the students in the College are very interesting, I really do. I know I was teaching for nineteen years in universities before I started teaching in the College, and I have to say that by far the best students I have ever had, over and over again, have been the students in the College. But I have something else to say about that. I don’t think of the College as an elite operation, and I don’t think the students strike me as better because they are brighter than all of those students I had in the past. I think those students I had in the past had already been pretty well crushed by the system, or they were being simultaneously crushed by it at the time I was having the class. And I think there is a nice kind of resilience, bounciness, about the students in the College that’s a great pleasure to work with, that’s all. I don’t think I’m deceiving myself, because I still do teach classes in the English Department, and I think there is a categorical difference. Are there any other questions? Don’t forget, this is the only time you have an opportunity to ask questions in this way. If anything occurs to you—this is another thing (I’ll tell you a story and maybe this will induce some of you to ask questions). I will have students come to my office after a class, and they will say, Just exactly what did you mean when you said so-and-so at the third minute of the class? and so on. In the first place, I forgot it five minutes after I said it. In the second place, I am enraged that you wouldn’t have raised the question in the class at the time when it happened. Why won’t you give the other students the benefit of your curiosity and your inquisitiveness? I make one rule when I ask students to come see me in my office: You may talk about anything at all, except what goes on in my classes. [Laughs.] I am not interested in talking about literature. I talk about it in my classes, and I write about it, and that’s enough for me. If you have any juicy gossip, or you want to find out about me, or you’re complaining about your mother, come to my office. I’m available. But don’t ask me questions about what I said. Yes? STUDENT: As far as literature goes— MUDRICK: And what I mean by that of course is, you have an opportunity to benefit the others if you ask a question now, instead of waiting after everybody goes and then coming up and asking me something. Yes? STUDENT: As far as literature goes, are you saying that across the board or only what goes on in class? For instance, if I have a question about making a point in a paper, should I bring that up in the middle of class, about my personal paper? MUDRICK: Absolutely, best place to do it, by far. I love to have students bring up questions about papers they want to write for the class. Best place to ask it, sure. 5

Mudrick Transcribed And I try to make that point clear. Why not? Why not? The students’ questions in the office about your specialization are generally awful anyway, they’re so leaden. What do you think of Hemingway? What do you mean, what do I—first thing I think about him is he’s dead! [Laughter.] You really have to understand, literature is a living activity, and the classroom is a place which is set up to give you an opportunity to get into a conversation with somebody who knows something about it. But if you ask questions as if you’re a reporter for Time Magazine, you’re not going to get anything sensible out of anybody. You really have to respect the situation. The situation in the office is essentially a casual and gossipy situation; it’s not a literary situation. I don’t have any final answers about literature; I’m sure you don’t either. And I’m not interested in giving you stock-market quotations about whom you should admire and whom you shouldn’t. I don’t care whom you should admire; I want to know whom you do admire, I want to know what you like, I want to know what makes you keep reading! My own tastes and feelings about writers change every time I teach a course. Why would I expect you to have a certain set of notions which conforms to mine? I don’t even know what mine are! If a student asks me about a book that I’m going to teach in the next quarter what I think about it, I DON’T KNOW! If I knew I wouldn’t teach the course. Why would I teach the course? WHAT A TERRIBLE THING TO DO! I mean, I have a pretty good idea of my last reaction to it, maybe, but that’s about all. And I certainly don’t preclude different reactions. Yes? STUDENT: I was just wondering—I can’t remember from last week, but do you usually go to the coffee hour? No, you’re— MUDRICK: I will go anywhere you want me to go if you think it would be useful. STUDENT: Well no, no—often it seems like you have to mull over what was talked about, I mean like you can’t just sit there and respond to everything— MUDRICK: Oh no no no—I know that. Then you can come to my office. STUDENT: —at other times throughout the quarter— MUDRICK: You know, I’ll tell you—once again you forced me to say something which is unfortunate, and which I shouldn’t say: The only people to whom I tell the complete truth are students. I lie to everybody else but I never lie to students. [Laughter.] Everything I say in the classroom is absolutely true. I have to lie to my wife, my children, my friends—because you can’t get along with those people unless you lie to them! [Laughter.] And for me, I’m a very shy person, so something like a coffee hour . . . The primary invention of the devil, for instance, was the cocktail party. And I remember all the years that I used to go to these cocktail parties—and I have a special problem because I’m a teetotaler, and I suppose the only justification of a cocktail party is to get drunk very quickly. But I’ve never been able to figure any other use of—nothing ever gets said, you always get trapped with some horror [laughter] who will not let you go—something like that—and you begin to wonder why it is that you are punishing yourself. My feeling is that when people have something in their hands they are no longer human, somehow. If they got a cup of coffee or a cake or a doughnut or a 6

“Why in the World Else Would You Be a Lit Major?” drink, something happens to them—maybe they’re afraid of spilling it. [Laughter.] And so I find it hard to talk to them. STUDENT: All I’m suggesting is that it’s hard to just respond automatically to all the things—two weeks later something will— MUDRICK: Then come to my office! STUDENT: It’s good to meet at other times— MUDRICK: Absolutely. Come and see me. [End of first side of tape.] I wanted to say, by the way (because I myself was a little surprised by it), if there is anybody here who is interested in taking my writing class, The Writing of Narrative Prose, classes do begin tomorrow. And that happens to be a Thursday class, and we’ll be having our first meeting tomorrow. I think maybe I will take the opportunity to make a little pitch for this class of mine, because I am very fond of it, and I think it’s often misunderstood, and some people say bad things about it. And I want to try to justify it, in part because I love to have students outside the lit major take that class, and it’s very hard to coax them into it. They will ask questions like, But suppose I haven’t written any fiction at all? I regard that as a great advantage, by the way. I mean if you’ve never written fiction—if you’ve never written anything at all—that’s when I love to have you in the class. It’s true that your sensitivities are more exposed in a class like that than they are in most classes. I mean if you write a story, somehow it’s more you (or so you think) than if you write a critical paper, and your feelings are likely to be deeply hurt if somebody makes fun of it or if it’s criticized unfavorably. But it is astonishing what you can learn to turn out. Learn is the wrong word. I don’t mean that I can teach it; I can’t. I really think it’s a question of atmosphere, and getting out of your own way. I love the class, it’s fascinating to me in a way in which almost no other class I’ve ever taught is fascinating, because things get done in that class that I almost wouldn’t believe could get done before they get done. It just seems to me very interesting. I think that if some of you—any of you—have any mild curiosity about writing, I really think that the way to start writing is to write fiction. I think it’s by far the most natural way (I don’t think man is the rational animal, I think man is the storyteller animal, and that too gets suppressed in you very early) and the class gives you an opportunity. I think it works for many people. So I would strongly recommend, especially for those of you not in literature but with some slight curiosity about writing, that you think about at least dropping in to that class the first meeting, which is tomorrow. I’d love to have you, and I’ll try very hard not to make cruel jokes the first meeting. STUDENT: [Makes an announcement.] MUDRICK: Is there a hand up back there? No? Well, this is your last chance—you won’t see me again for another year [laughter] (like the groundhog I go back in, that’s the end). I would like to see any of you who want to talk about the program, I really would. Some of you have a very wrong idea about this (that too I suppose is inevitable) some of you (oh—I can really establish ground rules) some 7

Mudrick Transcribed of you have a habit—I don’t know what it compares to, but I will sometimes see people walking hurriedly by, and I can’t tell whether they’re exercising their peripheral vision or not. You know how you go past a door—you don’t want somebody inside to know that you’re passing the door, because what could be more shameful than to pass the door of a teacher who is already sitting with somebody? So what you do [mimics the action (laughter)]—you’ll be damned if you’ll be caught, pretending to be interested in seeing this teacher, who is vile enough to have a student sitting there when you come by. [Laughter.] The other thing that some of you do (and this is much more irritating), you creep along the inside wall without coming into the doorway, and you put your ear up to hear whether anybody is in there. And if somebody is in there, you sit on the floor out in the hall right next to the door without being seen, so then you hear all this filth and gossip from the inside which goes on for the next hour and a half, and finally the person leaves. Don’t do either of those things with me, especially the latter. If you come to see me, and there are forty-two people in my office, appear in the doorway boldly, square your shoulders, and you just stand there, and I will say, “What do you want?” [Laughter.] And we’ll work it out. Really, we will! Very often you save me from this terrible boring session that I’ve found myself involved in with these three jerks who’ve occupied the chairs and won’t get out, and so I’m often very grateful for people who show up in the doorway—I can simply say I have to talk to this person. So you can be helpful. I do really like to talk to students, I love to talk to students. Yes? STUDENT: So we don’t rush by it accidentally, where is your office? MUDRICK: South Hall 1718. Pat already told you, but I’ll make very explicit when I’m there. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—except occasionally on Fridays—I’m there always from eleven to three. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I teach in the afternoon, I’m there always from eleven to one. I don’t go out to eat lunch—you will sometimes discover to your horror that you have to watch me masticate, but I try to get it over with as quickly as possible. I try to keep my mouth closed too (my wife is still telling me about that). And I’m really very glad to talk with you, I am. It’s interesting to me. And I don’t mean to—really, I mainly object to talking to literature students, so you mustn’t get the wrong idea. [Laughs.] The thing about literature students is that they’re pretending to regard you as a great authority, so you have to come up—I mean, if you start talking to me about something in physics, since I know absolutely nothing about it I don’t mind listening to that. I wanted to make clear that I don’t object to all academic subjects, only literature. [Laughter.] You can talk about any other academic subject—it’s true, I mean it—or about anything else. And a lot of you get the wrong idea because sometimes you see people in there, but it’s sometimes the same people over and over again. It gets to be very tiresome. We’re all glad to be renewed. As some of you may have suspected, if I have a fundamental philosophy it is this: We are put into this world to entertain each other. I have not been able 8

“Why in the World Else Would You Be a Lit Major?” to discover any other purpose of existence. [Laughter.] I wish there were some other purpose, but I haven’t found any yet. Unfortunately this sometimes doesn’t work. People are so anxious to be hurt, to be injured, to have their feelings hurt, that instead of being entertained they’re outraged, which is too bad. But all I’m trying to do is entertain you, really. This is a terrible kind of session, it’s an impossible one. We only hold it once a year . . . I would like to loosen you up a little, partly to give you an idea of what is available in the College. One of the saddest things about the young is how conservative they are, how frightened to take a chance. You don’t have to take chances—they’re simply opportunities. And you should take them, because you’ll never get them again. I mean, somebody once asked me what a university was, and I said that it’s essentially a library surrounded by accidents. And I believe that, but I believe there are some good accidents, I mean you might run into interesting things in one or another of those accidents in college. I really think the only enduring justification of a university is the library, because you can’t get a great library anywhere else, and libraries are wonderful. And the library here, by the way, is marvelous. It’s almost unbelievable for a university in this area, I mean out in the boondocks and relatively new—I mean it’s a million and a half volumes. And I think I have yet to look for a book in literary studies that I haven’t found in the library, unless it was published in the last six or eight months. It’s a remarkable library, certainly in the humanities. And of course you will have the advantage of having graduate rights in it. STUDENT: What’s that mean? MUDRICK: You embarrass me because I’m not sure. Can anybody say exactly what that— STUDENT: You can check out a book for the quarter instead of just three weeks. MUDRICK: Okay? STUDENT: I was wondering if you were going to have office hours tomorrow. MUDRICK: Yes—I’m going to have office hours after this meeting, but I will have office hours tomorrow. You remember I teach my class tomorrow so it’ll only be from eleven to one tomorrow. But I’ll be there. Generally speaking, by the way, and I think this is another thing that some of you do, I mean if you want to come see me. Some of you wait until you think the rush is over—say, you come about five minutes of three. And of course if you come at that time I wish you were dead, because by that time I’m ready to go home, I’m very tired. (I’m just tired sometimes from sitting around—in fact I get more tired from sitting around than from talking to people.) So, don’t do that, don’t do that. I mean unless there’s absolutely no way otherwise—you’ve got a job, or you’ve got classes or something. If you’re going to show up, actually the best times are the early times. When people come in at eleven or twelve then I love it, because I know I can get rid of them and maybe do some work in the afternoon. Yes? STUDENT: [Makes an announcement.] MUDRICK: All right? I’m trying to think if there’s any other excuse for me to keep you. All right, I guess not. Then would all the literature majors come up. 9

From a class in

Eighteenth-Century English Prose

The class met on Tuesdays from 1:00 to 3:30, for ten weeks, in the fall of 1984. Five class meetings were taped. Each recording begins shortly after the class has started, and ends about ninety minutes later. The books talked about in these transcripts are Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. About twenty-five students were present at each meeting.

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Week One 25 September 1984

MUDRICK: I think talk without the reading is bubbles, is of no importance, and reading without talk is pedantry. And so I try to set up the class in such a way that you will be really drowned in reading. For instance I expect you to read the entire Life of Johnson by Boswell by next Tuesday. That’s about fourteen hundred pages in the edition that you have. Of course if you are really serious English majors you would have read it a long time ago anyway. You certainly would be familiar with a lot of the material. I’m inclined to think myself that it’s—you’ll check me on this, because some of you have heard me say The Greatest This and The Greatest That, and you probably know that it’s the latest superficial enthusiasm that I have—but I do think that it’s the greatest work of nonfiction ever written. And I also am inclined to think that it’s one of the two greatest books ever written. The only book that for me comes anywhere near it, and is greater than, for certain reasons, is Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. But I don’t have any doubt that it’s the greatest book of nonfiction ever written. It’s fascinating. And certainly the greatest nonfictional character in literature—I mean the character of Johnson. Also to some extent, and not even very secondarily, Boswell himself, who in some ways in his own writing is more fascinating than Johnson. But in the Life of Johnson no, he’s not as fascinating as Johnson, because he very deliberately subordinates himself to Johnson. He is the vessel through which Johnson passes. And sometimes you’re not aware of how extraordinarily efficient that vessel is. One of the strangest facts of literary history is the attitude taken toward Boswell almost since the book was published, and certainly before the book was published—that’s more excusable. That is, Boswell was regarded as a silly ass. And he continued to be regarded as a silly ass by many people after the Life of Johnson appeared, and has continued to be regarded as a silly ass up through fourfifths of the twentieth century by many people, most of whom should know better. He isn’t; he’s an extremely intelligent man. He’s also a silly ass, but that I mean in some respects. But then most of us are, and most of us are not nearly as intelligent as Boswell is, and not nearly as gifted. Also we spend most of our lives concealing the fact that we are silly asses, whereas Boswell made a special effort

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Mudrick Transcribed to reveal this quality in himself because he had certain advantages by it. That is, he was able to associate with people that he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to associate with, and so on. STUDENT: How can you get closer to important people? MUDRICK: You can be extremely pushy, you can be presumptuous, you can get yourself invited to places where you don’t ordinarily belong. You know how shy we all are, because we know what filth we are and that nobody in his right mind would talk to us. Boswell knew that, but it didn’t stop him. [Laughs.] That’s the difference. It’s astonishing how many people you can get to see if you really want to. But if you’ve already decided that you’re no damned good, and you act on that decision, then you’re not going to see anybody. I mean, you’ll be locked up in a closet somewhere and you’ll never meet anybody. And Boswell had no shame, absolutely no shame. And sometimes it puts him into situations in which he appears to be rather unpleasant. And certainly as the years went by and as he developed certain qualities . . . For instance some of you may wonder while you’re reading—I was struck by it this time (I’m rereading it and taking my notes) by how many times the subject of drunkenness comes up. And you wonder because much of the time that Boswell was writing this, Johnson himself was a teetotaler. And Johnson is going on at great length about the effect of drunkenness and this, that, and the other thing. Well, the reason for that is, of course, that Boswell was a terrible drunk in the last fifteen years or so and he was fascinated by the topic—he kept bringing it up. And the anonymous people that Boswell always refers to as making a disgrace of themselves at some party or other—that’s always Boswell. [Laughter.] Johnson’s very interesting on drinking. As a matter of fact there’s a wonderful discussion between him and Joshua Reynolds about the social effects of drinking. For those of you who want a kind of model conversation . . . you’ve all participated in that conversation: Does alcohol, or does it not, help to make situations more sociable? Does it loosen up people? and so on. And Sir Joshua Reynolds takes up the positive side of the argument and Johnson takes up the negative side. And Reynolds does about as well as can be done with the positive side, only Johnson demolishes him [laughs], makes it clear that that argument is just full of holes, and that essentially the only way it works is if everybody’s drunk and so nobody’s saying anything intelligent but everybody thinks he is. That what liquor does is to diminish your intellectual powers. That’s what it does, it’s one of the things it does, whether you like it or not. It may make you extremely charming—especially to yourself [laughter]—but it definitely diminishes your intellectual powers. And Johnson is wonderful. If I can find that . . . let’s see if I can find it. . . . But of course I never can find these things on the spur of the moment, so that will be that. . . . No, I got it. STUDENT: Excuse me, is that your handwriting? MUDRICK: Yes, that’s my handwriting. STUDENT: [Laughs.] It’s very small! 12

Week One MUDRICK [reading]: We discussed the question whether drinking improved conversation and benevolence. Sir Joshua maintained it did. JOHNSON. “No, Sir: before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority, have the modesty not to talk. When they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous: but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.” Sir Joshua said the Doctor was talking of the effects of excess in wine; but that a moderate glass enlivened the mind, by giving a proper circulation to the blood. “I am (said he,) in very good spirits when I get up in the morning. By dinnertime I am exhausted; wine puts me in the same state as when I got up; and I am sure that moderate drinking makes people talk better.” JOHNSON. “No, Sir; wine gives not light, gay, ideal hilarity; but tumultuous, noisy, clamorous merriment. I have heard none of those drunken,—nay, drunken is a coarse word,—none of those vinous flights.” SIR JOSHUA. “Because you have sat by, quite sober, and felt an envy of the happiness of those who were drinking.” JOHNSON. “Perhaps, contempt. [Laughter.]—And, Sir, it is not necessary to be drunk one’s self, to relish the wit of drunkenness. Do we not judge of the drunken wit of the dialogue between Iago and Cassio, the most excellent in its kind, when we are quite sober? Wit is wit, by whatever means it is produced; and, if good, will appear so at all times. I admit that the spirits are raised by drinking, as by the common paricipation of any pleasure: cock-fighting, or bear-baiting, will raise the spirits of a company, as drinking does, though surely they will not improve conversation. I also admit, that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten. There are such men, but they are medlars. I indeed allow that there have been a very few men of talents who were improved by drinking; but I maintain that I am right as to the effects of drinking in general: and let it be considered, that there is no position, however false in its universality, which is not true of some particular man.” Sir William Forbes said, “Might not a man warmed with wine be like a bottle of beer, which is made brisker by being set before the fire?”—“Nay, (said Johnson, laughing,) I cannot answer that: that is too much for me.” I observed, that wine did some people harm, by inflaming, confusing, and irritating their minds; but that the experience of mankind had declared in favour of moderate drinking. JOHNSON. “Sir, I do not say it is wrong to produce self-complacency by drinking; I only deny that it improves the mind. When I drank wine, I scorned to drink it when in company. I have drunk many a bottle by myself; in the first place, 13

Mudrick Transcribed because I had need of it to raise my spirits; in the second place, because I would have nobody to witness its effects upon me.”a Well, that gives you an idea of—this is not a particularly inspired piece of Johnsonian argument, but it’s characteristic. It’s not as brilliant as Johnson often is, but it does show you how extraordinary he is in his ability to stick to a point. That is, he will not allow himself to be deflected by any—for instance, the way that he responds to Sir William Forbes’s comment: he knows that’s a joke, and he’s not going to play around with metaphors. That is, if you warm a bottle of beer before the fire it becomes brisker obviously, because anything bubbly confined in a space will get more bubbly if you heat it up (and eventually if you heat it up too much it’ll explode, too). So Johnson says, If you want to bring that up I simply won’t argue with you. STUDENT [walking towards the door]: This is the wrong class. MUDRICK: I should say, by the way, to forestall [laughter] any immediate flights, that I am going to knock off for about ten minutes, after about an hour (I mean, of meeting) to let those escape who want to escape, and then I’ll resume the class. I want you, in other words, to help me to conduct the rest of this class, even though we don’t have any immediate reading or common reading to base it on. Because as far as I’m concerned, that’s what this class is about. I don’t think there is any alternative to reading. That is, reading gives you certain things that you cannot get in any other way. Johnson himself is as good an illustration of that as anybody who ever lived. Johnson’s wit is unimaginable without the range and depth of his reading (and his extraordinary memory too). And I know that most of you are very young and of course you live in the age of television, and so probably most of you don’t even know what the excitement of reading is, since you have this alternative from practically infancy. I have to repeat my little song and dance about reading. I don’t know any alternative to very hard reading in order to know what reading is. The kind of reading that you do for most of your classes is absolutely ridiculous. I mean it’s trivial, it’s minimal, it’s conducted under false auspices—that is, you’re not reading scripture. Literature is not religion. The study of literature is not the study of religion. The significance of reading—I mean the reason you read is to be entertained. And there is a sense in which you always have to have excess before you can have sufficiency. So in order to know what reading is like, you in effect have to read to excess, you have to read overmuch, you have to be driven. And once again, I can only depend on my own experience. Unlike most of you—all of you I guess—I grew up in the age before television (and even radio was just beginning), and so for me a great time was to go to the library after James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 746-7, April 12, 1776. Hereafter, page numbers from the Oxford edition, as well as the date in any edition, will be noted in brackets. Also placed in brackets will be short comments that Mudrick makes while reading, and indications such as laughter. a 

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Week One school, and I went at least two or three times a week. And for me the most exciting thing in the world was a thick book with small print, because that meant I had something that would last me (instead of these beginning. I recently have finally figured out what the word watershed means, and the eighteenth century is the great watershed of human history. Everything that came before comes to an end in the eighteenth century, and everything that produces what we call modern occurs in the eighteenth century. I mean you think of things like the French Revolution, and that’s of course extremely important. The so-called Enlightenment . . . Johnson is one of the great figures of the Enlightenment, and paradoxically he’s particularly important in the Enlightenment because he consciously opposes it. Johnson is the great resistant force of the eighteenth century. That is, what he would like is for things to be as he fondly imagines they might have been at certain times in the Middle Ages (he never says that). But of course Johnson would have been burned at the stake within thirty seconds if he had lived in the Middle Ages, because he supports all the positions, but he supports them with such a sense of his own personal liberty—his right not to be bothered, his right to say what he pleases—that he is inconceivable earlier than the eighteenth century, he is just inconceivable. Nobody would have been able to get away with things the way Johnson did before the eighteenth century. So he is, almost against his will, one of the very greatest figures of the Enlightenment. Certainly the two major literary figures of the European Enlightenment (for me anyway) are Voltaire and Johnson. And if you wonder (those of you who know anything about the eighteenth century) why I exclude Rousseau, I think that Rousseau himself is a kind of counterrevolutionary, and is not really . . . he is neither an enlightened man nor, except by historical accident, a figure of the Enlightenment. He’s essentially a moral reactionary, an intellectual reactionary. Okay, you see already (those of you who are paying attention) that the fact that you haven’t even read encyclopedia articles is something of a disadvantage when people are talking. Because some of you have no idea who Rousseau is, except that he’s a name; Voltaire is just a name; Johnson is just a name—all of these people are just names. And the function of a course like this, if it has any function at all, is to compel you to read so hard and so much that these names will begin to have substantiality for you; they’ll begin to exist in space and time. And if you have no interest in that kind of experience, then you really shouldn’t take this course. I remember—once again I’ll give a personal experience—I remember (this was in the late ’fifties—no, middle ’fifties) I had a number of enthusiastic students. It was just after Spectrumb had started, as a matter of fact, and some of the earliest people associated with Spectrum were very anxious to take extra courses. And we really worked rather hard in those days in the English department—I mean I taught four courses, including two freshman courses—and they wanted me to teach extra courses in authors like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy because such A literary magazine based at UCSB which Mudrick and Hugh Kenner started in 1957.

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Mudrick Transcribed courses weren’t available. So I remember, for instance, teaching one semester a course in Tolstoy, another semester a course in Dostoevsky. And because I have a lousy memory and have to read what I’m teaching, shortly before I teach, and take detailed notes, I would prepare for the Dostoevsky course by starting to read the novel as soon as I came home from school, about three o’clock in the afternoon on the day before (because that was the only time—the classes met at my home one evening a week). And I read. And I read, and I read, and I broke for dinnertime, and then I read, and I read all night. And I usually was able to finish the novel by about six or seven A.M. I was in better shape in those days, so I could then get up and start my day. I didn’t feel it was any imposition, it was absolutely fascinating to me. You people would stay up all night getting drunk, or fucking some attractive member of the opposite sex, so why you should think that reading can be any less attractive necessarily, I don’t see why. Chacun à son goût, as we say. [Laughs.] I can tell you that until you develop some such attraction for reading you aren’t going to be anything like a serious student of literature. Unless reading begins to take you over in some such sense, then you might as well forget about literary studies. And you really ought to forget about teaching, because it will be the most miserable—I mean, some of the unhappiest people I ever knew are professors of English, who hate to read, hate books, hate intellectual activity . . . they really are virtually out of their minds with self-hatred. It’s a waste of time. So I don’t think I’m putting you through anything loathsome, disgusting. As I say, I don’t expect you to be able to do this really—very well, anyway. But I expect you to make an effort, and I start you with—I love the fact for instance that Boswell, using a relatively new word, said (while he was writing the book on Johnson—in fact even before he started) he said: This will be the most entertaining book in the world. And that, as far as I know, is the first really modern use of the word entertain in a good sense. And he was right. I think it’s probably fair to say that it is the most entertaining book ever written. And Boswell knew it, and by the way his friends thought he was absolutely crazy, out of his mind. DO YOU MEAN TO SAY THAT YOU HAVE THE NERVE TO COMPARE THE BOOK THAT YOU’RE GOING TO WRITE ON DR. JOHNSON WITH MASON’S LIFE OF GRAY? (And all of you are very familiar with Mason’s Life of Gray, aren’t you? It’s on every reading list . . . I mean, even the people in this English Department wouldn’t dare put that on a reading list. In fact I think most of them have never heard of it. [Laughs.]) That’s the sort of thing that Boswell had to face up to, because he was doing something absolutely unique. Not only unique—it’s never been done again. In fact the only thing that I know like it, the only thing that’s remotely like it in literature since—that is, the combination of circumstances and personalities that made it possible—are the books brought out by Craft and Stravinsky, that is, which record Stravinsky’s conversation. Those are the only books I know of which are at all like Boswell’s biography of Johnson. This is one of the greatest men who ever lived, being recorded —accurately, frequently, also being 16

Week One provoked into doing even more talking than he would have done otherwise—by this nut, whose purpose is to get Johnson to talk as much as possible, and who will ask him all kinds of questions like: What would you do if you were locked up in a castle with a newborn baby? [Laughter.] STUDENT: What did he say? MUDRICK: He answered it in some detail, or rather reluctantly—nothing sensational. But it’s the sort of question that finally would lead Johnson to say: Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both. [Laughter.] But if Boswell hadn’t been like that there wouldn’t have been any Life of Johnson. So think hard before you give up. You know, there are all sorts of qualities in the world which are vastly overrated. Decorum is one of them, decorum really is one of them. There is almost nobody of any importance that I know of . . . well . . . [laughter] well well well well. The great man who comes closest to decorum, in his writing at least, the very very great man . . . I’m not even sure of this either. I was going to say Chaucer, but even that’s not really true. There is a sense in which Chaucer can make even shitting and pissing decorous. So I don’t know, I don’t know. The fact is that Boswell really isn’t decorous from time to time, I mean he would have made me extremely uncomfortable from time to time, and since I’m squeamish I regard myself as a . . . Certainly Johnson made all sorts of people squeamish. I mean, when you read Boswell’s description of how Johnson ate dinner, you get an impression that [laughter] might have turned you in the direction of anorexia. But their vitality manifests itself often in indecorous ways. I mean most of us have no vitality and a great deal of decorum; Johnson had a great deal of vitality and very little decorum. Oh yeah, a lot of decorum, but sometimes his vitality manifested itself without decorousness. So that Boswell had a boyhood friend named Temple, who became a clergyman. And they went to school together, and Boswell was a perfectly respectable young man—and stayed fairly respectable for quite a while. But as he got older it was more and more important to him that he do what he was driven to do. And one of the things he was driven to do was to associate with these extraordinary men that he had met in London—I mean people like Johnson and Edmund Burke and Topham Beauclerk and Goldsmith . . . Sir Joshua Reynolds—these were quite extraordinary people. And so he was driven to associate with them, as well as with others—a very different crowd, like the politician Wilkes, who was a notorious rake and got into all kinds of trouble in Parliament and so on. And Boswell was also driven by drunkenness, and he was also driven by his unslakeable sexual appetite. And when Temple came to London once fairly late and visited Boswell, he was APPALLED! by what was going on. And he wrote back home, I mean he thought he had come to hell itself, because Boswell was dragging him from house to house to see people like Edmund Burke and Dr. Johnson. [Laughs.] And of course he saw Boswell drunk often, and he also knew what Boswell did with some of his nights, at least with parts of his nights. And he was appalled. 17

Mudrick Transcribed Most of us don’t have any problem, we are all Temples for lack of appetite. I mean we don’t have enough appetite to be anything more than a Temple. Yes? STUDENT: How can you explain his Christianity? It’s sort of— MUDRICK: Who, Boswell’s? STUDENT: Yeah, Boswell’s. I was imagining it’s— MUDRICK: Oh, there’s no question he’s a believing Christian, anymore question than there is that Johnson was a believing Christian. It’s a very interesting issue. There’s a wonderful statement in Boswell’s London Journal when he’s talking to a friend of his (not the Temple kind) and it suddenly strikes him that the world would be a much simpler place if sexual intercourse were made a gift—what am I thinking of? what’s the word?—a reward for piety. [Laughter.] He was describing what the world would be like if sexual intercourse were reserved for virtuous people. So that people would vie with each other to be good, and ministers would preach sermons on the pleasures of sexual intercourse to fire up people to be virtuous so that they would be allowed to perform sexual intercourse. That seems to me one of the most brilliant and interesting moral ideas ever presented. And of course, Boswell didn’t find any conflict at all between saying things like that and being a pious and believing member of the Church of England. Of course all of you live completely consistently. I mean, those believing Christians among you follow without question the Ten Commandments and the injunction to love one another, and you never engage in premarital or extramarital intercourse, and you never feel lust, and so on—is that right? You’re all completely consistent . . . That’s what I thought. ‘Cause we manage these things better in the twentieth century than in the eighteenth! And you don’t get blind, sloppy drunk. True. See, you can read about these strange, antediluvian creatures who fall into the mud, who seek out prostitutes behind St. Paul’s Cathedral at night—after going there during the day [laughter] and not seeing any inconsistency between these two activities. Yes? STUDENT: I have two questions. MUDRICK: Yes? STUDENT: What does ante— MUDRICK: What’s the second one? [Laughter.] STUDENT: Well, the second one— MUDRICK: What’s antediluvian mean? STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: “Before the flood.” STUDENT: Oh, okay. MUDRICK: Literally means that. STUDENT: And the other one is, I was raised Catholic, so what about the Protestants? They can just confess their— MUDRICK: No, there’s no confession. As a matter of fact Johnson has a very interesting statement on confession [laughing]. He talks about everything in the world! And where the hell he talks about—you can’t figure, all of a sudden he’ll . . . Boswell of course was a lawyer, and Boswell would occasionally come to London with 18

Week One the latest case that he had to plead in Edinburgh, and he would ask Johnson to write a brief for him. Sometimes Johnson would write the brief and sometimes he would dictate it. (While Boswell was sitting there Johnson would simply . . .) And these are the most incredibly argued things you ever saw in your life! You have never seen such beauty and consistency of logic and argument. They are gorgeous! They are greater by the way than anything that Johnson ever wrote, just as Johnson’s conversation is greater than anything he ever wrote. He’s one of those people who were to some extent inhibited when they started to write, but whose minds were so well-stocked, so marvelously stocked with information. He probably had the greatest reasoning power of any human being who ever lived—I think that’s probably true. In fact his reasoning power was so great that he couldn’t dare to limit it to things that he believed in, so that he would often argue on the wrong side of a question because it gave him the opportunity to use arguments that he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to use. Yes—you had your hand up. STUDENT: I was just going to say that it was interesting that he gives Boswell these arguments, but they never work. MUDRICK: They never work, and you remember that one of the— STUDENT: The juries never accept it— MUDRICK: The judges. One of the [laughs] one of the judges (I think it was Lord Hailes, but I don’t remember) a friend of Boswell’s in Scotland, when the argument was brought back, this judge was able to figure out—he said: Some of this was written by Dr. Johnson, wasn’t it? Oh yeah. And he picked out exactly the part that was written by Johnson. He said: You know, you mustn’t take the trouble to bring good arguments to this court—it’s casting pearls before swine. [Laughter.] Anyway, I didn’t say that Johnson’s arguments were necessarily convincing, it’s just that they are the best possible arguments that can be made by a reasonable mind on the issue. And they are a pleasure to read, they are just unbelievable. And the way in which he is able to bring documentation to bear—that is, he will bring some ancient authority, or Pufendorf on education, who has this to say about so-and-so. It’ll come just . . . out like that. He is learned in the only sense in which learned is a human quality—that is, his learning doesn’t impede either his reasoning powers or his humanity. It’s all together, it’s all associated together. So that you feel that everything irradiates everything else. Marvelous man! marvelous man. And yet why does he eat that way? [Laughs.] It is amazing, is it not, that extraordinary people sometimes have habits— personal habits, social habits—which are so disturbing to others, that you would think that they would be the first to be aware of them, and would inhibit themselves from doing them. But this doesn’t happen to be the case. There is a sense in which a perfectly well-behaved person is always a nobody. [Laughter.] I can’t think of whether I know of a really first-class genius who was perfectly well-behaved, I mean even in rather ordinary matters of social intercourse. I guess it’s 19

Mudrick Transcribed because ordinary people don’t think of anything but making a good impression in company [laughs], I mean that’s all that’s on their minds. So that any talents that they have are finally destroyed by their desire to make a good impression on other people. And if you have any talents it’s inevitable that they will skew you, they will make you lopsided. I think that that is probably true. This is one of the reasons why I would love to have known . . . I would love to have a personal impression of Chaucer. Because I have the impression somehow that he escapes these arguments, that somehow he saw all around him, and he saw himself too. Whereas this is impossible for most people—they cannot really see themselves. And in fact, maybe a capacity to see all around you necessarily prevents you from seeing yourself. Yes? STUDENT: Was it Boswell who referred to his gesticulations and things like that—was he an epileptic? MUDRICK: No. Well, we don’t know. And if you’ve read that far, you will remember Sir Joshua Reynolds’s very interesting—and very up-to-date—explanation of Johnson’s gesticulations and movements. (Boswell describes them in marvelously minute detail.) Boswell simply assumes that they’re a physical difficulty—a disease—and he says that they’re St. Vitus’s dance. Reynolds disagrees (Reynolds is a very smart man); Reynolds felt that Johnson was punishing himself for guilty thoughts that he was having or might have. This is, by the way—even whether it’s true or not, and obviously we’ll never know—it’s extraordinary that Reynolds would have come up with that kind of explanation in the eighteenth century. Generally speaking, the eighteenth century didn’t go in for that kind of explanation. Yes? STUDENT: Wasn’t Johnson celibate? MUDRICK: Oh, no—he was married. STUDENT: Oh. Oh yeah. MUDRICK: And there’s a description—Boswell goes about as far as he can go in the direction of describing—he apparently was crazy about his wife, who was twenty years older than he was. A monster! [Laughter.] And apparently, especially in the last few years, she detested him—and didn’t let him sleep with her, as a matter of fact. You don’t get that in Boswell but you get it elsewhere. Garrick, you remember, describing when he was one of Johnson’s students at the school, the schoolboys looking through the keyhole, observing Johnson’s tumultuous affection with his wife. [Laughter.] Also Boswell hints, and apparently it was true, that when Johnson first came to London he was associating with people like Richard Savage—who was a real scoundrel, though Johnson was very fond of him—that his attention to certain moral obligations was not as strict as it became later. [Laughs. End of first side of tape. The second side begins shortly after the class has resumed following a ten-minute break.] Gibbon is almost a kind of antithesis to Johnson. He and Johnson, by the way, loathed each other. Boswell also loathed Gibbon. And the primary reason that Johnson and Boswell loathed Gibbon was that Gibbon wrote a book which did 20

Week One in fact represent some of the most iconoclastic aspects, some of the most obviously iconoclastic aspects, of the Enlightenment. That is, what Gibbon does in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is to attack Christianity. This is the first serious public attack on Christianity in European literature, and both Boswell and Johnson obviously felt very much threatened by it and so they hated Gibbon. And it’s interesting that both of them were very often in Gibbon’s presence, because Gibbon was one of the great literary figures of the time and they were often at the same parties together, at the same dinners together, and at the same meetings of the Literary Club together. And some of Boswell’s funny anecdotes have to do with that. There’s a wonderful anecdote about—let me see if I can find it quickly. I’m so sorry not to be able to get these things quickly. I think I can find the business about Johnson, Gibbon, and bears (b-e-a-r-s) quickly. I’ll have to look it up in the index. [Searches for the passage.] This is one of those curious instances also in which Johnson acts in an odd way, I mean a way which is not really decorous, and you would think that he’s smart enough not to do this. But he does it, and it provides Boswell with a nice anecdote. One of the company suggested an internal objection to the poetry said to be Ossian’s, that we do not find the wolf in it, which must have been the case had it been of that age. The mention of the wolf had led Johnson to think of other wild beasts; and while Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr. Langton were carrying on a dialogue about something which engaged them earnestly, he, in the midst of it, broke out, “Pennant tells of Bears—” (what he added, I have forgotten [Pennant was a well-known traveler of the time].) They went on, which he being dull of hearing, did not perceive, or, if he did, was not willing to break off his talk; so he continued to vociferate his remarks, and Bear (“like a word in a catch,” as Beauclerk said,) was repeatedly heard at intervals, which coming from him who, by those that did not know him, had been so often assimilated to that ferocious animal, while we who were sitting around could hardly stifle laughter, produced a very ludicrous effect. Silence having ensued, he proceeded: “We are told, that the black bear is innocent; but I should not like to trust myself with him.” Mr. Gibbon muttered, in a low tone of voice, “I should not like to trust myself with you.” This piece of sarcastic pleasantry was a prudent resolution, if applied to a competition of abilities. [p. 615; April 7, 1775] And then, of course, in the very next paragraph you discover Johnson coming up with one of the most famous aphorisms in history. Because Johnson, just like that, all of a sudden would say things like this: Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong, determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” 21

Mudrick Transcribed Just like that. He comes up with things like that all the time, all the time. And of course, nothing truer was ever said. And it’s marvelous coming from a man who in fact was a rigorous patriot—nobody was ever more an English patriot than Johnson. So it’s astonishing, just over and over again. Do you get a little vibration of what feeling you might have reading a passage like that, if you knew who Gibbon was, how important he was, who Johnson was, how important he was, who Boswell was, how important he was? You see how exciting it would be to imagine these extraordinary men in the same room together at the same time—who could scarcely abide each other, some of them. And there they are, I mean before our eyes, speaking as they would speak at the time. And by the way, Boswell was the only person that I can think of who ever lived who consistently presented people behaving domestically in this way. Imagine, you wouldn’t have that anecdote about Gibbon and Johnson if it weren’t for Boswell. And you would know that from time to time they were together, but what did they say? How did they feel? Were they really afraid of each other? How much did they dislike each other? In what way did they dislike each other? and so on. And Boswell gives it to you. What books give you is history. And there is no substitute for history, in the feeling that you have about the human race. You can be as smart as all get-out, but your smartness will be . . . Whenever I hear about noble savages—and I am impressed when people are telling me how smart, say, Indians are, or savages (I’m using savage not in the pejorative sense)—I always think that their intelligence often has an extraordinary breadth—that is, they can know about everything on the face of the earth, if you take earth to mean dirt, and sky to mean sky—but they know nothing whatever in depth, because depth is history. If you don’t know history, you have lost the third dimension—if you don’t have a sense of what people were like in the past, and who lived in the past, and what they did. And you don’t get that except by plunging in to books. Nothing will give you that but books. Where does Johnson get by with, for instance, understanding that lectures are a fake? Johnson understands in the 1760’s . . . They had started giving lectures at Oxford, and Johnson disapproved of them. He said: What can you learn from a lecture that you can’t learn from the books that the lectures have been taken from? Which is, of course, exactly what you have to say about lectures. I can’t get over this notice that went around the faculty the other day, which I already read to my writing class, in which the television studio on campus is offering every teacher on campus the opportunity to get his lectures videotaped, on the chance that he has to be gone some day. I think it costs forty-three dollars for a sixty-minute videotape, and seventy-five dollars for a ninety-minute videotape, and if you want to buy the videotape it costs an additional forty-five dollars—so you can watch yourself delivering the lecture at home, play it over and over again on your TV set. [Laughter.] And what I suggested was that I would provide canned laughter for ten dollars. [Laughter.] Terrific! What is the use of a lecture, will you tell me that? And the ludicrousness of a university paying these people to read from their notes, which were obsolete 22

Week One before they were written. What would you rather do: find out about the Roman Empire from the lectures of some tenth-rater, who if he had a few brains would steal from Gibbon, but probably hasn’t even read Gibbon, at least since graduate school—or Gibbon? I mean, one of the most extraordinary minds that ever lived, giving you a sense of another period too, an entirely different period. This just baffles me. But Johnson knew that instantly, he knew it instantly. He looked at it and he said that’s ridiculous, why should they have things like that? STUDENT: Maybe the use for lectures is that the instructor has to give tests, so he’s telling you beforehand what’s going to be on the test—but it’s intentional. MUDRICK: That may be. You don’t regard that as a serious justification for lectures, though, do you? STUDENT: Well, if he didn’t lecture he wouldn’t be able to give a test, because it would be so broad. MUDRICK: And if he didn’t give a test he wouldn’t be able to lecture. [Laughter.] Yes! there’s a real problem there, that’s true! Yes? STUDENT: What do you mean by a lecturer? Do you mean someone who’s reading from something, or somebody who’s talking— MUDRICK: I MEAN SOMEBODY WHO IS PRESENTING YOU WITH CANNED MATERIAL, who knows what he’s going to say before he says it. Anybody who knows what he’s going to say before he says it is either a lecturer or an actor. Actors sometimes at least deal with interesting material, I mean they’re reading interesting material. Yes? STUDENT: The implication of that is, that maybe in twenty years we can all stay at home and watch lectures instead of going to the university. MUDRICK: It’s true of course—that’s the implication of university education, that is, the teacher really is obsolete. Johnson makes the point—and I assume I must have stolen it from Johnson years and years ago because I had no idea—that lectures are invalidated by the existence of books. As soon as you have books you don’t need lectures. If you’re growing up in the Middle Ages, let’s say, and you’re going to Professor Abelard’s class and you happen to be Heloise, the teacher has all the books. So the teacher is both the professor and the library. You have no alternative. And obviously if he has more than two or three students he can’t lend out the books. When Chaucer, for instance, talking about his young scholar, the Clerk, says that he has “twenty bookes at his beddes heed,” and you say twenty books—why, my God, you have twenty books on the floor! [Laughter.] Twenty books in those days meant virtually the entire range of what was written. For one thing the books were collections. A book in the medieval sense was a kind of anthology, it had an enormous variety of material. But even so, that was all there was. There is a very interesting modern example of this that I love, because it shows exactly what conditions must have been like in the Middle Ages. There was a teacher here, a young German, who grew up in Vienna, and the first university he went to was the University of Vienna just after World War II. And of course Vienna had been bombed to the ground, there was nothing left. (For 23

Mudrick Transcribed those of you who imagine by the way that European cities, with the possible exception of Paris, exist as they did in the pristine Middle Ages, you’re really out of your minds. They were bombed to the ground in World War II, and then they were built up in imitation of the past—that is, they tried to reconstruct. Prague for instance was bombed to the ground, and then was rebuilt, and Vienna was rebuilt in much the same way—rebuilt according to architectural specifications . . . But anyway . . .) So the University of Vienna had been destroyed, the library had been destroyed, the books had been destroyed and so on, and so the students went to lectures. And they had no alternative—there were no books, you couldn’t get any books. And he took a class in Kafka, and the class in Kafka consisted in the teacher reading synopses of Kafka’s stories to the class—detailed synopses of Kafka’s stories—because there were no copies of Kafka’s stories available. And that was what going to class with Abelard might very well have been like. I mean you can assume that Abelard was a brilliant teacher, and also he was showing off for Heloise and so on, so he probably made a few smart cracks from time to time. But still, he had all the books, and the students had to take the word from him. But you have the books. You can use them, you can read them. And if I serve any purpose in my humble way, I serve the purpose that Johnson, say, serves to Boswell when Boswell says: Well, what do you think about this passage in this book, Sir? Or: No, I disagree with you, and I think this. And Johnson will go off, Boswell will go off, and so on. That’s the only purpose. What in the world business do I have telling you what you’re supposed to think about something which you haven’t even read? I mean does that make any sense at all? It doesn’t to me. So unless you read, we have nothing to talk about, we really have nothing to talk about. We can talk about the birds and the bees. One of the reasons I talk about sex so much is that that’s about the only interest we share. [Laughter.] I don’t know of any other interest that you and I share. And we share very little information. So I have to talk about sex. (It’s a lie, but it’s a good story.) So read! Why would you be taking an advanced English class unless you liked to read? If you don’t like to read the Life of Johnson, forget it, really forget it. If you don’t find this book interesting, you just should take up another line of work, that’s all there is to it. Because Boswell was right—it’s the most entertaining book ever written. Now I don’t mean you don’t have to make some effort to get into a book which after all was written almost exactly two hundred years ago. So that it’s a different time, and especially at the beginning when Boswell is trying to establish the sense of this character—he’s writing, after all, for people who understood that Johnson was the greatest Englishman of the century he is secure in that belief. So he knows that he confronts a patient audience. Now I know that you don’t know that Johnson is the greatest Englishman of the eighteenth century, and that he’s just a misty literary figure of the past. Well, you have to make that effort at the beginning. You have to give Boswell the chance to introduce him. Another thing about reading is the notion that some of you have been given (and this, too, really is quite the reverse of what it’s intended to be). That is, your 24

Week One teachers will tell you: Never read anything without making every effort to understand every word of it. THAT IS DEATH TO READING! If you allow yourself to get into that frame of mind, you will never get through a single book—never get through a single interesting book. You read because you expect to come to something that’s going to entertain you. And you keep reading as hard as you can to try to get to interesting parts, and you turn the pages as fast as you can. And I’m not talking about speedreading, which I know nothing whatever about, so I’m not qualified to speak of it. I don’t read that way myself, I can’t read that way (I mean I suppose I wish I could), I don’t know anything about it. And I am not a fast reader. But what I’m expecting you to do, and I really wish you would try to talk about this a little because I’m sure—I don’t want to lose those of you who had the courage to come back for the second half of the class, I wouldn’t like to lose anybody. And I am serious. I’m not going to punish you in any way—I will be grateful if you have done as conscientious a job as you can. And once again the notion of conscientious as trying to understand every word—that I don’t go for. You are conscientious because you try to read in such a way as reading should be done, which is to get as much fun out of it as possible, and if you don’t understand something the first time around keep going, just keep going. Try to cover as much of it as you can. One thing you try to bring into play as much as possible is the completion compulsion. This notion that all obsessions are bad, is crazy. Many obsessions are very good, in fact we couldn’t live without a lot of obsessions. I have an obsession about completing chapters for instance: I have to complete a chapter before I stop reading anything. So it doesn’t matter what the time is or what’s going on . . . STUDENT: There aren’t any [in the Life of Johnson]. MUDRICK: No, I know, but there are years, and it’s divided by years. Any way that you can develop a habit which compels you to do something which in the short run might not appear to be particularly attractive to you but in the long run does appear attractive to you, develop it like crazy. It will serve you in very good stead, and the astonishing thing is that eventually you may even develop a liking for what you have forced yourself to do—that’s the most astonishing thing about it. Because it really is quite as easy to develop good habits as bad ones, good addictions as bad addictions. And I should think that the function of our lives, especially when we’re young, is to develop as many good habits (the trouble is, when you say “good habit” everybody says, yeah, I know what that is) good addictions, good obsessions: things that don’t really make any sense if you consider them rationally—I mean why am I forcing myself to this?—but there is some hope of future gain. I don’t know of any obsession that you would be better off to develop than the obsession for reading. It is really, of all obsessions and addictions, the one that will serve you best throughout your entire life. Every once in a while I revise my notion of what pleasures sustain themselves best as you get older (because every year I get older—so, you see, then something diminishes). At the moment my feeling is that the only two habits that pay off completely, continuously, 25

Mudrick Transcribed without diminution, and indeed I think with intensification if you practice them properly, are reading and eating. I don’t mean stuffing your mouth three times a day with anything that’s there, or overeating because you have suffered some kind of emotional setback; I mean really discriminating. If you really eat, you know the difference between shit and Shinola, or chalk and cheese. And if you really read, you know the difference between this and that. And that of course is part of the enormous pleasure that you get from it. STUDENT: What about writing? MUDRICK: Well, if you can write—not everybody can. That, I think, is a special obsession. I guess I do believe that everybody can write, but I think that . . . See, for instance I like to write, but if I am at all weak I will read rather than write, because reading, at my age at least, is much easier than writing. And so I will cheat by reading [smiling]. And I think most people find writing the hardest of all obsessions to develop in such a way that they can’t do without it. I developed other obsessions; I developed for instance the obsession of exercise. I can’t spend the day without doing my little stint in the morning—I mean I can’t do it!— and so on the rare occasions when I’ve been sick I’ve fretted the rest of the day, because I know I’m not in good physical condition, I’ll probably die of a heart attack by nine P.M. [Laughter.] But writing—oh sure, writing is wonderful, but . . . I suppose the trouble with writing as opposed to reading is that almost nobody has the feeling about writing that everybody can have about reading, which is that reading I do for myself, writing I do for other people. If you can develop the feeling that writing is something that you do for yourself, you’re in great shape. It’s a wonderful thing. Boswell by the way developed it, Boswell wrote only for himself—isn’t that marvelous?—until he wrote two of the greatest books ever written, I mean the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which is the first thing he wrote about Johnson (which is marvelous, by the way. In some respects it’s better that the Life because it’s more intense. It’s a shorter period and there’s more anecdotal material in it) and the Life of Johnson. But his journals he wrote for himself, and he wrote because he had cacoethes scribendi—the obsession of writing, the madness of writing. It’s a wonderful madness to have. I don’t have it, by the way. I wish I did. I would never have written if I hadn’t been published, because I’m not driven to it. There are other things I would rather do and there are things I excuse myself in order not to do it. If I have a deadline I have to do it—I just have to do it—because a deadline is an obsession for me. (You see, you have to pick your obsessions properly.) If I have a deadline I have to do it. And so for thirty-two years now I’ve had deadlines [smiling]. And I’ve never missed a deadline in thirty-two years. STUDENT: I’m sure that deadlines don’t produce deadlines. MUDRICK: Well, eventually I’ll drop dead of something or other. Yes? STUDENT: Did Chaucer have— MUDRICK: We don’t know. I doubt it, I doubt it. I think that Chaucer is an amateur. It’s interesting to me that the man I consider the greatest writer who ever lived 26

Week One is not really, by my way of thinking, a professional writer. He doesn’t seem to have been driven to it. Boswell was driven to it, Boswell was an obsessive writer. Shakespeare wasn’t an obsessive writer—Shakespeare wrote exclusively to make money. He wrote very rapidly, but from what we know, as soon as he retired to Stratford he didn’t write another line, had no interest in it. STUDENT: Phew. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Why do you say . . .? STUDENT: Oh, I was . . . blowing out a fume. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Maybe we can get you into a Japanese movie. [Laughter.] The latest perversion . . . STUDENT: Do you ever hear words in your head, though? Like you’ll start thinking of sentences and suddenly— MUDRICK: Oh sure, but that’s because I’m a professional writer, and I can’t . . . I’ll tell you one thing which I do and which is interesting to me (habits of writers are always interesting to me). I try very hard when I’m writing something to keep it completely out of my mind when I’m not actually sitting at a table or desk writing. I don’t want to be a writer when I’m not writing. And I’m pretty successful at it. That’s another obsession, I mean I’ve decided, rigidly, that when I’m writing, I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I’m not a writer, and I’m not interested in writing and I don’t want to know anything about it—at least from the standpoint of a writer. So that when something will sneak into my head I’m very irritated [laughs], and I try to suppress it. Now the only exception I make to that, and this I would recommend to your attention if you’re seriously interested in writing, because I know that things get lost. Ideas that come to me, just ideas, are of no special interest, but phrases sometimes you do have to put down because you do lose phrases. I mean a particular phrase you may lose—you may lose exactly how the words come together, and so you’re just stuck. I mean if it seems really first-rate to you, you rush home and you write it down or . . . The one thing I will not allow myself to do is to get out of bed and write it down. I mean, if it occurs to me after I go to bed it’s just tough titty, that’s all. [Laughter.] What I try to do is to fix it in my head by repeating it several times (I mean if I’m in bed) but usually I forget it, it doesn’t matter to me. For those of you who think that books will be outmoded, and for the things that you read about, it’s not true. There is no substitute for books. (And certainly I’m all for all modern improvements.) The invention of language was certainly the most extraordinary invention in human history (it’s much more significant than the wheel for instance), and more particularly the invention of written language. There is a cohesiveness . . . there is a correspondence between a book and the mind such as exists between no other external object and the mind. There is a sense in which a book is the objectification of a human being. And there is nothing else like that at all. A computer isn’t like that, a TV image isn’t like that, a floppy disc isn’t like that. And I think part of the reason is that the use of the eye in reading is special. The use of the eye in looking at images is much less . . . comprehensive than the use of the eye in reading words. The effort that 27

Mudrick Transcribed the eye has to make in conjunction with the mind while looking at words brings into action functions which are brought into action by no other human activity. There is nothing which so animates human beings. And I know that I’m struggling for words here, animates is not quite right, and you can think of all sorts of things . . . For instance I happen to be mad about music, and I am really fonder of music than I am of literature, it’s more exciting to me. Nevertheless I would stick by what I just said, that there is always a sense in which language involves more of me, or books involve more of me, than music does. Music involves a part of me more intensely than any book does, but books involve more of me than any music does. And this I think is of some significance, I mean even for your own examination, your own interest. Because it is true that music is more exciting to me, much more exciting, than books. Maybe that’s one of the things wrong with it, that it is so exciting to me that there is a sense in which it takes me out of myself. Books keep me inside myself, most of the time. I am where I am. I am within my limits. There is a sense in which music for me is sanctioned sentimentality, though music is not sentimental. Music makes me believe that I am bigger than I am. And for a moment maybe I am, but it’s unsustainable. Books very seldom do that to me. Yes? STUDENT: That sounds like the difference between love and friendship. MUDRICK: Yeah, to some extent. Maybe another way to put it is to say, that music for me is like passionate love at the beginning, and books for me are like love after many years if it sustains itself. The reason I say that, by the way, is that I don’t really happen to have any strong feeling about friendship, so I don’t really know what friendship is. Apparently Boswell does and Johnson does, so you’ll be interested to read . . . I just don’t have any very strong feeling about people that I’m not in love with. (I mean I like them, I like to be around them, I enjoy their company, I would seek them out . . .) So I don’t really understand what people mean when they talk about the bonds of friendship. But that may well be—I’m sure it is—a lack in me, some kind of deficiency. I lack the friendship hormone. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Self-satisfaction. MUDRICK: Lack of self-satisfaction? STUDENT: No, it sounds like . . . never mind. MUDRICK: No no, say it. STUDENT: Well, I was just thinking—I was talking about this last night with my roommate, because all these old friends of mine are always dropping in on me. And I’m not really much of a friendly person either [laughs]—as far as having friends. It just seems to me it’s sort of superfluous in a lot of ways. I mean I know that’s sounding awful, but . . . I like the people and like to see them, but— MUDRICK: Oh, I’m afraid to say it doesn’t sound awful to me. Besides, you don’t mean “friendly”—I’m sure you are friendly. You mean that you do not have any strong feeling toward the people to whom you are being friendly. [Laughs.] STUDENT: Right. Well, it’s strong enough, it’s just like you don’t wish them any harm certainly [laughter], and you want them to be around and you don’t mind it, but 28

Week One it would be too much of a draw—if all of these people were wonderful you’d want to be with them all the time, you’d never get anything done [laughing]. MUDRICK: You know, you’re giving a wonderful—all these things of course remind me of Johnsonian anecdote. There’s a wonderful statement when Boswell talks to Johnson about how much grief you feel when something bad has happened to somebody you know—how much grief you’re supposed to feel—and Johnson says it’s all bullshit, that we feel very little. He said, Nobody ate his plumb-pudding at dinner with less . . .c Now obviously that’s an extreme statement, but it’s interesting that a man like Johnson, who had so many friends and was indeed such a friendly man and depended so much on friendship, should say something like that. I think probably friendship is exaggerated, I think the feeling of friendship is exaggerated. I think people probably feel a lot less strongly about friends than they pretend to or imagine that they do. STUDENT: Have you ever been into the bookstore and read those cards on friendship? You know, they’re painted and they have this sunset . . . Because I thought about getting one for a friend of mine, and I’ve gone in there and read them and of course ran out ready to vomit, so I said forget it, I’ll go and say hi to them instead. Because they build it up so much, they make it seem like it’s supposed to be better than sex. MUDRICK: That’s right, it’s what most of us have to settle for instead of passionate love, or really a red-hot love affair that lasts so long. And one of the things that can be said (I mean I’ll preclude somebody saying it for me): Almost everything you see said about passionate love . . . is true! unfortunately [laughing]. You suffer in exactly the ways in which they tell you you are going to suffer! They are absolutely right, the sons of bitches! You have all the pains and all the problems and all the withdrawal symptoms and all the deprivations—everything! But nothing like that really occurs with friendship, does it? Well, maybe it does, maybe it does for you—something for you to think about. STUDENT: When I was a little kid I was really concerned about some of my friends. MUDRICK: Well, it depends on what you mean—what do you mean you were “concerned”? You mean you didn’t want to move into another neighborhood, something like that? STUDENT: No, no—you could get jealous. Like I would get jealous of one friend when he’d get another friend that wasn’t a friend of mine, and they’d go off and I would get like I was missing out on something. MUDRICK: Yeah, but you didn’t feel that you would DIE! STUDENT: Oh no—wouldn’t even cry. MUDRICK: Oh sure, well . . . You had your hand up. Here is the quotation Mudrick is referring to: “JOHNSON. ‘. . . Why, there’s Baretti, who is to be tried for his life tomorrow, friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plumb-pudding the less. Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in depressing the mind.’” [p. 417; October 19, 1769] c 

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Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: Yeah, I was just wondering if you had any of these feelings for men, then— any of this kind of passionate love—or is it just women? MUDRICK: No. Well, I don’t. I think that’s the real problem, and I don’t know what would happen, for instance, in some future where there (as is perfectly conceivable to me) where there’s much more of a breakdown against the sexual prohibition—that is, that you have one preference or another—and what would happen then I have no idea. STUDENT: I was just, you know, because like in Hemingway and all of those authors talk about the “great friendship” between men— MUDRICK: I understand, and of course a lot of the TV ads, especially for beer, depend [inaudible because of laughter]. I mean Lowenbrau would immediately collapse as a company if it weren’t for the fact that men really are just mad about each other—when they go off hunting together . . . STUDENT: That’s mostly Stroh’s—the Lowenbrau has got couples. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Oh, that’s right. Okay, okay. Yes? STUDENT: The basis of friendship is, find someone that you like and you’re interested in, that you know won’t try to kill you. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: If you start from there you are [inaudible because of laughter]. STUDENT: I was really grateful. I mean, they turned out to like me. I liked them, and they were interesting. They would take me places . . . MUDRICK: I think by the way that that’s particularly—although probably the same argument could be made about women—I think that’s particularly true for sensitive, timid, shrinking, cowardly boys who see men mostly as potential bullies and monsters who are going to beat the shit out of them, and so they’re grateful if somebody comes along who just doesn’t beat them up. And this is my friend! [Laughter.] Oh, I think that’s very smart, I think that’s true [referring to what the student said]. Does that have any relevance at all for women? Obviously you don’t have the same fear of being beaten up physically, at least mostly you don’t. STUDENT: Or that they’re not going to call you ugly behind your back, maybe. MUDRICK: No, I think friendship is overrated. I think it’s one of those human experiences which people overrate because they don’t like the weight which is placed on passionate love and on sexual relations, and they resent it. And they especially resent it in advance of having experienced it. They say: That really is overrated. I’ll bet there’s something as good as that, or almost as good as that. There may be something as good as that, but there isn’t anything as intense as that, there isn’t anything as involving as that. You don’t really suffer, and if you suffer you’re probably in love. The problem really is indeed between love and friendship. Love is different from friendship, and love is—in some sense which I wouldn’t particularly want to go into because I’m not sure of it—it’s always physical. I mean beyond a certain point, if you’re fond of somebody, something physical enters into it. How far it goes I don’t know, and I don’t want to get into arguments about mother love and that kind of nonsense. (It’s fairly clear for instance that maternal love is

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Week One a kind of displacement of physical love; that is, the desire for possession becomes mental and moral because it can’t be physical.) STUDENT: Did you just think of that? [Laughter.] MUDRICK: I may not be Dr. Johnson, but occasionally something occurs to me. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: I don’t know if what goes on between Garrick and Sir Joshua Reynolds and Johnson and Boswell when they’re all sort of running around together and sort of— MUDRICK: They’re having a great time, no question. STUDENT: It just seems to me just like a marvelous time, and like nobody’s really pushing anything, it’s just simply like their physical presences all just rubbing up against each other— MUDRICK: Very good, I agree entirely, I think you are absolutely right, and you are talking about probably the most extraordinary assemblage of human beings who ever got together regularly in a particular place in the history of the world, and so that does make it a little bit different. [Laughs.] That is, if for instance you have assembled in one room, say once every other week (or really more often than that—the Club met every other week) you have assembled the greatest man of the century, the greatest actor who ever lived, one of the greatest painters who ever lived, the greatest historian who ever lived . . . you wanna go on? [Laughs.] STUDENT: Who’s the painter? MUDRICK: Sir Joshua Reynolds. The greatest biographer who ever lived . . . I mean that’s a rather unusual group of people [laughs]—most of them probably have something to say! Now you gather with your . . . ratty friends [laughing] and you say: DO YOU KNOW THAT THEY RAISED THE PRICE OF COFFEE A NICKEL AT THE UCEN TODAY? I’M SICK OF THEM RAISING THEIR FUCKING PRICES! [Laughter.] AND SO I’M GONNA GET DRUNK! [Laughter.] STUDENT: Well, I’m talking about, though, more than just having something to say, there’s just a kind of relaxed genialness about— MUDRICK: Well, they have a relaxed genialness because they have something to say [laughing], I mean! I HAVE A VERY RELAXED GENIALITY AT THE MOMENT BECAUSE I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY! I mean I feel pretty good—I’m among ignoramuses [laughter] who are unlikely to challenge me in the extremities of my knowledge, and so on, and you’re fairly well-disposed, and you have nothing else to do until three-thirty, and so on. But if you’re a little nervous you start drinking too much, and you get drunk, and you think you’re being very witty, and you say all sorts of stupid things, and so on. No, I do think that there are certain kinds of company that obviously are exhilarating. And if you want to call that friendship, sure. But you see, you yourself, I think, justified something I said a little while ago when I said: These people talking—what they say has the quality of a book.

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Week Three 9 October 1984

MUDRICK [telling the class what he and a student have just been talking about]: This has to do with that discussion about the sensibility to music, and whether there’s such a thing as tone-deafness, and so on. And this person has professional information, and so [noticing that the student is embarrassed] no, I’m not—really, professional information is very helpful information. For instance I think I have professional information about literature, which is one of the reasons you should pay close attention to what I say about literature. I don’t have professional information for the most part about music—I’m just very fond of music. You had your hand up. STUDENT: It occurred to me when I went home and thought about it—I’m a professional singer, and I have a singing coach in L.A. who teaches people who are tone-deaf not to be tone-deaf. And he’s got it all set, and it’s happened before— so there really is no such thing as tone-deafness. So Johnson couldn’t have been tone-deaf, he just probably didn’t have an ear that was sensitive to what was happening [inaudible]. MUDRICK: You had that interesting instance mentioned. STUDENT: Oh—he taught Joe Namath. Joe Namath was tone-deaf, and he is no longer. MUDRICK: Because he was going to appear in some musical, wasn’t he? Is that . . . that was the reason, yeah. No, I just . . . I mean it seems odd for Joe Namath all of a sudden to show up at a music teacher’s studio. Yes? STUDENT: There’s a part in the book where Johnson talks about the one instance where he’s affected by music. MUDRICK: Yes. In fact there are two places in the Life where Johnson apparently is affected by music, and they’re mentioned specifically. Yes? STUDENT: I had a question about tone-deafness as the term—you said that it cures him of his inability to reproduce a melody or a series of sounds—or is it thought of, as far as the way he corrects it, as an inability [inaudible]?d STUDENT: When they say “tone-deafness” what they mean is, if I play a note, you can’t repeat that, and you can’t— MUDRICK: At the same pitch. Here the tape-recorder was for a short time turned off.

d 

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Week Three STUDENT: Right. It’s not that you hit the wrong note, you just couldn’t even conceive of making a note. STUDENT: So some of them might be able to tell the difference between an A and a third [inaudible] major scale, but not be able to make either the sound— MUDRICK: Do you happen to know what method he uses? Could you describe that? STUDENT: Yeah. He says, “Make a sound, make a pitch, make a tone,” and then he finds it on the piano. And then he says, “Okay, now be quiet.” And then he picks the same note and he says, “Make that same noise.” And it’s really strange when sometimes you can’t do it, and you keep doing this over and over with different pitches and “Try to sing higher, try to sing lower,” and eventually you get a command over maybe four or five notes, and then just keep going. MUDRICK: And is it something which stays once you have it? STUDENT: M-hm. MUDRICK [calling on another student]: Yes? STUDENT: Well, I mean just think about how when you whistle or sing or do anything, somehow the faculty of the brain knows where to put the pitch or the note. Same thing with like reading, or something—your brain has some sort of connection between, and I guess these people, they just don’t have that, they’ve never trained it. It’s like some people— MUDRICK: Well, it’s very important if, I mean whether they have it or whether they simply haven’t trained it, I mean that’s the point here. She’s saying that it’s not trained, and I suppose what most of us were figuring is that there is something with respect to response to musical pitch which is not unlike, say, some sort of brain malfunction like aphasia or dyslexia—and those are actual malfunctions of the brain. Yes? STUDENT: My wife teaches little kids, and she’ll simply start with two notes, one higher, one lower, and she’ll say to you, “Which is higher?” Sometimes the notes are so close together they can’t tell them apart. Once they get started, they can learn finer and finer distinctions—apparently anybody can learn. But I don’t think that has directly to do with enjoying music. Apparently Johnson didn’t. I don’t think he said he was tone-deaf, he just said he was insensible to music. MUDRICK: Well, we just don’t know, and obviously it’s perfectly possible not to be tone-deaf and to have no reaction to music—I don’t think anybody would contend that that wasn’t so. Yes? STUDENT: I was under the impression that he just wasn’t moved by it, you know? Nothing to do with not understanding it or hearing it, just that it didn’t move him. Because he says on page 1080 that Mr. Langton and he had gone to a concert, and he said he got moved—I got a melancholy feeling. MUDRICK: Yes, that’s the other one which you—and actually it’s more interesting than the one I think you’re thinking of. In fact that is one of the strangest facts about music, that it carries or can carry that emotional content. And that I have never seen satisfactorily explained, even begun to be explained. I’m of course not talking about music accompanied by words, or identified as, say, “funeral march” [laughing]. 33

Mudrick Transcribed In fact I had for me an experience of just this . . . when I was going home the day after the last meeting there was a performance over KDB-FM of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, which I happen to think is unbelievably beautiful in a special way, I mean it’s the suavest piece of music that I know. It’s like . . . to say it’s like satin is ridiculous, that doesn’t make any sense. I can’t think of . . . It’s all texture, and it’s marvelous. And I was listening to the second movement, and I thought: You know? That’s the most interesting movement I have ever heard in the way in which a very particular kind of feeling is evoked. And it’s not the kind of feeling which I customarily hear in music, and I was trying to put a word to the feeling, and I finally decided, nostalgia. That is, it’s not pathetic, it’s not tragic, it’s not energetic—it’s nostalgic. And how the hell he can write a theme which is nostalgic I don’t know. I don’t recall, as a matter of fact, ever having heard another theme which sounds like that. I think it’s easier in music to do things or to write music which expresses extreme feelings. That is, you can write something very lugubrious, and you know that’s tragic or it’s a funeral march or something. You can write something very loud, in a major key, and that’s supposed to be lively. But Mozart can do things like that—something intermediate. I just mention it because it occurred to me the other day, and it seems to me miraculous. And I assume the people who are insensible to music, irrespective of whether they can identify pitches or not, listen to that, and it doesn’t have any such effect on them at all, none at all. And it baffles me—I don’t know why. It seems to me as clear as crystal, it’s just all there, and you just have to listen. You had your hand up. STUDENT: Yeah, the part where he talks about music being melancholy— MUDRICK: Is my hearing disappearing? It must be that all the windows are open. I don’t hear as well as I heard the first two meetings. I wish some of you would try to speak a little more loudly. STUDENT: The part that he talks about the music being melancholy—I had the feeling that he was recognizing it as being melancholy, but he didn’t feel that that was very interesting or that that was . . . Like he belittles— MUDRICK: Oh! if you want to find that passage, my impression is that he was impressed, that he was struck, that he was listening very intently, and it was interesting to him that music could carry that kind of emotional content. That’s my memory of that passage. If somebody could locate it I’d be grateful. You have it? Yes, please read it. STUDENT: Mr. Langton is quoting Johnson: “‘This is the first time that I have ever been affected by musical sounds;’ adding, ‘that the impression made upon him was of a melancholy kind.’” [pp. 1080-1; 1780] MUDRICK: No, but there’s something interesting before that, when he’s listening intently or something. Isn’t it? Or am I misremembering? STUDENT: Not in that part. MUDRICK: It doesn’t say anything about his having listened? STUDENT: There’s another place where he’s listening to a woman. They notice how attentive— MUDRICK: Maybe that’s the one I’m thinking of. It’s his attentiveness. 34

Week Three STUDENT: He says, Yes, I’d be glad to have another sense— MUDRICK: Yeah. Well, I’m then confusing the two. Okay. STUDENT: He says a melancholy feeling is what he’s getting—when he says music is good if you get a salutary feeling from it. But if it gives you a melancholy feeling per se then it’s bad. MUDRICK: Well, but that’s Johnson [inaudible] false generalization—partly of course because Johnson didn’t like to feel sad. He felt sad all too often and he wasn’t interested in anything with—and he didn’t understand that there’s something peculiarly transformitory about melancholy music, that the effect is not sad. Even though the emotion which is being conveyed is sad, the effect is not sad, in a way that I also don’t understand at all. Yes? STUDENT(1): Once when we were over at your house listening to an opera you put something on by Mozart that just suddenly made me feel horribly horribly sad and drove me out of the house onto the balcony. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Do you know what I was playing? STUDENT(2): The overture to The Marriage of Figaro or something [laughing]. MUDRICK: Or maybe the Lone Ranger theme. [Laughter.] I think the theme that I usually play to illustrate what seems to me really tragic depth is the second theme of the slow movement of the Mozart K. 488 Piano [prepares to whistle it] . . . I won’t try it, because I lose the capacity to whistle when I’m nervous, and I won’t try it with my natural voice. But it’s just a marvelously beautiful and very very sad theme. And it may be that you’re reacting the way Johnson did—that is, you’re aware of the sadness because the sadness is so intense, but you don’t have enough experience of music so that the intensity itself and the eloquence with which it is stated overcomes the feeling of sadness, in ways that I don’t understand. Yes? STUDENT: I’m just curious as to when Mozart was in London. MUDRICK: He never was. STUDENT: Oh? MUDRICK: No, he never was. Except when he was maybe very very young—maybe when he was a child. He was invited to London—he was one of the people invited to London, in fact he was invited to London before Haydn was, by the impresario Salomon, but he decided he didn’t want to go. And it was then that Haydn was invited, and with most miraculous effects—that is, he produced all his great symphonies then. But Mozart certainly as a man did not go to London, and I don’t remember that he did as a child, either. I don’t think he did. STUDENT: Which one by Mozart were you just talking about? MUDRICK: The sad theme, the very sad theme? STUDENT: Yeah, which one was that? MUDRICK: It’s the Piano Concerto K. 488—the A Major Piano Concerto—the twenty-third Piano Concerto. And it’s the second theme of the slow movement, not the first. Yes? STUDENT: One part where Boswell observes Johnson’s reaction to music that perhaps was the one that you were thinking of. 35

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: All right. STUDENT [reading]: In the evening our gentleman-farmer, and two others, entertained themselves and the company with a great number of tunes on the fiddle. Johnson desired to have “Let ambition fire thy mind,” played over again, and appeared to give a patient attention to it; though he owned to me that he was very insensible to the power of musick. I told him, that it affected me to such a degree, as often to agitate my nerves painfully, producing in my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears; and of daring resolution so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest part of the battle. “Sir,” said he, “I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool.” [873-4; September 23 1777] MUDRICK: Sure. Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s a very interesting—and you know, that’s a very interesting thing that Boswell tells you there, because a person who expresses himself as being so directly affected by music but who talks about music as seldom as Boswell does—that itself is an interesting case. And I really have no simple explanation of it. Boswell certainly talks about almost everything else. I don’t think he’s lying at that point, it’s just . . . Like all of a sudden in the [London] Journal Boswell tells you he takes out his violin and begins playing it, and you realize that he hasn’t even mentioned anything about music before or that he’s taken a violin along to London. And why this should—I don’t know. I don’t understand why he should do it, why he shouldn’t go into some detail about music. Yes? STUDENT: In his journals you do see a bit more of it than you see in the Life, and maybe he felt that in some way it wasn’t appropriate in the Life. He goes off when he’s had a particularly uproarious evening, whistling one of the tunes from The Beggar’s Opera, and he goes on into how it’s, you know, right, and how he feels all his animal senses whirring, and he seems to be more integrated into Boswell. Maybe it’s because of his feeling that Johnson doesn’t share these sentiments that he doesn’t bring it in. MUDRICK: Maybe, except that I think a lot of the other times they’re the sort of thing that almost everybody would say, even unmusical people. That is, practically everybody is affected by Sousa marches or by pop tunes of one kind or another, and that’s not (in spite of arguments that I’ve had with various people) that has nothing to do with music, I’m sorry. I tried to describe that feeling, as a matter of fact, in a little autobiographical segment that I wrote, and for me it was associated with my adoration of my brother, who sang and played on the piano.e And what I was aware of was a kind of energy—that is, he BANGED on the piano, and he always played in the key of C, and he SANG along vigorously, The passage he’s referring to can be found on page 263.

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Week Three and so on, and that’s the way we feel when we’re MARCHING down the street, ARM IN ARM . . . I don’t think that has anything . . . In a sense, I don’t believe that things like pop music are really music at all. I think they have something to do with animal energy—they’re mainly rhythm and suggestion. For instance most marches are not really music, they are simply . . . ways of getting a large group of people to march! [Laughs.] And a lot of dance music is not music, it’s just ways of getting people to dance! I’ll tell ya, a very good instance of that—a perfect instance, as a matter of fact: if you listen to a great deal of Chopin music which has the name of dance, for instance if you listen to a Chopin polonaise and then you listen to polonaises which are written to be danced to, you recognize the difference almost immediately. I mean there’s a sense—unless you’re extremely professional musically and are very much concerned about where the beats are falling, after a while you completely forget that what you’re listening to of Chopin’s is a polonaise. What you’re listening to is music, and these marvelous changes of harmony and pitch and so on. Whereas when you’re listening to a polonaise which is supposed to be danced to, you are very much aware of where the beats are and where the feet are supposed to go when the beats are there. And that’s why when people begin to argue with me about how rock is really a fancy form of music, I’m aware of the extremely trivial rhythms—not to mention the asinine language. [Laughter.] And there, after all, I am a professional, goddammit! I mean I know literature, and I know that those words are asinine, most of them, and that they represent the very dregs of the romantic tradition of poetry. That is, I love you . . . Do you love me? . . . I love you too . . . Let’s fuck . . . and so on. [Laughter.] I mean it all may be highly suggestive and so on, but it doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with music. I’m very pleased by that analogy that I just made, I think that’s true. I think there are things which are called music but which are what Hindemith in this century called “music for use”—Gebrauchsmusik. Music for use is not music. It’s like the difference between, let’s say, instructions for putting a bicycle together, and Chaucer. I mean they’re both writing [laughs], they’re both literature—in a sense. But one is literature, and the other is Gebrauchsliteratur! [Laughs.] Now that I’ve expended that spleen on [inaudible because of laughter]. Yes? STUDENT: When you’re talking about that, I think about places in Mozart, or other composers, where he’ll break into a dance, and it has the same effect on you— you want to get up and start dancing. MUDRICK: You do, but it’s a kind of apotheosis of the dance also. [A student laughs.] Sure you do, I mean the movement itself is often contagious. But nevertheless it’s more than that—just as for instance you’re aware, I mean let’s say for instance you’re listening to the most popular of the Chopin polonaises, the Military Polonaise. You’re very much aware of the military character and even of the dance character and something of a march, and even maybe horsemanship. [Sings the tune.] But you’re also aware of the extraordinary variety of the music itself—that is, you know that something is happening in the music which is 37

Mudrick Transcribed somehow more than the rhythmic energy. And that is, it seems to me, what makes it music (in an honorific sense at least), but otherwise it’s music for use. And to music for use anybody can respond, a person with no sensibility at all can respond to it. STUDENT: It’s nice that Mozart can use that— MUDRICK: Well, not only is it nice: there’s nothing else to use—that’s where it comes from, I mean all music comes from singing and dancing. And originally, I assume, singing and dancing are explosions of excess energy. That is, they don’t have anything to do with art, they have to do with energy, and somehow this is a way of making energy into something else. Just as speech, I mean I’m sure that it starts with . . . hog-calling [laughter] and becomes literature, that’s all. I think it’s unfortunate that those words get—it’s like that movie last night. You remember when the black driver asks the kid, “Do you like music?” and he puts a cassette on—it’s some kind of pop—and I immediately . . . I get rigid [laughing] when people say that, because as far as I’m concerned it’s not music. It’s something else, and there should be another name for it. STUDENT: What movie was that? MUDRICK: Repo Man. It was very funny. STUDENT: You liked it. MUDRICK: Oh yeah, I loved it. The end of it I didn’t care for, I don’t know why they [inaudible] the floating car, and so on— STUDENT: Well, it was just a little bit too much satire— MUDRICK: No! what I objected to was when it became just crazy fantasy. I think they ran out of ideas. STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: But nevertheless I liked it fine. STUDENT: What did you think of Emilio Estevez? MUDRICK: Huh? STUDENT: What did you think of the young fellow, the young guy? MUDRICK: Maybe just a little too handsome. I was a little bothered— STUDENT: It’s not his fault. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: Sure it’s his fault! I mean it’s his fault in the sense that when you’re playing in a show . . . he’s just a little too good-looking as far as I’m concerned. Also he doesn’t look Latin at all. Where does he get a name like that? STUDENT: From his dad. MUDRICK: I imagine when his dad looked at him from time to time he had his doubts. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Do you think that Martin Sheen looks Latin? MUDRICK: No, but he’s not excessively good-looking, either. This kid is just excessively cute. I think the guy that he was playing with is perfect for the role, I mean Harry Dean Stanton is just marvelous, the repo man is terrific. But the kid is a little—but he was very good. For instance when he was playing being scared to death [laughs]—somebody was firing shots at him from the house, and he decided he wanted to be somewhere else—that’s very funny. 38

Week Three I love to see a movie like that because it confirms me in my feeling . . . You know, some of you are so terrified that in a Reagan second term all dirty words are going to be expunged from the language and nobody’s going to be allowed to say anything. I mean the filth is all so widespread now [laughter]—I mean we’re floating in it, it’s about forty feet deep. And you can’t ever really get rid of that—that’s like a new non- or anti-ice age in which the polar caps have melted and the entire continent is flooded, there’s not a thing you can do about that. “Fuck off”—he chases the girl into a room, and she’s very irritated because he wants to fuck her there, so she’s accidentally more or less on her knees and he says, “Why don’t you give me a blow-job?” [Laughs.] You people don’t understand that all these horrors have been going on only for about fifteen years [laughing]. To somebody like me it represents the most basic change in public morality and public acceptance. You can’t reverse things like that, not in an age of communication in which all of that is everywhere now—at least I don’t think so. I mean, short of an atomic war (and you may get them desperate enough so that [inaudible because of laughter]). Yes? STUDENT: In talking about the difference of essentially art and something else which people call music by accident, there’s an instance of Johnson’s being questioned on the verses of a young lady. They were a translation, and he’s asked what he thinks of them. We talked of a lady’s verses on Ireland. MISS REYNOLDS. “Have you seen them, Sir?” JOHNSON. “No, madame. I have seen a translation from Horace, by one of her daughters. She shewed it me.” MISS REYNOLDS. “And how was it, Sir?” JOHNSON. “Why, very well for a young Miss’s verses;—that is to say, compared with excellence, nothing; but, very well, for the person who wrote them.” [p. 968; April 25, 1778] [Laughter.] Which I think is just marvelous— MUDRICK: Taking away with one hand . . . [Laughter.] No, I know. STUDENT: Because he’s so conscious of what art is, of what excellence is, and he won’t be manipulated into praising that which—he may be manipulated at the time with the person— MUDRICK: Yes, and in fact you may remember that he gets very resentful when people ask him for his opinion and he has to give an opinion. Yes? STUDENT: I was thinking about that with Mozart—like in Don Giovanni there’s that little minuet that starts to kind of go downhill when everything starts to get kind of crazy. I don’t know if I can say it right, but it seems like you don’t just think of just something that he’s got onstage just falling apart, it gets to be something like you realize that they’re not just there as a minuet or as a little bunch of musicians that are playing that, that they’re there to kind of like celebrate it or something. I don’t know, it’s such a weird word. MUDRICK: Yeah. Well, I think I know what you’re trying to get at. But the distinction that I would make instead of between excellence and nothing—and I think 39

Mudrick Transcribed I understand what Johnson’s getting at—but I prefer the difference between something and nothing. And it seems to me art is something, and those other things are nothing. And then you can start judging the somethings on the basis of one to ten if you want to, but the non-art is just nothing, or it’s what I call Gebrauchsmusik—it’s music for use. It’s like toilet paper. I mean toilet paper is not to write great poems on, even though maybe it accidentally gets done from time to time. Okay. I want to read further in this Life of Johnson by Hawkins, because he goes on to say something which sounds in a sense very modern (I don’t necessarily mean by that anything complimentary). You remember when he says: To the delights of music, he was equally insensible: neither voice nor instrument, nor the harmony of concordant sounds, had power over his affections, or even to engage his attention. Of music in general, he has been heard to say, “It excites in my mind no ideas, and hinders me from contemplating my own.”; and of a fine singer, or instrumental performer, that “he had the merit of a Canary bird.” Not that his hearing was so defective as to account for this insensibility, but he labored under the misfortune which he has noted in the life of Barretier, and is common to more persons than in this musical age are willing to confess it, of wanting that additional sense or faculty, which renders music grateful to the human ear.f So Hawkins has talked about Johnson’s near-sightedness which prevents him from enjoying the visual world, and now about his insensibility to music. And he goes on to say: From this state of his mental and bodily constitution, it must necessarily be inferred, that his comforts were very few, and that his mind had no counterpoise against those evils of sickness, sorrow, and want, which, at different periods of his life he laboured under, and in some of his writings pathetically laments. Of this misfortune himself was sensible, and the frequent reflection thereon wrought in him a persuasion, that the evils of human life preponderated against the enjoyments of it; and this opinion he would frequently enforce by an observation on the general use of narcotics in all parts of the world, as, in the east, and southern countries, opium; in the west, and northern, spiritous liquors and tobacco; and into this principle he resolved most of the temptations to ebriety. To the use of the former of these, himself had a strong propensity, which increased as he advanced in years; his first inducement to it was, relief against watchfulness, but when it became habitual, it was the means of positive pleasure, and as such was resorted Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (Macmillan, 1961), ed. Bertram H. Davis, p. 133.

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Week Three to by him whenever any depression of spirits made it necessary. His practice was, to take it in substance, that is to say, half a grain levigated with a spoon against the side of a cup half full of some liquid, which, as a vehicle, carried it down. That’s another way of talking about laudanum—laudanum is a mixture of opium and alcohol. Yes? STUDENT: What does it do? MUDRICK: What does opium do? STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: Gee. [Laughs.] STUDENT: No, I know it does something, but it— MUDRICK: Well, its primary effect, at least in relatively small quantities, is calming, but eventually of course it’s stupefying. Apparently also it induces, in some people, highs. STUDENT: Euphoria—everyone who says they use it [inaudible] says it’s very, very pleasurable. MUDRICK: Apparently not over a long period of time. According to Burroughs if you get really habituated to it the only thing it does is to put you to sleep, I mean it just has this narcotizing effect. So it must be early in the addiction. STUDENT: They said it’s sort of like sexual pleasure. MUDRICK: Yeah, Burroughs did say that, at least in the early stages of his addiction. That’s one of the things by the way that people were very shocked by in Hawkins’s biography and that Boswell soft-pedals. He does mention in the late illness . . . Now you gotta understand that this is the eighteenth century and of course they had no notion—there was really no awareness of any extreme effects of opium until the nineteenth century, until at least, oh, thirty years after Johnson’s death. And of course another very famous opium addict was Coleridge, and yet another famous one who wrote a book about it was De Quincy. But it was Crabbe—the poet George Crabbe was also apparently a sort of daily opium addict at a time when it didn’t carry the stigma or the odium that it carries now, when they just weren’t aware of it in the same way. But I didn’t want to emphasize that. I felt I should in all honesty read the whole paragraph. But he says, you see, that it’s a result of Johnson’s bad eyesight and insensibility to music that he felt that life was a pretty miserable proposition. Do you think that? STUDENT: You mean that stuff about the opium following? MUDRICK: Well, it comes at the end, it says that “the evils of human life preponderate against the enjoyment of it. And this opinion he would frequently enforce by an observation on the general use of narcotics . . . [and he] himself had a strong propensity” to use opium himself. Yes? STUDENT: Well, I think he does believe that, but I think that you can’t take that alone. In fact— MUDRICK: Does believe what? 41

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: That the evils of life or existence preponderate. MUDRICK: Oh, there’s no question that he believes that. He says it over and over again and Boswell reminds you of it. But what I’m asking you is whether what Hawkins says seems to you to have any plausibility—that is, that the fact that he had bad eyesight and so couldn’t enjoy visual objects and also didn’t respond to music . . . Yes? STUDENT: It implies that those are the only two pleasures that can happen in life, and without those two you’re going to be an opium addict. MUDRICK: Or at least that you’ll feel very gloomy about the nature of things—something like that. Does that seem to you true? STUDENT: No. MUDRICK: Well, it doesn’t seem to me true. [Laughs.] STUDENT: Well, Johnson in the book shows enough instances of his own pleasures in existence and . . . MUDRICK: Well, I think all of us have known enough happy people who don’t particularly respond to visual objects or to music. It’s just ridiculous, it’s one of those pseudo-psychological explanations which irritate me more than anything else. I’m interested to find it as early as the eighteenth century, because you tend to think of it as being—I mean it’s introduced like a universal rash by Freudianism, and all those attempts to . . . We can figure out what causes people to be the way they are by one deficiency or another or by the fact that something happened in their childhood. This whole business of determining how people are . . . Yes? You had your hand up. STUDENT: They had an interesting study on last night—they found that something like one out of five people suffer from some great depression and that it’s not something psychological which is inherited, and it’s some deficiency in some hormone that the brain produces. So they were saying that they’re just perhaps medically depressed, and now they think they might be able to treat it. MUDRICK: Well, that’s one of the notions about depression, and of course they started treating with things like opium and so on, and we just don’t know yet. But I myself am extremely suspicious of any explanation which makes depression, or for that matter any other frame of mind, strictly a physiological thing. STUDENT: How come? STUDENT: Are you inclined to side with Laing and his statement that schizophrenia is a sane reaction to an insane world? MUDRICK: Oh no, I hate that, that just seems to me a figment of the hippie imagination, it’s just very uninteresting. All those notions that life was a very simple proposition and that you just had to think proper thoughts or go to the right guru—that too, see, that seems to me even more nonsensical. I mean if I were stuck between that view and the view that the temperaments are pretty well determined by physiology, I would take the latter. STUDENT: Well, maybe I should temper it and say that depression is a sane reaction to a sane world. MUDRICK [after a pause]: No! [Laughter.] I think depression is something that particular individuals feel under certain circumstances, and that the reason they feel 42

Week Three it at a particular moment is sufficient unto the moment, that’s all, and I think that’s the way you should talk about it. I have never known a depressed person (I’m trying to think now whether I’m telling the truth before I say it) . . . The people who seem to me depressed, at the moment they were depressed seemed to me to have very good reasons [laughing], I mean! They came up with these good reasons . . . Now it’s true, of course, there are millions of reasons—you can invent reasons. That’s one of the problems of ascribing motive—you’re always ascribing motive after the fact. I just think there’s equally good reason for everything in the world. [Laughs.] Or certainly for almost any feeling. And all of us have gone through those intense variations of feeling in a few moments, in which one moment the sun is shining internally, everything is just fine; the next moment a cloud comes across. One of the strangest of all feelings is to feel all right but to know that there is a very good reason why you should feel bad [laughter] and that at any moment it will come into your head—and sure enough it does! And you were right all the time. You should have been feeling bad, and if this hadn’t slipped out of your mind momentarily, you would have been all this time. Yes? STUDENT: You were saying that you discounted heredity as a— MUDRICK: It’s not a question of discounting, I mean essentially we’re nothing but heredity—everything we are is heredity. All our soma plasm and germ plasm is heredity—where do we get it from? I’m just saying that all these explanations—all explanations of this kind seem to me efforts to discount personal responsibility, and also to discount the importance of the present. They essentially try to place all the reasons in the past. And even if I believed that that were true I would think it was a bad thing to believe, I would think that it was something that you should do your best not to believe. (Now of course if it’s true, whether you believe it or not doesn’t matter.) It’s like passing your life on the basis of the aphorism: In a hundred years we’ll all be dead. You can’t do that. The important thing about life is to live in the present. Everybody agrees about that, except maybe some fanatical born-again Christians or something, who carry sandwich-boards. [Laughter.] Apart from that it seems to me everybody believes that you have to learn to live in the present. And practically all explanations of human behavior throw its causes and motives into the past, and also put it out of the control of the individual. And that just seems to me disastrous. I also happen not to believe it—I think it’s not true, I think it’s not true. And of course equally I believe it’s ridiculous to say that life is a very simple matter and if you only were cheerful all the time everything would be fine. If you were cheerful all the time you would also be in the booby-hatch. [Laughs.] Because there is such a discrepancy between your feelings and what is actually going on out in the world that sooner or later they would catch you in a net, and that would be the end of you. Yes? STUDENT: What about somebody like Van Gogh, you know? If you give him two tablets of lithium every morning, he’s not going to have the sort of impulses that he had. Is it that we’re trying to determine what’s normal? 43

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: You say that, but we don’t know, because there are a lot of people . . . You mustn’t get the idea that lithium works with everybody or that it works with everybody they’ve tried it on. It hasn’t worked anything like that at all. I think it’s perfectly possible to say about a guy like Van Gogh, for instance, that having worked all his life as hard as he did and with as little recognition from the world, and with as much of a sense that in the world’s eyes he’s a failure, and that he has lived off his brother all his life, and that he has nowhere to go, really nowhere to go, and also that he has a very highly developed sensibility, which means he’s aware of what’s going on in the world, suicide seems like a pretty sensible proposition. I don’t really see that that has anything much to do with being made cheerful. I don’t get the impression that he was cheerful much of the time anyway, but I don’t think he was depressed. He gives me more the impression of being dogged—that is, there’s something he wants to do, and he does it. And by the way, I think cheerfulness is a lot less common than most people think. I think cheerfulness is very often a quality that we put on for public consumption—I know I do all the time. I don’t mean that I’m gloomy, it’s just that I’m not cheerful. But if you’re around other people you have a kind of obligation to entertain them—at least I think so, and so I try very hard to entertain people that I’m around. I think my characteristic mood when I’m alone is just a kind of general . . . thoughtfulness, I guess. I mean things keep going through my head, I’m neither depressed nor cheerful. I can’t describe it in the sense of an emotion, it’s just . . . existence. So to talk about cheerful people it seems to me is already to make a mistake. I don’t know any cheerful people except a few people who strike me as idiots. I mean they probably giggle to themselves all the time. Yes? STUDENT: There’s the meeting of Johnson and Edwards, who— MUDRICK: Yes, I was just going to bring it up. STUDENT: —who makes a statement about how he wanted to be a philosopher— MUDRICK: Yeah—but cheerfulness keeps creeping in. STUDENT: Indeed you see his kind of animated cheerfulness in Boswell’s recording of their discussion when they’re back at Johnson’s house. And he does seem a little, at least to me, superficial, at least in these things—but apparently not at all to Johnson. MUDRICK: Not at all to Johnson? STUDENT: He doesn’t seem at all superficial to Johnson. Or Johnson at least allows him as, being a separate individual— MUDRICK: Well, I don’t know what you’re—I think you may be trying to say that what I say about most people doesn’t necessarily apply to Edwards, and that may well be so. I think what Johnson particularly likes about Edwards is that it’s easy to talk to him, and Johnson is always looking for people who are easy to talk to. I mean you don’t have to— STUDENT: I couldn’t really figure out what Johnson found— MUDRICK: He says that—he says what I just said—he says that to Boswell. Boswell says: How can you keep talking to such a simpleton, I mean a man who is so obviously a simpleton? And Johnson says: Well, at the very least you don’t have to worry about the next topic of conversation. And as usual, Johnson is right. He’s 44

Week Three socially almost always right. And Johnson is one of those people who apparently in solitude do get depressed, that is, they do fall into a depression. And there may well be people of another kind who are always extremely cheerful when they’re alone, I don’t know. If there are I’ve never met them. I mean I’ve never known anybody who gives me the impression— STUDENT: You’d have to be hiding to know [laughing]. MUDRICK: No, I mean, even from what they say about themselves, because if you’ve known somebody long enough, they talk about themselves, they say how they feel, and so on. I don’t mean that a lot of people don’t feel fairly secure in themselves—I do, as a matter of fact, I don’t do much worrying when I’m alone. But I certainly don’t go around chuckling to myself [laughing], I mean! I think that dispositions as we think of them very often are social dispositions—that is, they are what we show in the presence of other people. And sometimes we show these things because we think it’s a good idea, or because we think we can make the social circumstances a trade-off. If you think for instance of what Johnson reveals in his prayers and meditations . . . [End of first side of tape.] One of the most interesting things about the Life is that practically everything that is said in criticism of the biography turns out not to be true when you read it carefully. And you are so impressed by some of the criticisms that even if you’ve read the Life three or four times and you come on one of these criticisms say five years after the last time you read the Life—Yeah, that makes a kind of sense. Maybe Boswell does present Johnson as too uniformly cheerful, too uniformly vigorous. And then you see that Boswell tells you over and over again about Johnson’s depressions, he quotes over and over again from the Prayers and Meditations, where Johnson expresses his depressions, he discusses his depressions over and over again, and so on. . . . I got sidetracked. Yes? STUDENT: Johnson really states it also for instance when they’re talking about struggling for happiness. Someone has brought up fine houses and fine gardens and public amusement, and Johnson says: Alas, Sir, these are only struggles for happiness. When I first entered Ranelagh, it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind, such as I never experienced any where else. But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards . . . MUDRICK: See? In a hundred years we’ll all be dead. STUDENT: so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle, that was not afraid to go home and think; but that the thoughts of each individual there, would be distressing when alone. [p. 875; September 23, 1777] 45

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Which is very interesting, in part because it doesn’t happen to be true. I mean it’s interesting that Johnson felt so strongly that that was the condition of man, that it didn’t occur to him that it was possible for other people to feel differently. I think he’s also talking about stages in life, and that this too is a matter of interest. And once again I can only bring up my own experience. I remember—the whole business of parties, I mean why you go to parties when you’re young and how you experience them and so on. And you go to parties with great hopefulness when you’re young—at least certainly I did, on the few occasions when I had the opportunity to. And it had a great deal to do with the sexual thing—that is, you were looking for somebody to talk to, and maybe also you were looking for an extension of your friends, and so on. And you very often suffered this kind of depression when you left it and went home. You felt, My God, is that all there is? And later, with somebody like Johnson, who apparently didn’t find a way of cutting himself off from society, for whom life was society in some important way—I mean everything else was guilt—I mean the dichotomy began very early. Sooner or later you have to understand that life has limited possibilities. There are only so many things you are going to be able to do, you’re only going to be able to live so long, and you’re only going to experience so many things, and these promising situations turn out really to be a lot less promising than you thought, and you’re very unlikely to run into a large number of people with whom you will be friendly or have love affairs and so on. For somebody like Johnson, for reasons which I don’t pretend to understand, he could never reconcile himself to that discrepancy. I don’t know why. I know that in my own life I did reconcile myself to that discrepancy. I think I understand certain reasons (that is, outside my own decision) why it was easier for me to do it than it was for Johnson to do it. I do think by the way that I had some choice, and I made a choice. I wouldn’t argue with you if you said: Johnson, however, given the circumstances of his life, didn’t really have the opportunity to make a choice. That is, the discrepancy was so great that he couldn’t accommodate one to the other. He had to try to extend what is essentially an experience of youth into extreme old age—that is, the excitement (is this fair? I don’t know) the excitement of parties. I mean what are parties for? Do people have to get together? Why do they get together? What is the purpose of getting together? STUDENT: What you said to begin with about young people, I think that’s true—at least it was true for me. But as far as Johnson, when you have to make that decision it usually comes down to a matter of your public life and your private life. I don’t think this is making sense. MUDRICK: Well, you gotta be a little careful about public because it begins to sound as if you’re talking about politicians and celebrities. You mean social life. STUDENT: Social life, yeah. Your social life and your private life, which also has a public side to it— MUDRICK: Or a social side to it. STUDENT: Right. So in other words you have something that you’d want to get done and that you can’t do while you’re carousing or whatever with these people. And 46

Week Three see, I don’t think Johnson really felt a draw between the two, I think it was a shut case—he’d rather be with the people than work at his—whatever it was that he was doing. MUDRICK: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” STUDENT: Right, exactly. And he wanted the money for comfort and also to spend time with friends. MUDRICK: So eventually you would make enough money so you wouldn’t have to write. STUDENT: Right. MUDRICK: And then you could spend all your time bothering your friends at their houses until all hours of the morning. STUDENT: Exactly. MUDRICK [calling on another student]: Yes? STUDENT: One thing that bothers me about this whole question is that if Johnson would write the Lives of the Poets for so little money and that he would contract to write them as merely small little inserts and then that they expanded it to something, apparently he must have had some interest in— MUDRICK: Oh, sure he did! and obviously the remark that he makes is just not true. A lot of what Johnson says is not true, and that’s another aspect of Boswell’s treatment of Johnson which is very interesting. Boswell is by no means an uncritical admirer of Johnson. He knows perfectly well when Johnson is arguing so he can win an argument, when he takes the wrong side of the argument—when he deliberately takes the wrong side of the argument. There are funny instances as a matter of fact, there are a number of categories—Boswell disagrees with many things that Johnson says. Certainly one thing on which he disagrees with Johnson, about which most of us agree with Boswell, is for instance the American Revolution. We feel that Boswell—at least I—no, I feel that way. I’d feel that way, I think, even if I were British. It seems to me that the British were exceptionally stupid in their treatment of the Colonies. If they had behaved with slightly more intelligence there wouldn’t have been the Revolution, and the Revolution when it came was proper—there was no alternative. And a lot of Englishmen felt that way, including Boswell and Burke, and Johnson didn’t. When Johnson thunders—but there’s a very interesting aspect of Johnson’s opposition to the Americans which is lovely and in which Boswell seems really vile—I mean the issue of slavery. You remember that Johnson was unalterably opposed to slavery and would say nothing good about it—he talked about the American “slave masters.” And what he held against the Americans, as much as anything else, was that they had slaves. And you remember that asinine few pages in which Boswell goes on, explaining why slaves are necessary, and it’s moral, and then you raise them all to your level, and so on. And Johnson is wonderful about things like that. Every once in a while you come across this statement by Johnson in which he hits the absolute core of a moral issue and is unswayable. Some of you may feel this way for instance about his (as far as I know) unprecedented attitude toward vivisection. You remember that’s in one of 47

Mudrick Transcribed the—one of the Idlers, I believe, is against vivisection, and he also talks against vivisection in another of the pieces that he wrote. Now I’m not going to get into that argument, but nevertheless I think what you feel is that here, Johnson isn’t being perverse at all. The idea of deliberately inflicting pain on any creature is to him so horrible as to be inconceivable by a civilized man. And that argument I understand. Whatever arguments can be brought to bear in favor of vivisection are—they’re something else. And certainly, better arguments can be brought to bear nowadays than would have been brought to bear in Johnson’s day. (By the way, the things that Johnson is describing actually happened, I mean like nailing dogs to a table—alive, and obviously without any anesthesia since they didn’t have any in those days—and tearing out their guts one at a time to see when finally they died, and so on: this was scientific investigation in the eighteenth century. Well, it was the beginning of it. It became a little more subtle later.) So you have to be extremely careful. In the first place, Boswell does have many differences of opinion with Johnson, and he expresses them explicitly, carefully, sometimes at great length. Secondly, in some of these differences of opinion, Boswell I think proves pretty conclusively that Johnson is arguing simply out of perversity, that he wants to win an argument—that if the person he is arguing with had taken the opposite position Johnson would have taken the right position. And finally there are strong moral positions that Johnson takes in opposition to Boswell’s in which Johnson is right. Johnson is one of those moral men in advance of his time. And there are certain things that Johnson will not allow any argument in favor of, and one is pain and suffering. And that too is revealed beautifully in that piece on Soame Jenyns’ philosophy, I mean the review of Soame Jenyns in which this attempt that Jenyns makes to justify human suffering and human evil on the ground that some superior being is gratified by it—Johnson writes his very best satirical piece on that—most convincing. Yes? STUDENT: And yet even though he’s against slavery he’s constantly coming out with his political arguments about maintaining the classes and how they’re— MUDRICK: Oh yeah, but social hierarchy and class distinction is very different from being in favor of slavery. And you remember in the piece on Soame Jenyns, when Jenyns talks about keeping the classes in their place, Johnson says that’s intolerable, and he uses even the practical argument that in a commercial nation it’s impractical, that if people can’t live with the idea of making a fortune by trade—and obviously in this instance he’s thinking of people like Mr. Thrale, whose brewery you may remember was eventually sold for £135,000. And if you understand that it was possible for people to live annually on about £25, you get an idea . . . [Laughs.] (You ought to do the multiplication, work it out for yourself.) Moreover, he got all that by himself. (Oh, he had some money from his father, but he—I mean Mr. Thrale.) You have to be extremely careful not to impute to Johnson as his fixed opinions arguments which he is using simply for the sake of beating somebody down. But there are certain things he is absolutely fixed on, and one is slavery—he’s

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Week Three agin it. And very few people at that time were, including most of the clergymen of the Anglican Church. Yes? STUDENT: On that subject Boswell says: The truth, however, is, that he loved to display his ingenuity in argument; and therefore would sometimes in conversation maintain opinions which he was sensible were wrong, but in supporting which, his reasoning and wit would be most conspicuous. [p. 734; April 7, 1776] MUDRICK: Sure. STUDENT: And even more than that, I think, he does that not just because it provides sport for him to show off, but he’s fundamentally more interested in the contact and the conversation by confrontation of consciousness, by talking with other people, and it’s more important to him than all the morals and all the—well, maybe not more because— MUDRICK: No, I think you are about to go over the cliff at that point. STUDENT: Yeah. Then not more but— MUDRICK: He just thinks of social situations as being less critical—I mean he’s not in church. He says a man writing a dedication is not upon oath. If you write a dedication to a member of the royal family and say very nice things about that member even though you know that he’s a jerk and a sneak and a profligate and so on, that doesn’t mean that you’ve signed away your moral decency—you’ve simply written a dedication, that’s all! And when you’re arguing at a party, in a sense you’re playing a game of charades. There’s something else involved with Johnson for me, and you may remember that I said, or tried to say something like this, when you brought it up with me in my office [speaking to a particular student]. And this is hard to say without getting sidetracked into all sorts of things, but I think it’s true of Johnson, and I think it’s an important aspect of both Johnson’s and Boswell’s characters. And that is, I think that anybody who is as intelligent as Johnson is, and also as intelligent as Boswell is, and has maintained as much of a conscious responsiveness to the world as both of them had, fundamentally believes that there’s nothing out there but the void. They can be believing Christians, and they can hope for salvation and immortal life and so on. But if you’ve thought that much and that hard, and continued to do your thinking, and haven’t lapsed into one set of platitudes or another, as most of us do after about the age of twenty, you are in the position that somebody like Johnson is in, which is that there are no anchors anywhere. There’s nothing to depend on, and in fact there’s nothing out there. So it’s fairly easy to shift positions. I think this is one of the reasons why Johnson can shift as readily as he does. Because it’s essentially all a waste of time, but that’s all we can do—all we can do is pass time. We’ve got to pass time in the most attractive . . . it’s a game, it’s a game.

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Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: It makes him particularly opposed to simple romantic notions, including for instance that when you die you’re going to be perfectly resolved and [inaudible] float away. To him it’s the most abhorrent and frightening thing, and he says as much, that it’s annihilation, and that anything is better than annihilation. MUDRICK: Yes—even, presumably, being sentenced to hell. Yes, and I think that that is the great fear. It’s certainly the great fear that Boswell has. And Boswell from time to time in his journals, especially in the later journals, has some of the most terrifying images I have ever read involving the fear of annihilation. So that everything in the world is reduced to a dead level, because in the face of imminent annihilation nothing matters. As I say, you can’t get into that, because once you get into that you’ve come to the end of the discussion. I just wanted to mention it. STUDENT: I wanted to ask you, since I was tottering on the brink of a cliff there— MUDRICK: Yeah. STUDENT: Johnson obviously thinks his morals are very important, and he has opinions that he maintains that he does believe are truthful— MUDRICK: That’s right, so that in another very important sense he has a very solid anchor, or he is determined that everybody else think that he has a very solid anchor. Go on. STUDENT: Not just for other people— MUDRICK: Oh yes, absolutely, yes. Because there’s no contradiction here, it’s just that people are complicated. STUDENT: So it’s not ultimately annihilation. That one part of the consciousness that knows that all these beliefs are imposed on consciousness and not— MUDRICK: Or imposed by consciousness. STUDENT: By consciousness—that that somehow doesn’t negate the fact that opinions are important, and morals are important, and— MUDRICK: Well, the best way that Johnson ever puts it is the way he puts it early to Boswell when Boswell asks him about noting very trivial details in his journal—he says “little things”—and Johnson says (and you’ve all heard me quote this before. I’m not sure that this isn’t the wisest statement ever made by anybody about human life): “Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man.” And that’s right, in a great variety of ways. And it’s not a particularly gloomy thought. In fact, for instance, I happen to find it a very comforting thought. I love the notion that even the most trivial objects of attention in human life are important, and I believe that it’s true. I believe that the flicker of an eyebrow is important, and almost anything you do is potentially as important as almost anything else. Of course I also believe the domestic—I believe very much with Johnson, and this is something I haven’t brought up, and I’m delighted that it occurred to me. Johnson believes that domestic and private are much more important than social and public. And this is not a contradiction of what we’ve been saying all this time, though apparently almost the only satisfactions that he has are social and maybe also public. Nevertheless he understands that human life is lived for the most part in the domestic and private, and that happiness 50

Week Three or unhappiness is determined to the largest extent by far by the domestic and the private. Yes? STUDENT: In his essay on nature, Johnson makes use of the idea that when you’re alone, one of the things that you can do to try and entertain yourself is to cultivate your powers of observation, and to live in the present, and to— MUDRICK: Yes, he says the right things, I mean he knows what one would have to do, though most of time he himself can’t do it. You know, I want to bring up a more general issue. We haven’t tried to say so far why—and if you don’t believe it, by all means say so, or if you’re bewildered and would like to ask questions about it—why is this the greatest biography ever written? I mean, we already know that Johnson says many things that we don’t agree with, we know that he was in some important things an extremely unhappy man, most of us certainly don’t share his overt religious convictions, we may even feel that he’s something of a bully in his behavior towards other people, we may feel that Boswell is pretty silly from time to time: what gives this the reputation—even if you don’t agree with that judgment? Yes? STUDENT: Well, you couldn’t get to know a character like you get to know Johnson in any other way than this. I mean you’d think that it’s almost fiction, you get such a live presence in front of you. MUDRICK: And how does he do that? STUDENT: By making him speak. MUDRICK: Well, that’s certainly the most important fact technically, and it reminds us of how important dialogue is. I’m delighted by that comparison with fiction, because of course the novelist has the wonderful freedom to invent dialogue for his fictitious characters, so he can give them as much dialogue as he wants and they can establish themselves. I mean, if Troilus says something, Criseyde says something, and certainly we hear those tones of voice. What practically destroys most biographies is that we don’t have adequate representations of how the people speak. Nobody defines himself more effectively than by what he says—there is no other way. And this can be the most silent person in the world. People define themselves by what they say. I don’t mean they say, I am this way. No! they define themselves as a matter of fact much more effectively by saying, Who put this dead rat in the refrigerator? [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: I think it’s good because .  .  . I’m not really experienced in biography, but I know that most of them have this sort of languid tone [laughing]: I recall Eddie . . . or something like that. And this— MUDRICK: You’re talking about a memoir rather than a biography. STUDENT: Yeah, well whatever. In any case, sometimes either they have an impersonal tone to them or they have a very affectionate, lukewarm—as though you’re looking through one of those fuzzy lenses. But this, Boswell just throws out shopping lists and things like that. MUDRICK: Well, it’s certainly comprehensive and inclusive, yeah. STUDENT: And so you get the full idea of the life. I mean I really do think that this is—like, Here, here’s some facts, here’s some things, and put them together for yourself. 51

Mudrick Transcribed Instead of like, Senator So-and-so did this and that this year. And you don’t have any sense of him except as he is as a cardboard front. MUDRICK: Yeah. Yes? [calling on another student] STUDENT: To me one of the most interesting things about it is the friendship—that Boswell is writing about someone whom he really likes. It’s like it’s someone he’s intimate with. MUDRICK: That’s very good, and very much to the point, I think. STUDENT: He’s more than just, you know, telling details—he’s remembering. MUDRICK: He’s remembering, and he loves those details, and he savors them. It’s like a lover describing . . . simply the way his beloved walks. There is that sense of intimacy which you almost never get— STUDENT: Because Boswell decided— MUDRICK: And when Boswell says, flatly, I mean in that wonderful moment that I mentioned last week, when he says in this conversation about Johnson before Johnson shows up at a gathering, “I worship him,” and you know, it’s true! And by the way, one of the most attractive features of the journals is that this was true. It’s amazing. The relation between Boswell and Johnson . . . I did say some things at the first meeting which I’m perfectly willing to contradict, at least in their favor, now. I said that I never really understood the fuss which is made about friendship, and I was perfectly willing to agree that this might be because of some emotional lack in myself, some emotional deficiency—I just haven’t got it. There was one person about whom I felt very strongly, I mean in the way of friendship. But certainly, the idea of feeling that way about many people—the way apparently Johnson did, or at least you’re told that, I mean Johnson says so—I find very hard to believe or understand, and I think I am very likely to ascribe to statements of such feeling all sorts of reasons which denigrate those feelings: that is, Johnson didn’t like to be alone, consequently he liked to accumulate as many friends as possible, consequently he overrated the feelings of friendship he had for these people. But I have to admit also that the impression that one gets from time to time in the Life is of something that you really have to call love; that these are people who are really delighted to be in each other’s company. I mean it’s particularly true of Boswell and Johnson. And some of the things that Johnson says are almost breathtaking in their explicit, confessional commitment—to Boswell, of all people. You gotta remember also how strange that would seem probably to other people at the time: Johnson is the great man of the time, he’s thirty-two years older than Boswell, and Boswell was a nobody, an absolute nobody, and a rather silly kid in a way—certainly he must have appeared that way often to Johnson. And when Johnson makes objective statements about Boswell, it’s a little bit like the way a guy who’s very much in love with a girl will make rather dry, critical statements about her, because for a moment he’s thinking about her as a human being, and not as his beloved, with whom he is stuck forever. You’re always a little shocked by that. So that for instance when Johnson writes to somebody from Scotland during their trip, Boswell has turned out to be brighter than I thought, 52

Week Three and you think, gee, he’s been concealing all the qualifications that he has about Boswell from Boswell and from other people—but it’s not so, it’s not so. It’s really like discovering that your beloved has qualities which you hadn’t imagined before—he might be brighter than you thought [laughs], and so on. So you’re not quite as badly stuck as you had thought [laughter]—something like that. So I have to admit that what goes on between Boswell and Johnson—and I’m delighted you brought that up, because I certainly think that this is the moral center, or it’s the spine of the book, that they love each other. And I’m afraid there is no other word for it, either. There really is no other— STUDENT: It’s amazing how often [inaudible]. MUDRICK: And even that is interesting, because it isn’t true of Johnson [laughs]—he very often has people who [inaudible]. Nevertheless it’s an indication of the intensity of his feeling. It’s clear that he took particular delight in seeing Boswell. And the statement that he makes about how good of a travelling companion Boswell was—that’s one kind of indication of— STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Yes, that’s true, and that’s part of the attractive inconsistency in Johnson. And moreover it’s not fair, I think . . . It’s not a question of deliberately arguing on the wrong side; what he is always arguing against is what he calls cant (c-an-t). And by the way, one of the most quoted remarks that he makes to Boswell, you may remember, stated one way is: Clear your mind of cant. But in the biography that’s not what he says. Boswell was extremely careful to italicize the appropriate word. Johnson says: “Clear your mind of cant.” Because, he says, we live in a world in which cant is absolutely necessary. [Inaudible.] “I am your humble servant,” and you are not his humble servant, and you wouldn’t under any circumstances be his humble servant. But explicitly you say that, because the forms of the world are all cant.

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Week Four 16 October 1984

MUDRICK: And Pope seems to me prost.g [Laughs.] He’s always seemed that way to me, but that’s all right—I mean, that’s my business, and I’m not teaching a course in Pope. What I’m talking about now is the way Johnson talks about him, but I want to concentrate on the Life of Pope because I think this other issue is raised. But I think the Bishop of Bristol is correct in saying that the Lives of the Poets generally have that kind of tendency, and I have never seen this referred to by anybody but Dr. Newton, and it’s just dismissed immediately and indignantly by Boswell—and by Johnson himself, who you remember says that Tom wouldn’t have dared to say that while he was still alive (that is, he left it in his autobiography which was printed after his death). And so it’s interesting to me also that Johnson himself didn’t know—because Johnson was a very honest and honorable man. Even the productions, the writings of Johnson that Boswell doesn’t like, doesn’t admire, criticizes—I mean some of the political pamphlets, for instance—whatever they are, don’t have this kind of meanness. I mean, political pamphlets on behalf of the government’s position—for instance against the Americans, something like Taxation No Tyranny: it’s a blustering, angry, furious, unjust attack on the Americans, but it’s perfectly compatible with Johnson’s personality, there’s no problem about that. The same thing is true of The False Alarm. But Lives of the Poets, many of them, much of what is in them, is incompatible with what we know about Johnson. And I have a suspicion that people read—I know I did, and here too I think there is something curious and interesting about the experience of literature which you have to bear in mind. I can’t remember whether this came up—yes, it came up in my office, as a matter of fact. Several students were there, and I was talking about how I was intimidated by great writers when I was young. I read them, and I simply took their opinions—I mean the opinions of them for granted. So that if I read Shakespeare or Milton I was essentially reading them under the lowering cloud of a whole, almost universe of opinions which I wouldn’t have dared question. And one of the students said (I think very intelligently): “Isn’t it right to read writers of great reputation that way, at least to begin with, at least when you’re young?” And I Yiddish, meaning boorish.

g 

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Week Four thought about that for a minute and I said: “Yeah, that’s right. That’s the way you should read them.” [Laughs.] But by my age various things have happened. I mean you realize that people make mistakes, that opinions are often wrong . . . I think also, readers and critics like consistency in writers. For one thing that makes them a lot easier to write about. So if Johnson seems to be a high-spirited, generous, maybe somewhat choleric, easily angered man—all those tie together perfectly well, there’s no problem putting all those qualities together. We all know people like that, though none of those qualities is incompatible with what I call generosity of spirit. But the quality that Johnson displays as it seems to me surprisingly and disconcertingly often in the Lives of the Poets is not compatible with generosity of spirit. So I’m going to try to call certain things to your attention (and I’m using the book that you have).h I want to start on page 376 with something that he says about Pope which is a breathtakingly extreme kind of praise of Pope: He then returned to Binfield [he’s still very young—I think he’s still in his early teens], and delighted himself with his own poetry. He tried all styles, and many subjects. He wrote a comedy, a tragedy, an epic poem, with panegyrics on all the princes of Europe; and, as he confesses, “thought himself the greatest genius that ever was.” Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings; he, indeed, who forms his opinion of himself in solitude, without knowing the powers of other men, is very liable to error; but it was the felicity of Pope to rate himself at his real value. Now I don’t see how you can get around that. Johnson is saying there that Pope was the greatest genius who ever lived. He’s certainly saying something very near that, and Johnson is a man, as you must know by now, is a man who’s very careful about the statements that he makes. If he wanted to make a reservation there he would make it, but he makes no reservation. He makes two superlative comments about Pope. He makes this one and he also makes the other one about the Iliad which he calls the greatest version (and of course that means translation) of poetry ever written. Yes? STUDENT: Doesn’t it say that’s why, though? because the Iliad is a translation of it? because it was his one great contribution and the rest of his work has its problems, but that’s the real reason, the fundamental reason? MUDRICK: Well, that just doesn’t seem to me an inference that can be drawn from this. For one thing he says this much earlier than any of the remarks that he makes about the Iliad. He doesn’t say anything about the Iliad at this point or about the translation. He doesn’t make that connection at the time when he does call the Iliad the greatest version of poetry ever written—that’s just another instance. I think if you had asked him what he regarded as Pope’s greatest The Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson (Signet, 1981), ed. Katharine Rogers. All italics are Mudrick’s emphases. h 

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Mudrick Transcribed work, he would—yes—have said, the translation of the Iliad. But it seems to me that you’re making a connection that Johnson doesn’t make. And whatever you want to say about Johnson, he knew what he wanted to say. You don’t have to dig out meanings in Johnson. Johnson’s a very, very straightforward writer, and he’s a person who speaks his mind directly, with great force and with absolute self-confidence, especially this late in his life. Even so, I don’t see that that contradicts it—what does that have to do with it? So the translation of the Iliad is his greatest work, it’s the work which allows us to call him the greatest poet who ever lived—that still is a pretty extreme statement to make about a man about whom you are also going to say some of the things that Johnson is going to say. All right, let me just start quoting some of the things—here’s something on page 377: At this time began his acquaintance with Wycherley, a man who seems to have had among his contemporaries his full share of reputation, to have been esteemed without virtue, and caressed without good-humor. Pope was proud of his notice, Wycherley wrote verses in his praise, which he was charged by Dennis with writing to himself, and they agreed for a while to flatter one another. It is pleasant to remark how soon Pope learned the cant of an author, and began to treat critics with contempt, though he had yet suffered nothing from them. So Pope as a young man cultivated the friendship of a man whom Johnson detests (and who by the way was a great playwright, William Wycherley—also a notorious roué, for which reason Johnson loathed him, and he was also of course a representative of the Restoration wits, whom Johnson regarded—quite rightly, by his standards—as unchristian infidels who lived vicious lives, and whose works probably ought to be expunged from English literature. One of the funniest plays ever written is Wycherley’s The Country Wife—really funny). But in any case look what Johnson is saying irrespective of his contempt and loathing of Wycherley. He is saying that this young poet allowed himself to be flattered by this disgusting old man—they flattered each other. And he doesn’t simply say that they flattered each other, he says they “agreed for a while to flatter one another,” which makes it as contemptible as possible—that is, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. So he seeks out this old man, and there is something intentionally nasty in that. It is pleasant to remark how soon Pope learned the cant of an author . . . That is, you attack critics even before you’ve been criticized, so Pope is this silly little guy who begins to attack critics. Already we’re developing a pleasant attitude toward him: this is a guy who knows what he’s doing, who learns from experience, and so on. 56

Week Four The next page I think is one of the funniest, and I wonder what you made of this. He’s explaining why Pope read a lot, and he says: During this period of his life he was indefatigably diligent, and insatiably curious [I think this is his late teens, by the way]; wanting health for violent, and money for expensive pleasures . . . —which is obviously the only reason why he didn’t practice them, because Pope especially was a nasty little guy who would have fucked like a mink and investigated all the gambling palaces of Monaco if he had health and money. What else does that mean, by the way? Would you explain to me what it means? STUDENT: The violent pleasures really struck me as being strange—what can you imagine being a violent pleasure? MUDRICK: Nautilus, I believe [laughing]. and having certainly excited in himself very strong desires of intellectual eminence . . . See? he wanted fame. It wasn’t simply because he liked to read books, it was because he EXCITED in himself—which is also a rather strangely nasty way of putting it. I mean, you’re talking about me—let’s say you want to criticize me for having read more books than you. You say, At a very early age he EXCITED in himself ideas of intellectual eminence. And because he was this homely jerk he couldn’t get any women to sleep with him, so he sat at home and read books. That happens to be true for me, but [laughter] I mean it wasn’t necessarily true of Pope, and it seems rather nasty to say this about him if you think that he’s such a great poet. Maybe he liked to read! Maybe he just liked to read—some people like to read! he spent much of his time over his books . . . Okay. Then, on the next page, he’s talking about the attack by Dennis on Pope. And of course this time he has an opportunity to attack two people at the same time: Dennis (who was a very nasty man) and so he attacks Dennis for attacking Pope, and then he attacks Pope for being attacked by Dennis, because he goes on to say: How the attack was clandestine is not easily perceived, nor how his person is depreciated [that is, these are complaints that Dennis has made]; but he seems to have known something of Pope’s character, in whom may be discovered an appetite to talk too frequently of his own virtues. That too, you see, is not a noble kind of deficiency. It happens to be true, by the way, of Pope. He’s a man who’s always explaining in his letters what a great guy 57

Mudrick Transcribed he is, and then he collects all the letters and publishes them—surreptitiously. [Laughs.] He sees to it that they’re accidentally sent to a disreputable publisher, who will bring out a pirated edition, which will allow Pope indignantly to say, THAT HIS LETTERS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED WITHOUT HIS AUTHORIZATION, AND HE WILL NOW BRING OUT AN AUTHORIZED EDITION—something like that. I mean that’s what he did, that’s a fact about Pope. This too is not a noble kind of defect, is it? It doesn’t make you think highly, or even to be intimidated by the man who has done it. All right, let’s see. Some of you might be interested to catch Johnson in a direct contradiction, or in a statement in which—he was saying something (it’s in the Life—sorry I didn’t look it up) but this is on page 382. He says: Aristotle is praised for naming fortitude first of the cardinal virtues, as that without which no other virtue can steadily be practiced; but he might, with equal propriety, have placed prudence and justice before it, since without prudence, fortitude is mad; without justice, it is mischievous. At one point in the Life he says that what he there calls courage is the primary virtue, because without it, all others are useless. So he’s really quoting Aristotle without acknowledging it, and he must have had afterthoughts by the time he wrote the Lives of the Poets. He decided to contradict Aristotle too [laughing], but he also contradicted himself, which amuses me. He doesn’t like the poem on The Unfortunate Lady, which he thinks unjustly ennobles what he calls “the amorous fury of a raving girl.” Okay. (Pope’s love poems do bother me. And Johnson on the other hand very much admires the Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard. It’s true I haven’t read these things for a long time, but they make me very uncomfortable. They don’t sound anything like love to me, I mean that Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard gives me the creeps. And The Unfortunate Lady also bothers me, not because she has the amorous fury of a raving girl but because it sounds like the eighteenth-century idea of passion, which I’ve never been able to understand anyway.) On page 386 he finds that Pope is susceptible to another kind of cant. And here too I think he’s right about Pope, though also what he says about him has to be considered in this context of what I’ve been saying. There is reason to believe that Addison gave no encouragement to this disingenuous hostility . . . (This has to do with Pope writing a piece in which he attacks Dennis for having attacked Addison. At this point Pope and Addison were still friends, and without consulting Addison he wrote this piece called The Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis.) There is reason to believe that Addison gave no encouragement to this disingenuous hostility . . . 58

Week Four So Pope’s hostility is disingenuous [laughs], I mean his hostility to Dennis for attacking Addison is disingenuous, which means phony—I mean disingenuous almost exactly means phony. That is, you pretend that it’s innocent and well-intentioned but in fact it isn’t, which means it’s phony. for, says Pope, in a letter to him, “indeed your opinion, that ’tis entirely to be neglected would be my own in my own case; but I felt more warmth here than I did when I first saw his book against myself (though indeed in two minutes it made me heartily merry). By the way, all you have to do is listen to that or read it and realize how phony that is. I mean, what you hear is this kind of falsetto voice which is screaming, and which obviously is not telling the truth about itself—and almost doesn’t believe what it is saying at the moment it’s saying it. That is, When I saw his attack on YOU, it really irritated me, certainly a lot MORE than his attack on ME irritated me, and after a few minutes I just went HA HA HA HA! Sure. Then Johnson comments: Addison was not a man on whom such cant of sensibility could make much impression. . . . So Pope now has two kinds of cant (and very few kinds of can, as a matter of fact [laughing]). He left the pamphlet to itself, having disowned it to Dennis . . . (Pope behaved very badly toward Swift, by the way. One thing you can say about Swift is that—and Johnson says it at some point in the Life of Pope, and it’s for me almost the most attractive remark—he says . . . I think I’ll come to it, so we’ll see.) He gets back at the Earl of Oxford, who was prime minister at the time that the Iliad was being subscribed for (Johnson does): His proposal . . . was very favorably received, and the patrons of literature were busy to recommend his undertaking, and promote his interest. Lord Oxford, indeed, lamented that such a genius should be wasted upon a work not original; but proposed no means by which he might live without it . . . I mean, he should have given him money or a pension—and indeed he might have, and it’s true as far as it goes. But what I’m really talking about is the tone of this piece. Look, I know that your attention spans are relatively limited when anything serious is being talked about, but you have an opportunity now to hear 59

Mudrick Transcribed something which you will not hear in any other class. Some of you complain all the time about not having literature discussed in detail. I am now giving you an opportunity to find out something about one of the major figures in English literature that you will not find out from anybody else in the world. And so you should take advantage of that, you should listen very closely, and see whether it seems to you true or false. And moreover it’s an issue of the highest importance. If you don’t believe that the morality of a writer, that the moral character of a writer is of any importance with respect to the quality of his writing, then you might as well give up the study of literature anyway. And here we’re involved with the moral nature of two of the major figures in English literature, one of whom happens to be writing about the other—and writing uncharacteristically. So it’s a real literary crux, it’s a very serious problem and issue that as far as I know nobody has ever touched. Yes? STUDENT: I found the style very nice [laughs]—I was very pleased when I started reading it. It’s entirely different obviously, Johnson’s style is different from Boswell’s, but in there too it just seemed— MUDRICK: It’s also entirely different from Johnson’s earlier style, and much more impressive, and that’s one of the reasons that it’s as effective as it is, and that it’s so hard to—you remember how Boswell praises it. It’s a marvelous relaxation. He really is speaking—he’s almost speaking rather than writing. It’s the closest that Johnson ever comes to conversation in any of his writing. And so you are so overwhelmed by that, I think, if you like and know Johnson, and are interested— STUDENT: Well, in the long run, I think what you’re saying, because in fact these little jabs every now and then, each one of these things I think has to be taken as a whole, you know what I’m saying? The attitude he presents toward Pope works that way in the long run, it makes you feel that he’s being a little bit nasty. MUDRICK: Well, I think I know what you mean—that’s okay [reassuringly]. I’m taking for granted that you find the style of the Lives easier to read than, say, the style of The Rambler. But the content of The Rambler is absolutely compatible with the content of Johnson’s conversation in the Life, though the conversation in the Life is much livelier, introduces a much greater variety of feelings. The style of The Rambler could be called prematurely arthritic—at least I would. And Johnson is very limber in his conversation, so that the conversation in the Life is marvelously freewheeling, moves in any direction momentarily. He’s like a person all of whose muscles are in such great tone that he doesn’t just run, he could play a game of tennis. I’ll bring up a personal anecdote again [apologetically], because it is interesting how there are limbernesses of various kinds. (One of the reasons that baseball players get injured as often as they do, because relatively speaking they run so seldom, they’re sitting on their ass on the bench or waiting out in center field for a fly to come their way every four innings—that sort of thing—so when they have to run or slide into a base, it’s a sudden unusual action.) Anyway, long after I had taken up running (and I felt very good—in great shape and so on) I 60

Week Four was up in Berkeley visiting a friend, and he suggested that we play tennis. And I used to be a very good tennis player, and never got injured or anything playing tennis, and it seems a very easy and obvious sport, so sure I would play. (I don’t think I’d played in about six or seven years.) So we went out onto the court, and I hit this ball and I hit that ball, everything felt fine, all the muscle memory was there, and so on. And then suddenly he made me, as a result of a shot that he hit, move suddenly in a direction in which I didn’t expect to move. I was lying in bed for about four days with a pulled muscle in my leg, which of course hadn’t been forced to move that way for maybe six or seven years. [Laughs.] Because running is just straight ahead, and those very sudden movements in one direction or another, which are characteristic of a game like tennis or say softball, involve muscle contractions which you haven’t prepared yourself for. And in Johnson’s conversation he’s playing this marvelous game of tennis, in which he can move in any direction. He can go all the way back, to the back of the court to pick up a lob, run all the way up to the net, run left, run right, and so on—whereas in The Rambler he moves steeeeadily left [laughter], and then he goes right, and then he goes left, and so on. And anybody who denies that simply can’t read. I mean if you hear from your idiot instructors that [in a deep and mocking voice] Johnson’s writing is really much greater than his conversation, and Boswell’s reputation is vastly—all absolute bullshit. And it’s particular bullshit because these people don’t even understand that Johnson’s style is very different at different points, I mean the style of the Lives of the Poets is very different from the style of The Rambler. And in fact the style of the Notes to Shakespeare is also wonderfully lucid—the Notes, not the Preface. I don’t really like Johnson’s formal pieces. I don’t really like the Preface to the Dictionary or the Preface to Shakespeare, or even most of The Ramblers, though they’re all marvelously smart. I just don’t think writing should be written that way, I just don’t think that’s real writing. That is, it’s come so far from its connection with speech that it doesn’t resemble anything (for me) flexibly human. I think if you think about robots and animatronic figures at Disneyland and so on, you understand why it is that I, at least, like a style which suggests the almost infinite mobility of the human body. And if it starts being immobile it’s just not terribly interesting. It’s one of the worst things about old age. I mean I drive down Garden Street this morning, and there’s an old woman with a straw hat and a red dress, and she’s about that tall. [Laughter.] (I got nothing against her and she should live to 123.) And I think, “It’ll take her the rest of her life to finish that block!” And that’s just a kind of parody of human life. (I don’t know her, and so on.) And surely there is a difference between that kind of movement and what I’m calling human movement. That is, you could make a robot which could do better than that—right now. It has nothing to do with pity! Some of you people don’t like the jokes that I make about paraplegics and so on—ha ha ha. I feel as sorry for them as anybody else does. But I do think there’s a difference between health and energy and spirit and vigor, and lack of health and lack of energy and lack of spirit and lack of 61

Mudrick Transcribed vigor, and on the whole, the former are to be preferred to the latter. If you have a choice, you really should pick the former. Yes? STUDENT: How come they were so interested in having— MUDRICK: How come they were so interested in what? STUDENT: Okay, what I mean to say is— MUDRICK: I didn’t hear what you said! STUDENT: I already forgot it. I wanted to ask— MUDRICK: Talk about attention spans! [Laughter.] STUDENT: I wanted to rephrase it and say, why was that style such a preferred style? Was it because of the Greeks—they were trying to imitate some dated style? MUDRICK: That, I think, is almost the most interesting question to ask about the eighteenth century, and I have never seen it satisfactorily answered. Why the eighteenth century fell into that rut I do not know. (I’m sure I could come up with some speculation if somebody brought up some issue.) I’ve never seen a satisfactory discussion of it. It’s clear that to some extent it’s moving away from the real wilderness of fancy that goes on in seventeenth-century writing. It also has a lot to do, I think, with the ascendancy of prose. There are a lot of people who would argue that English prose doesn’t even get written until Dryden (that’s at least one of the standard views of the literary history texts) and all prose before Dryden doesn’t really have the respect for continuity and linearity that real prose has, so the eighteenth century is trying to develop a completely rational prose which the seventeenth century didn’t have. There is also, I think, the fact that, especially in England, it’s moving out of the feudal period. England has had its revolution, and there is the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, the middle class, and prose becomes the language of choice. But why it should have begun to sound so arthritic almost immediately, I don’t really know. It’s clear that people didn’t talk that way, I mean all you have to do is to read the Life of Johnson—and one of the glories of Boswell is that he didn’t write that way either. Boswell writes right out of his ear. Most eighteenth century prose is not written out of the ear (I don’t want to describe which organ it is written out of, some of the time), but in any case it’s almost unconnected with conversation. And Johnson suffers from that too. He’s a very great man. One of the ways in which I tried to distinguish Johnson once from Boswell was to say that Johnson was a great man who happened to be a writer, and Boswell was an ordinary man who was a great writer—something like that. That’s not quite true, but at least it’s an attempt to untangle some of the problems of eighteenth-century prose. And I think by the way there are equivalent problems in eighteenth-century poetry. I do think, in spite of everything, that Pope is an overrated poet, and that he’s overrated partly because he is so alone in that century, because there is nothing else there, and because he probably does as well with the limitations that the eighteenth century imposes on him as he could have done. I’m not sure by the way that I wouldn’t think more highly of Pope if Chaucer had never written. Because if you had only Pope and you didn’t have Chaucer, if all that preceded Pope was, say, writers like Spenser and 62

Week Four Shakespeare and Donne, you would say, well, my God, at least Pope is talking English! and isn’t it nice. But Chaucer talked English a long time before Pope, and he talked a much broader range of English than Pope could have dreamed of. And he talked about everything. He talked about as many things as Shakespeare talked about—certainly a hell of a lot more than Milton talked about. Yes? STUDENT: Johnson pays a lot of attention to the rivalries between Pope and his critics. MUDRICK: Especially if he can make a dig about it. And it was a very contentious period. STUDENT: That’s what I was going to ask you. MUDRICK: It was an extremely contentious period, yes. Yes? STUDENT: Dryden says something really nice about Chaucer being so comprehensive. MUDRICK: Yes—“Here is God’s plenty” is the famous statement, and he’s quite right. Okay. Johnson says something in one of those offhand remarks that I love to have him make—like the remarks he makes about the stupidity of lectures—and here he’s talking about the edition of the Iliad which was published in Holland: The notes, which in the Dutch copies were placed at the end of each book, as they had been in the large volumes, were now subjoined to the text in the same page, and are therefore more easily consulted. God bless Johnson. I loathe books in which the footnotes are at the back of the book, they all ought to be burned by the public hangman. And of course the only reason they do it is that the publishers can do it more cheaply that way. It makes it impossible to read the book. Have you ever tried to read a book with one finger here and one finger there? and one up your nose? STUDENT: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is like that. MUDRICK: I know, I hate it. It’s too bad. No, footnotes should always be published on the same page as the text. Yes? STUDENT: A writer who’s always puzzled me because he seems to have a lot of petty faults, and also (unlike Pope) is not even very intelligent, is Gogol. MUDRICK: A very good instance, yes. STUDENT: I still don’t know what to make of it. MUDRICK: Yes, but I think that that’s an interesting . . . Gogol is a freak—a little bit like Swift. (It’s very convenient—I got my galleys for my long Swift piece yesterday, and I have it here, and I may read a few . . .) Swift is a freak, Gogol is a freak—Pope is not a freak. That is, Pope’s subject is really all of human experience, whereas Gogol writes freakishly about all sorts of freakish human experiences, and Swift is a very peculiar man. And if what you write about is very peculiar, you can be very peculiar. But Pope is not writing about peculiar things, he is writing about what might be called the Homeric range of human experience, a lot of the time—at least he wants to, he wants to write about the whole range of human experience. And so he writes poems called Essay on Criticism, An Essay on Man, Of the Characters of Women. He doesn’t write about the household at Dikanka, or Taras Bulba, or the nose that walks around town 63

Mudrick Transcribed seeking to attach itself to somebody. If you’re a freak, it doesn’t really matter what kind of character you are. Do you see the distinction I’m trying to make? This is really a very important one. I don’t have any trouble at all with Gogol’s nuttiness. I think you probably have to be that nutty to write something like “The Nose.” And you certainly have to be as nutty as Swift was to write those poems about women shitting that he wrote. Pope didn’t write poems like that—at least he didn’t publish them. Swift wrote them and published them. And it’s interesting actually because it suggests that human nature is almost infinite, that almost anything can happen to people. But when a guy is representing me, not just himself, and when Pope writes a poem called Essay on Man he’s representing me, or he professes to represent me, and I don’t want to be represented by a little squit like that! I don’t like it! I don’t care how great a technician he is. I certainly don’t want that kind of meanness of spirit to represent me. People accuse themselves of all sorts of things, but one thing we all have is a sense of humor [ironically], and the other thing we all have is generosity. So, you know, I don’t want to be represented by people who lack a sense of humor and lack generosity . . . I made a joke, a little joke, a little teeny joke. [Laughter.] Sorry. You’re still with me—somewhere. All right. I don’t care, I really think I’m doing something important. (A lot of times I feel very guilty when I’m doing this sort of thing, but not now.) He takes another crack at the Earl of Oxford later, on page 392: By the success of his subscription Pope was relieved from those pecuniary distresses with which, notwithstanding his popularity, he had hitherto struggled. Lord Oxford had often lamented his disqualification for public employment [Pope was at least nominally a Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholics couldn’t hold positions of public trust], but never proposed a pension. So he gets the poor Earl of Oxford twice. Okay. Then, you remember Halifax the critic (this is one of those instances in which Johnson swats everybody) you remember Halifax who, when Pope was reading to him the first books of the Iliad translation— In four or five places Lord Halifax stopped me very civilly, and with a speech each time, much of the same kind, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope; but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me. Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little at your leisure. I am sure you can give it a little turn” I returned from Lord Halifax’s with Dr. Garth, in his chariot; and, as we were going along, was saying to the Doctor that my Lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty by such loose and general observations. . . . Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough 64

Week Four acquainted with Lord Halifax to know his way yet; that I need not puzzle myself about looking those places over and over, when I got home. “All you need do (says he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Halifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages, and then read them as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event.” I followed his advice; waited on Lord Halifax some time after; said, I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed; read them to him exactly as they were at first; and his Lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, “Ay, now they are perfectly right: nothing can be better.” Okay, so Lord Halifax is an ass, and Pope has shown him up. But Johnson isn’t satisfied with that: It is seldom that the great or the wise expect that they are despised or cheated. Halifax, thinking this a lucky opportunity of securing immortality, made some advances of favor and some overtures of advantage to Pope, which he seems to have received with sullen coldness. I love that word sullen [laughing]. I mean the guy isn’t even allowed to turn down Lord Halifax’s offer of help without in Johnson’s notion being sullen. Presumably Johnson wasn’t sullen when he turned down Lord Chesterfield’s offer of help. He was indignant, noble, generous, and proud—but Pope was sullen. [Laughter.] He was there—he saw him. Pope went like that [makes a face], and that was that. So—a little further down the page— These voluntary offers, and this faint acceptance, ended without effect. The patron was not accustomed to such frigid gratitude, and the poet fed his own pride with the dignity of independence. Pope turned down this offer of help and he’s not even given any credit for it—he FED his own pride. They probably were suspicious of each other. —says Johnson. [Laughs.] That is, they’re both no fuckin’ good—the one who offered and the one who refused. Pope would not dedicate till he saw at what rate his praise was valued; he would be “troublesome out of gratitude, not expectation.” Halifax thought himself entitled to confidence; and would give nothing, unless he knew what he should receive. Their commerce had its beginning 65

Mudrick Transcribed in hope of praise on one side, and of money on the other, and ended because Pope was less eager of money than Halifax of praise. I don’t really know how you can be any meaner than that, in a transaction about which you have no personal knowledge. You really don’t know. It is perfectly possible under these circumstances that Pope thought: Who is this idiot to offer me money? I don’t want to take money from him. And Pope might even have thought: Okay, now I got enough money to live on, I don’t need any money from him. He might have been not sullen, he might have been noble, he might have been defiant. By the way, I have a wonderful story which is not dissimilar to that. This is a personal story which some of you have heard. It was one of my first experiences of critics—not quite the same, but okay. (This was over thirty years ago by the way—geez, 1953.) I wrote a long piece on the Japanese novel The Tale of Genji, and I was then in the first year of my connection with Hudson Review. And so I sent this piece off to Hudson for consideration. (It was unusually long, and they very seldom publish such long pieces.) So, I mailed it. And I got a letter back after a while, saying they liked it very much, but it really was too long, it would have to be cut by at least a quarter—I think he said a third. So I said I would do what I could. I had typed it on a typewriter (this is the truth, I swear), I had typed it on a typewriter with pica type [laughter]—big type, you know?—big margins, top and bottom: pure accident. And I looked at it and I looked at it, and I was really sincere to begin with, not sullen [laughter], and I probably was even generous and noble. I tried to figure out ways of cutting it but I couldn’t. (I’ve always had great difficulty with cutting, I love every word I write. [Laughter.]) And so finally I thought of this trick. I got a typewriter with elite type, and I retyped it, the entire thing, word for word, with very narrow margins, in elite type, and instead of taking thirty-five pages it took twenty-five pages. And I sent it off, and they were very grateful to see it, loved it, it was now just fine, and they published it. And that’s the reason by the way—as a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve ever told this to anybody. Some of you have seen some of my manuscripts—I usually cover practically the whole page, it is typed in elite type, and it goes all the way out to the right margin: it started at that time, and it started for the reason that I didn’t want Hudson to know how long my pieces were until they went into galleys. [Laughs.] STUDENT: And it worked. MUDRICK: And it worked, yes, it worked. STUDENT: You probably don’t need a formula when you send a manuscript in— MUDRICK: Well, now they—I finally stuck them with me, so they don’t dare question me. (They had great trouble as a matter of fact with the Swift just now because it was about twice as long as they expected and it just came in under the deadline, so they had to redo the whole magazine.) STUDENT: What would Johnson have said if Pope had accepted? 66

Week Four MUDRICK: Very simple: Pope was more eager of money than Halifax was of fame. [Laughter.] Very simple—you just adjust a few adverbs [laughing]. I’m afraid that that’s— STUDENT: He sullenly accepted. MUDRICK: Pope sullenly accepted, yes. Okay. Johnson is now explaining the hostility that developed between Pope and Addison: It may be supposed that as Pope saw himself favored by the world, and more frequently compared his own powers with those of others, his confidence increased, and his submission lessened; and that Addison felt no delight from the advances of a young wit, who might soon contend with him for the highest place. Every great man, of whatever kind be his greatness, has among his friends those who officiously, or insidiously, quicken his attention to offences, heighten his disgust, and stimulate his resentment. He has none of course among them who officiously or insidiously quicken his attention to praise, heighten his good feeling, and stimulate his generosity—there are no such people around great men. Johnson had many of them, as a matter of fact—including Boswell (I mean the kind that I just mentioned, but that Johnson doesn’t). [End of first side of tape.] He can’t even make himself—you know, Pope made a grotto. He unfortunately got this property which was separated by a main road, so that in order to get to the other side of the property he had to cross the road. (It’s like crossing a bicycle path on campus [laughing]—you could disappear.) So what he did was to make himself a little tunnel under the road, and he was very proud of it, and he showed all his friends. Seems fairly harmless, doesn’t it? Would you think there was anything wrong with making a grotto of that kind? Sounds rather nice to me. Here he planted the vines and the quincunx which his verses mention, and being under the necessity of making a subterraneous passage to a garden on the other side of the road he adorned it with fossil bodies, and dignified it with the title of a grotto: a place of silence and retreat, from which he endeavored to persuade his friends and himself that cares and passions could be excluded. Didn’t believe it for one minute, but he went around and said, You know, when I’m in my grotto I feel terrific, and if you’d come down with me to my grotto you’d feel terrific. And Johnson says Bullshit. A grotto is not a place where anybody feels terrific. He’s tried grottos. [Laughter.] You’ve seen one you’ve seen them all [laughing]. You hear the fucking stagecoaches rattling over [laughter]—it’s like being in a tunnel under the airport! 67

Mudrick Transcribed He’s talking about Pope’s having undertaken the edition of Shakespeare: On this undertaking, to which Pope was induced by a reward of two hundred and seventeen pounds, twelve shillings . . . You understand that Pope was now by common consent the greatest poet in the world. He was also a wealthy man. He had made a great deal of money—he was the first English poet to make a great deal of money from his poetry, the subscription for the Iliad was an enormous success, Pope had all the money he could ever use for the rest of his life: why would Johnson say something like this? Now, you can go back and say that Johnson was the man who said “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” but that really is something different. For one thing he knows perfectly well that Pope wrote all the time for fame rather than for money—that was what Pope was interested in even more than money. Yes—you had your hand up. STUDENT: Yeah, do you think Johnson’s having a really good time writing this stuff? I mean I realize he’s serious, but— MUDRICK: Are you saying do I think that he’s being amused while he’s writing this, or wants to amuse us? STUDENT: No, not so much an amusement, but it’s so different from his other stuff, and there isn’t any generosity— MUDRICK: Well, you say that he must have known, and I say that on the basis of the remark that’s quoted he was universally praised for the Lives of the Poets. Many people thought it was his masterpiece. Boswell did, and said so, and many people did. And moreover if you had—I’m ashamed that I have to say, if you had asked me ten years ago what Johnson’s masterpiece was, I would have said without any hesitation at all, Lives of the Poets, and that the only place in which Johnson appears to better advantage is in Boswell’s Life, because there he speaks about a much greater variety of subjects. And if you had confronted me with these quotations I would have said, well, this is himself a great man, acknowledged to be the greatest poet of his own time, certainly the greatest literary figure of the century: he has a kind of carte blanche to speak with freedom about the great men of the time, so he can speak a little more sharply about them. And it was only about five or six years ago that I started becoming nervous. I began to see that something was going on that I hadn’t really been willing to acknowledge. And that’s all I—well, let me go on. But the principle way of answering your question is to say, I don’t know of anybody who has ever made this criticism except Dr. Newton, the Bishop of Bristol, and me. I don’t know of anybody else who has ever made this criticism. Yes? STUDENT: It seems to be a mood he got into. Isn’t he in the same mood when he’s actually talking about the verse? It seems that he’ll start off with praise for something that he’s going to quote, and by the time he gets done he’s like a machine—he’s found everything that could possibly be wrong with it. 68

Week Four MUDRICK: He certainly does that in the Pope thing—you think he’s quoting a poet whom he regards as the greatest poet who ever lived, and then all of a sudden this word is wrong and that word is wrong, and this doesn’t work and that doesn’t work—well, if it doesn’t work, how the hell is it the greatest poetry ever? STUDENT: I think he almost does it to his own surprise. He expects to praise it and ends up— MUDRICK: I think that may well be true. I think there’s another thing about the Lives, and it’s associated with what you were trying to say. He wrote them at a very advanced age, and he had long ago given up the constant practice of writing. He was an incredibly prolific writer, by the way, and he did write almost exclusively to support himself, and he was associated with magazines and turned these things out by the bucketful, he turned out incredible quantities of writing. And he had really stopped writing by the time the project for the Lives of the Poets had come along. He hadn’t been doing anything but talking for years (essentially he hadn’t been, anyway—he wrote a few political pamphlets). So then, he started writing the Lives. By this time, I think the good thing that had happened was that he had been talking so long, and not writing for so long, that the writing took a great deal from his conversation—that is, he started writing in a way which borrowed from his conversational style. And that was one thing. Another thing was, he had got out of the habit of writing, and he really grudges it, that these people have the nerve (that is, these dead poets) have the nerve to make him write this stuff. So he’s taking it out on them, he really is taking it out on them. Talk about sullen! Johnson is sullen in these Lives. He is saying, Who the hell are you to take me out of my retirement and force me to write about you, and force me to pretend that I’m interested in writing? Now I don’t think that’s conscious, obviously, I don’t think it’s conscious at all. The grudging, mean quality is so persistent in a lot of the writing. As I say, curiously enough it’s mainly those writers whom he does not like and never has liked as writers to whom he is fairest. He’s fair to Swift, he’s fair to Milton, and he’s fair to a lot of the nobodies—but he isn’t fair to Pope. He’s fair to Gray, even though it’s very critical. Gray of course was very highly regarded in the eighteenth century. Boswell thought Gray a great poet, and I don’t think there’s any question that Johnson’s attitude toward Gray is absolutely correct: Gray is a big phony. As a matter of fact he’s the great evidence of what goes wrong in eighteenth-century verse. He writes either stodgy eighteenth-century verse or ridiculous preromantic verse, and it’s all dead as a doornail. And Johnson knew it, and so he could write fairly about him. I think what happened was, when he was writing about people that he disliked, he could discharge enough of his irritation by criticizing them adequately and correctly, so that he could be fair for the rest of it. But with somebody like Pope he has the problem of writing about somebody whom he vastly admires, but he doesn’t know why this guy is forcing him to write a life of him, and he’s going to get back at him. 69

Mudrick Transcribed So Pope does the edition of Shakespeare, and he’s attacked by Theobald: From this time Pope became an enemy to editors, collators, commentators, and verbal critics, and hoped to persuade the world that he miscarried in this undertaking only by having a mind too great for such minute employment. If you read that, if you listen to it carefully, you think that Johnson is doing something which all of you quite justly would have the right to criticize severely. There’s something nowadays called psychohistory or psychobiography, in which the psycho author [laughter] presumes to explain exactly what was going on in the writer’s mind while he was doing whatever awful things he was doing. Okay? Johnson is writing here as a psychobiographer and a psychohistorian. He doesn’t know what’s going on in Pope’s mind. And if he always draws the nastiest possible conclusion, you would assume that sometimes he’s wrong. I must tell you a little anecdote (I know I’ve told this to some of you). You know, Johnson himself says that it’s impossible to be a bad man all of your life. In fact most of the worst people in history have probably behaved more often well than badly, because just in order to get through the day you have to do more right things than wrong things. And you can even behave not only appropriately but decently. There’s a wonderful anecdote about Hitler that I love to quote, and I wish I—I’m going to have to look it up. A book that I used to read, for reasons I don’t really quite understand, over and over again when I was in a real slew of despond in the early ‘sixties, so that I practically memorized it for a while, was William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Partly it was because I was so happy that it came out all right. [Laughter.] It would have been very bad if it had come out wrong, but it came out right. And it’s actually a very interesting book. It’s written in a kind of loose, journalistic style—he says things like “the fat field marshal” when he’s talking about Goering, so every fifteen pages you have to be reminded that Goering was overweight. But still he’s got a lot of fact in it, and it’s an honest book. And there’s a wonderful anecdote there that I’ve never seen anywhere else. I’m almost sure that it happened directly after the Munich agreement that Hitler had managed to squeeze out of Chamberlain. Hitler was all excited, and he rushed into the room where the stenopool was—all these young women typing away at the Foreign Ministry or somewhere—and Hitler was very excited, and he shouted (in German of course, which I won’t give you [laughs]): Children! Children! I shall go down in history as the greatest German! That’s a very touching anecdote! You can imagine the childlike excitement, and the feeling of having done something wonderful for his country, and on and on and on. Johnson behaves, when he’s writing these biographies, as if anybody who ever did one mean thing does nothing but mean things all the time, and thinks nothing but mean thoughts. And that’s just not true, it’s simply not true. Yes? STUDENT: He’d probably say, if Hitler were doing that too, he would have to have it be ominous and [inaudible]. 70

Week Four MUDRICK: Yeah—Hitler sullenly shouted, giving the Nazi salute: Children! It’s not true, it’s not true. STUDENT: He was just excited about all the evil things he was going to do. MUDRICK: Yeah, that’s right. Let’s see. He makes fun of Pope—quite correctly in this respect, but this too makes you think about Pope and the guy who was writing the greatest poems of the century: Before these Miscellanies is a preface signed by Swift and Pope, but apparently written by Pope, in which he makes a ridiculous and romantic complaint [romantic meaning, as the editor says, “extravagant” here] of the robberies committed upon authors by the clandestine seizure and sale of their papers. He tells, in tragic strains, how “the cabinets of the sick and the closets of the dead have been broke open and ransacked”; as if those violences were often committed for papers of uncertain and accidental value, which are rarely provoked by real treasures, as if epigrams and essays were in danger where gold and diamonds are safe. And indeed, Pope is being an ass! to imagine that anybody wants to steal manuscripts. I mean you know for instance that the man—you remember that famous story about the valise of Hemingway’s manuscripts being stolen when it was in his wife’s care, or I guess she left them on a train—assume that it was stolen, it doesn’t matter—manuscripts have been stolen. You can imagine if they were stolen, the person opened the suitcase—“Writing!” [Laughs.] You remember he goes on about The Dunciad. And he does think it’s a great poem, but the subject itself had nothing generally interesting; for whom did it concern to know that one or another scribbler was a dunce? If therefore it had been possible for those who were attacked to conceal their pain and their resentment, The Dunciad might have made its way very slowly in the world. This, however, was not to be expected: every man is of importance to himself, and therefore, in his own opinion, to others, and, supposing the world already acquainted with all his pleasures and his pains, is perhaps the first to publish injuries or misfortunes which had never been known unless related by himself, and at which those that hear them will only laugh; for no man sympathizes with the sorrows of vanity. Well, this of course as some of you know goes right along with something that I remind you of from time to time (I have the same feeling about it): the main thing to remember in this world is that nobody else gives a shit about you [laughing]. This is occasionally a comfort. Somebody was coming in to complain to me about having had a very bad class (that is, teaching). I said the main thing 71

Mudrick Transcribed to realize is that nobody in the class even noticed. [Laughter.] They don’t care! I mean it’s just an hour and fifteen minutes that they have to spend somewhere, and when they get out it’s completely out of their heads! The idea that it’s been a bad class would never even occur to them. I mean maybe if you vomited they would notice. [Laughter.] But apart from that they wouldn’t notice a thing. And so it can give you comfort from time to time to know that nobody gives a shit. A lot of the time it doesn’t, also. But really, nobody gives a shit. Remember. I told you [laughter] and Johnson confirms it. And especially nobody wants to hear about your troubles—I mean you have to pay somebody. That’s the main thing to remember. Yes? STUDENT: I have a question about—you said that Johnson was taken out of retirement to write these Lives of the Poets— MUDRICK: Yeah, essentially. STUDENT: Why is he writing them if he doesn’t want to write them? MUDRICK: Because he’s a writer. Why do we do things we don’t want to do? STUDENT: He feels obligated? he’s compelled? MUDRICK: Because we are driven much of the time by impulses against our will, by needs that we don’t understand . . . No no, this is just to begin to talk about the perversities in human nature, and about the need to assert ourselves. Now, we can be psychobiographers about Johnson: Johnson was a man who prided himself on his ability to write and on his literary importance in the age. These booksellers came to him and said, “Dr. Johnson, you are the greatest literary figure of the age, you are the greatest critic, the greatest poet. Is it not fitting that you should write the prefaces to these selections of poetry from the poets in English literature?” “Well, I don’t know, fellas . . .” You can make your own scenario, it doesn’t really matter. People are like that. You can flatter me into doing all sorts of things. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: When he does this, is there any way you could have pieced this together from reading Pope? I don’t understand how he comes up with these things. MUDRICK: What do you mean? I think all his opinions are perfectly honest, I think he does believe that Pope is the greatest poet who ever lived— STUDENT: No no no—like when he says for example the meeting with Lord Halifax, that Pope was— MUDRICK: Well, he had a lot of materials to work with, and there were already biographies of Pope available. You remember that Boswell tells you about finally getting him together with the Earl of Marchmont to get personal anecdotes of Pope—the Earl of Marchmont was one of Pope’s executors. Don’t forget that Pope had died only about thirty years earlier. STUDENT: So in other words these might not be just imaginary constructs. MUDRICK: Well! they aren’t imaginary to the extent that he quotes the material that’s available. But the interpretations he makes of Pope’s feelings—yes, they are imaginative at least. They might not be imaginary, but he is imagining them, because he doesn’t have hard and fast evidence of them. And when he over and over again imputes bad motives to Pope you begin to be a little suspicious—was 72

Week Four Pope worse than Hitler? I mean did he never have a generous or magnanimous feeling in his entire life about anything? Did he never do anything except for material advantage or to cheat somebody else? Seems unlikely! Really seems unlikely. STUDENT(1): What about his parents—doesn’t he— MUDRICK: Yes, he does say that he treated his parents well. [Laughter.] That’s true, yes. STUDENT(2): Doesn’t he say that parents are better dead—he wouldn’t want them back again if they came back? [Laughter.] MUDRICK: About Pope’s parents? STUDENT(2): Yeah—doesn’t he say it’s better that parents are dead because they won’t have to come back—we’re all happier when our parents die? MUDRICK: I don’t remember that. If you can find it . . . I just don’t remember. Well, listen to this: Pope appears by this narrative to have contemplated his victory over the Dunces with great exultation; and such was his delight in the tumult which he had raised, that for a while his natural sensibility was suspended, and he read reproaches and invectives without emotion, considering them only as the necessary effects of that pain which he rejoiced in having given. STUDENT: See, now where does he get that? MUDRICK: He just imagined it. Moreover, what about all the times when Johnson in the Life gives obvious pain to people? Suppose Boswell had said at a time like that: “Dr. Johnson, you don’t mind the fact that some people hate you because you so rejoice in the pain that you have given?” [Laughter.] “Well, as a matter of fact that’s right, Bozzy. That’s the way I feel.” I mean [laughing], Boswell would have lost both ears. No, what he’s doing is monstrous. Yes? STUDENT: How did he get away with this? I mean why— MUDRICK: I’m asking you! He got away with it with me for about thirty years, he got away with it with all the English critics—if you can— STUDENT: His style is really nice. MUDRICK: Reputation, style . . . Don’t just—you mustn’t believe me! You must just consider the evidence. And sure, discuss it with other people. When he attacks the Duke of Chandos— He published (1731) a poem On Taste, in which he very particularly and severely criticizes the house, furniture, the gardens, and the entertainments of Timon, a man of great wealth and little taste. By Timon he was universally supposed, and by the Earl of Burlington, to whom the poem is addressed, was privately said, to mean the Duke of Chandos; a man perhaps too much delighted with pomp and show, but of a temper kind and beneficient, and who had consequently the voice of the public in his favor. 73

Mudrick Transcribed A violent outcry was therefore raised against the ingratitude and treachery of Pope, who was said to have been indebted to the patronage of Chandos for a present of a thousand pounds, and who gained the opportunity of insulting him by the kindness of his invitation. Then Pope, you remember, says he’s going to stop writing, and it’s “a compliment [which] this age deserves.” Then Johnson says: The man who threatens the world is always ridiculous; for the world can easily go on without him, and in a short time will cease to miss him. Once again, nobody gives a shit. True, absolutely true. And I think that probably may have been bothering Johnson too. I think, given the extraordinary celebrity and fame that he had, given his position at the center of the age, given his fear of death, given his consciousness of being pretty close to death now (after all, he was in his seventies when he was writing most of the Lives), there’s a kind of bitterness here too, I think. The world really doesn’t care, and he knew that very well, and of course he particularly knew it when he was sitting alone in his room at three o’clock in the morning when everybody had finally asked him to go home and stop bothering them. Yes? STUDENT: Does Boswell’s work in presenting the biography of Johnson help you to see the contrast between what Johnson did in writing his biography? MUDRICK: In writing Pope’s biography. STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: Oh! I think I understand you, and if I do, I think that’s a very shrewd observation, because what I would say was, if I had nothing but Johnson’s writing to go by, if there were no such thing as the Life of Johnson, and if I read through these works and say my judgment matured over the years and I finally got some horrified sense of what was going on in the Lives of the Poets, I would say this was a man who started out as a stern moralist and a decent man and a good man, and as he got older grew more and more embittered and full of hate, and was able to conceal some of it, but not by any means all of it, in the Lives of the Poets. Now we know, as a matter of fact, from the Life of Johnson that that is not true, that the man Johnson is consistent and continuous, and is noble and wonderful and great and generous and friendly and lovable throughout his life, to the very end. And I’m very glad you brought that up, because some of you people, if you do listen, you listen for five minutes at a time and you think that this is what I’m saying as my final opinion of Johnson. You go to some jerk on the English faculty and you say: You know, Mudrick really hates Johnson. He thinks he’s a big fraud and a nasty man, he says nasty things about everybody, and so on. And of course since they can’t read and so they haven’t read anything I’ve written about Johnson, and you don’t read so you haven’t read anything I’ve written, and you don’t pay attention to what I said five minutes ago, you don’t know. No! I’m 74

Week Four talking about the incredible inconsistency of human beings, how strange they are, how different they can be from themselves. Yes? STUDENT: I couldn’t remember if the Life of Savage is more generous than— MUDRICK: It’s more generous in one sense, but it’s very very indignant. It’s not meanspirited, it’s very indignant. Johnson is a kind of hippie in the Life of Savage—that is, he’s attacking the nobility and these people who mistreat you, and so on—he has that kind of attitude. No, it’s not like these. Yes? STUDENT: Do you trust Boswell’s account— MUDRICK: Oh! yes, I trust implicitly every quotation in Boswell. I even trust Boswell to this extent, when he will say something like this. He will quote some marvelous statement by Johnson and he would say: Oh, I only wish that I had the exact words that he uttered on this occasion. And I say: My God, we couldn’t stand it if he had the exact words! because what he’s been able to reconstruct is itself so marvelous and so consistent with the image of Johnson that he’s been presenting throughout, that we have to accept it. I also take his word for it, that what Johnson did say was even greater and more remarkable. Yes? STUDENT: Do you take his word for it because he was so generous in the Life of Johnson, and in comparison Johnson— MUDRICK: Because nobody else who’s ever lived is quoted as having said the kinds of things that Johnson is quoted as having said in Boswell. These things are marvelous. They are not like Boswell at all. And so there may be a kind of intermediate Johnson, a Johnson who was imperfectly but nevertheless accurately reproduced by Boswell. There was also the transcendent Johnson, whom nobody remembers. But it is also a fact by the way that Johnson’s friends said, when the Life came out, that the representation was incredibly faithful. Dr. Burney was particularly wonderful in this way—the comments that he made about the Life of Johnson—he said that he would never have believed that Johnson could be reproduced in this way, and that if you read the Life, this was what Johnson was like. And if you say, in answer to that, Does this mean that Boswell was lying when he said that Johnson spoke even more marvelously? No! What it means is, as far as I’m concerned, is that Boswell was so preternaturally sensitive to what he calls the Johnsonian ether, that what Boswell has to say sounds, to slightly coarser sensibilities, like exactly what Johnson said—and probably was on many occasions—but Boswell was even sensitive beyond that, to the marvelous things that Johnson said beyond that, that he can’t quite altogether reproduce, partly as a matter of quantity, and partly as a matter of quality. It can’t be faked. The only modern comparison that I can think of are the Craft-Stravinsky books, in which people who say that Craft is inventing Stravinsky—as some people by the way said that Boswell invented a Johnson—don’t understand that you cannot create a figure greater than yourself. This is the one thing you cannot do. And the Stravinsky of Craft’s books is greater than Craft, and so he must be Stravinsky. Or he’s very close to Stravinsky, because it is Stravinsky that Craft is being influenced by while he’s writing these books. Yes? STUDENT: So you can only record someone greater than you? 75

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Yes, that’s right. You can be infected by him to the extent—you can be, as Boswell says, impregnated by his ether. You might even be able to reproduce a characteristic sentence. It’s like listening to certain kinds of eighteenth-century music. You listen to it and think, Yes, that sounds like Mozart, that sounds like Haydn. And you listen for a while, but it’s not really transcendent, and then you hear that it’s by Stamitz, or somebody else, who has everything except the genius—he just is a kind of follower. And Boswell probably could have created some Johnson, but it wouldn’t have had—I mean it would have sounded like Johnson, but it wouldn’t have been Johnson; it wouldn’t have had the greatness of Johnson. The greatness has to come from Johnson, it can’t come from Boswell. It’s a greatness that Boswell himself doesn’t have. Boswell has his own greatness, but it’s very different from Johnson’s, and when you begin to read the journals of Boswell you realize how different that this is. Boswell doesn’t have the wit, he doesn’t have the force, he doesn’t have the economy of statement that Johnson has—he doesn’t have the authority that Johnson has. He has all sorts of things of his own, but they’re different. Johnson tells the story about Pope’s letters and all the skulduggery that goes on: Pope’s private correspondence thus promulgated filled the nation with praises of his candor, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship. You understand that he’s talking about the statement that Pope makes about himself in his own letters. [Laughs.] And it’s true, they read that way. They are probably the dullest of all literary letters, they are the worst of all literary letters and the phoniest. Johnson says something very interesting about style in letters (bottom of page 411): Pope is seen in this collection as connected with the other contemporary wits, and certainly suffers no disgrace in the comparison; but it must be remembered that he had the power of favoring himself: he might have originally had publication in his mind, and have written with care, or have afterwards selected those which he had most happily conceived, or most diligently labored; and I know not whether there does not appear something more studied and artificial in his productions than the rest, except one long letter by Bolingbroke, composed with all the skill and industry of a professed author. It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously formed a style rarely writes afterwards with complete ease. That’s a wonderful comment, and very true, and as a matter of fact applies to a lot of Johnson’s letters. I think I once mentioned the irritation that I began to experience when I was reading through the Life this last time and came upon 76

Week Four those letters which he wrote to people that he hadn’t written to for a long time. You will wonder why I have not written you for a long time. I have not written to you for a long time because nothing has been happening to me, and because the life of a person who stays in the same place is often unvaried and dadadadadadadada. And then he comes to the end of the letter [laughs], that’s it. STUDENT: Those are the longest letters. MUDRICK: Oh yeah! they go on and on and on, and he’s saying absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s all style—it’s nothing but style. And you wouldn’t dare write a letter like that unless you were a great man and unless you had a great style. It’s a style operating—I mean it’s a bicycle without a rider. [Laughter.] It’s going down the street with this advertisement [laughing] . . . Pope may be said to write always with his reputation in his head; Swift perhaps like a man who remembered that he was writing to Pope . . . That’s smart, by the way. Swift is always Swift. And I’ll tell you, if you have any feeling about what I call in my article “The Age of Pffft and Swope” . . . [Laughs.] (Seems funny to me . . .) [Laughter.] See, it’s the course that you take for credit, in which you study these famous authors, Jonathan Pffft and . . . Swift gains in the comparison because Swift is a real nut. It’s funny how you can accept a real nut and a pervert and a jerk by comparison with somebody who pretends to be the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. You don’t really mind Swift because obviously he wants everything his own way, and he’s always—he’s a crook but he’s always honest. Does that make sense? STUDENT: There are honest crooks—they know they’re crooks and they tell you about— MUDRICK: That’s not what I mean, though. He doesn’t know he’s a crook, he’s just a crook—he’s pure crook. So everything he does is genuine, it’s authentic. He’s a nasty man who shouts at people, who wants people to do what he wants them to do, he’s got a terrific sense of humor in pursuit of whatever it is he wants done at this moment, he easily figures out the weaknesses of people and attacks them for it, he attacks the weaknesses of the human race, he makes fun of women. He knows everybody’s weak point and he gets the first blow in all the time. You’re expecting a left jab and you get a right cross, all the time. I’m always very happy to turn to Swift after Pope. With Pope I have to think what men are like and what women are like and I’m supposed to be carried along by the very impressive verse and so on, but I’m so aware of the artificiality of the character behind the verse. That is, the guy is being so careful to appear to be in control—of himself as well as of his verse. In other words what I’m saying now is, I really, to a much larger extent than I would like, am sympathetic to Johnson’s animadversions against Pope, but I think his animadversions against Pope very seriously undercut the poetry—as Johnson himself would not grant, and as of course most people would not grant. And what I have against Johnson, for attacking Pope in that way and not understanding the implications, is that 77

Mudrick Transcribed it’s inconsistent with Johnson’s character, and it is mean, and it’s not so much interesting as it is troubling. Swift is a very interesting man. That he got away with what he got away with all his life! I make all kinds of comments but . . . [searching through his article on Swift] I’ll never find anything in this fucking [inaudible]. [Laughter.] Wait a minute, I think I can find one thing . . . . I’m talking about a new biography of Swift—two thousand pages: Swift was a very peculiar man, an obdurate and self-satisfied bundle of idiosyncrasies which he never bothered to conceal or modify, which aren’t susceptible to traditional or conventional moral formulas, which defy tact and consistency, which Ehrenpreis’s Freudian scrapings don’t come anywhere near the quick of, which served Swift well all his life and protected him against every fatal retribution they perpetually solicited. True, he didn’t become a bishop, but in view of what he was it’s a kind of miracle that he became Dean of St. Patrick’s. True, he faded after three score and ten and was declared legally incompetent at the age of seventy-five, but most of us would be glad to settle for a run of seventy-five years of pretty much having things our own way.i Nobody ever gives me the impression of getting away with murder as Swift does. Does everything he goddamn pleases, and gets away with it. And it’s very peculiar. Very strong—he’s a bully, and he gets away with it. Finally I rather liked him. When I was reading through Swift this time—I’ve never liked Swift. He’s always irritated me and bothered me, and I’ve never found the so-called great works terribly interesting—his satire is not particularly funny to me. This is one of the reasons by the way why it’s useful to be a writer (a critic, anyway). I accepted, very reluctantly, this commission to do the piece on Swift, and I thought, oh my God. I have to go through the whole range of world authors, and I hadn’t done Swift, so I was going to do Swift—I’m gonna “do” him. See, this is really a lesson for you, those of you who think you should do only what you want to do. Because a lot of the things that you do, not because you want to do them but because—I’ll bet that the reason Johnson did the Lives of the Poets was that he really felt he had no alternative: I don’t want to do this thing. Why am I doing it? Well, I gotta do it. Nobody else is gonna do it. I can do it. I’ll do it, goddamit. But then, I think, a lot of things intruded to make him adopt that very unfortunate tone. I am different [smiling]. I mean I. And so I decided to do Swift, and I was going to do it as conscientiously as I could—I was going to reread all his stuff, and I read every word of Swift. And I got more and more irritated, and I was wondering why I was doing this, and a lot of it didn’t hold up at all, and then little by little something began to creep over me. I sort of loved the fact that this guy had triumphed over everybody: critics, his age, all the political figures of the Mudrick, “One of a Kind,” Hudson Review, Vol. 34, Winter 1984-85, p. 596.

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Week Four time—everybody. He’s the greatest smart aleck in English literature, that’s really what he is. He bullied and bluffed and browbeat everybody, and beat them all down. He even prescribed his epitaph. I always wondered about that. You know when you hear about Swift’s savage or fierce indignation and so on? That’s an epitaph which he—imagine writing your own epitaph! and writing it in a way which congratulates you for being what you were. (If I can find it [searching through his essay] . . . Damn! . . . That’s important enough, so give me a minute, I’m going to see if I can find it.) He wasn’t self-critical at all, and that too didn’t matter. (The reason I had wanted to find it was that I thought I had a funny image about what he calls savage indignation or fierce indignation.) Here it is: In the self-dramatizing epitaph he wrote for himself in his will, he even prescribed just how we should summarily recollect him forever after—“Here lies Jonathan Swift, where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no further.” (It’s of course originally in Latin.) And then he prescribes also that it should be (I haven’t seen anybody else quote this, and I love this) it’s to be carved on “Black marble . . . in large Letters, deeply cut, and strongly gilded.” That’s another part of what he prescribes for his epitaph. STUDENT: Did he get that? MUDRICK: Yeah, oh sure. And he got away with that too—he gets away with everything. That self-applied tag, saeva indignatio [that’s the Latin], whereby in accordance with his final instructions we have ever since meekly distinguished him from other literary lights . . . Imagine an author telling us what we’re supposed to think of him—and we go along with it! He puts it on his grave—gilded [laughs]—and we say, yeah! that’s what he’s like—saeva indignatio. Every goddamn thing you’ve ever seen on Swift quotes that, first thing. They don’t even tell you, by the way, that he said it himself. Listen to my image because I think it’s funny: can be allowed to be what it professes to be only as it designates the feeling which supermarket shoppers have in a checkout line when they notice somebody sidle into it ahead of them with a shopping cart full of groceries. [Laughter.] That’s Swift’s fierce indignation. [Striking a pose, he points with his arm extended and cries “Out!” (Laughter.)] And imagine being able to palm off on the world that this is a noble and generous feeling! [laughing] He was able to do 79

Mudrick Transcribed it, and I think I’m able to demonstrate, by the way, in my piece that that’s what his indignation amounts to. But it is funny that he got away with it. He got away with everything—he got away with his attitude toward women, his attitude toward politics, he was the great man, he managed to get appointed to one of the very best ecclesiastical positions in Ireland, even though he was very bitter about not being made a bishop. So it’s interesting. Yes? STUDENT: Don’t you think that when he’s writing there is a kind of honesty, in that when he’s writing about something he seems to be feeling what he’s writing about? MUDRICK: Yeah, I do think there’s sincerity, and that’s what I was trying to establish a while ago. There’s sincerity and absolute consistency—he is all of a piece [laughs], but it really is honest. And what one is troubled by, or what I’m troubled by in the Lives of the Poets, is that something is going on that is inconsistent with Johnson’s character. I wish he hadn’t done it, and moreover he’s getting credited with things which he really oughtn’t to be credited with.

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Week Six 30 October 1984

MUDRICK: If you really stay interested in literature and the arts, or if you are interested now, I think you will recognize the kind of experience that occurred to me on the way over. I think this happened to me more spectacularly and more excitingly with music, as usual—but almost anything in the arts that happened to me happened most excitingly with music, because music is simply more exciting to me. But I can remember, for instance, waiting with trembling anticipation for the first performance I ever heard of—that first performance by Toscanini of the Beethoven Eroica Symphony. And I think one of the excitements of art is also—you’re going to scale Mount Everest for the first time, something like that. That’s really the way you ought to be feeling about something like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I mean surely everybody here, probably even people who have read nothing but comic books all their lives, have heard the term—they know Decline and Fall, and then they’ve probably even heard of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And it seems to me that one of the really great excitements in the arts is to climb that kind of peak. For one thing there is an almost necessary disappointment associated with that, a little bit like the necessary disappointment that’s associated with the first experience of sex: Is that all there is? [laughter] and so on, as all the pop singers say, and as also Stendhal said. Nevertheless it’s an interesting and necessary experience. So that you read this and you say, my God, is that all there is? But that’s not all you say. You come back to it, or you come back to thinking about it, and it’s a very (I think) a very attractive kind of experience. And it’s almost infinitely repeatable because there are so many peaks. I mean there are so many intellectual peaks that you almost never run out of them. The eighteenth century is particularly interesting because (I don’t know whether this fair) but I think it’s the first (and this too just occurred to me—I may want to modify it or cancel it, and I would be interested to know what you have to say) the eighteenth century is the first century in which it became clear that there were more important kinds of writing than fiction, even though the eighteenth century is also the beginning of modern fiction. It’s the century in which it becomes perfectly clear that there are all kinds of writing which really occupy a more important place in the intellectual life of mankind than fiction (and by fiction of course I mean anything invented; I don’t just mean novels or 81

Mudrick Transcribed short stories, I mean poems for instance). And I don’t mean that I think that it seems to me that this is so because, say, the fiction of the eighteenth century is less interesting than the fiction of other centuries—I don’t even think that’s true. I think that there’s a great deal of marvelous fiction in the eighteenth century, and there’s even a great deal of great poetry, which I happen to be less interested in than the novel, the prose fiction. But I don’t think that there is any doubt that most of you sooner or later if not already, and I don’t mean supinely agree with this, but that you would come to feel this way after reading at length in all the centuries, that the really titanic works of the eighteenth century are nonfiction— or at least that that’s the feeling that you have. I don’t think that there’s any question that in English literature the two most important books of the eighteenth century are Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And this is not to say that either is perfect, though I guess I think that the Life of Johnson is about as nearly perfect as a book like that can be, given that he has to work with factual material. I really don’t know how it could have been done any better, unless there had been tape recorders available in those days and Johnson had been followed around by somebody with a Sony all his life. (Even that I don’t think really would work, but . . .) Okay. I wouldn’t say that—I suppose most of you wouldn’t say that—about The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’m particularly interested by the way (it’s one of the reasons that I assigned the autobiography) I would be particularly interested by any associations that you attempt to make between the man himself and the book that he wrote. Yes? STUDENT: His aristocratic attitude that comes out so strongly in the memoirs, I think, is reflected in his discussion about the— MUDRICK: The patricians and plebeians? STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: The vile and wretched populace? [Laughs.] STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: Bread and circuses. STUDENT: I think he glosses over the violence quite discreetly, too—maybe that’s part of his personality. MUDRICK: Well, it’s also part of the restrictions that you were working under in the eighteenth century. So that you know that you had to get a good head of steam up before for instance he began writing frankly about somebody like the Empress Theodora. I love the Empress Theodora. [Laughs.] I always did as a matter of fact, it was the first interesting thing I found in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And by the way one thing I should have done was to bring—does anybody have the unabridged Gibbon here? because the editor mentions this in his introduction, but he doesn’t really give any serious indication of what you’re missing: Gibbon has marvelous footnotes. There have been people who argued that Gibbon’s footnotes are more attractive, more interesting, more amusing than the text. And the editor gets rid of most of the footnotes, and he gets rid of them of course to conserve and to save as much space as possible. But there are 82

Week Six wonderful footnotes, and in some of the footnotes Gibbon takes more chances than he does in the text. He very often will say things that he wouldn’t want to be indiscreet enough to say in the text. I can’t resist telling you what Theodora’s remark about a fourth altar always reminded me of. He records her as having complained that there wasn’t a [inaudible] fourth altar of sexual pleasure. (And I won’t go into any details about that, I hope you have enough—I mean I hope you can count! [Laughs.] That will help you to figure out what she’s talking about.) But I’m always reminded of a remark that Shakespeare has Cleopatra make in Antony and Cleopatra which supplies a—in fact a fourth and a fifth altar. [Laughs.] That is, “Ram thou thy fruitful tidings in mine ears”—“in mine ear,” excuse me. (She has only one left, the other had been worn out.) [Laughter.] This is what Cleopatra says to the messenger who comes to her with a message from Rome. So Theodora could have learned something from Cleopatra if she had been willing to listen. [Laughter.] I read something about an empty eye socket once. [Laughter.] That’s probably the sequel to Tommy—they put one of his eyes out. It was an orgy scene— STUDENT: It’s that joke about I’ll keep an eye out for you. [Laughter.] STUDENT(1): Didn’t the Chinese mention orifices out of women’s feet by binding them very tightly so that they would have holes of flesh? [Many talk at once.] Yeah, but also it had those other uses, and they did fold the feet over so that it formed almost another orifice. MUDRICK: Where did you read this? STUDENT(2): But that was so painful for them! MUDRICK: OH WHO CARES! [Laughter.] Listen, you gotta suffer. Women were made to suffer [laughing]. Jervey, I admit I have never heard that—anywhere! If you can come up with a reliable source for that I’d like to know. STUDENT(2): Oh, I’ve seen them in books. MUDRICK: Well good. STUDENT(2): Their feet are like slippers. MUDRICK: No, I’m not talking about the binding of the feet—of course that’s well known. I’m talking about the use to which he says— STUDENT(1): I think it’s from a book I read in high school called Strange Sexual Practices Around the World. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: All right. Do you wonder why Boswell and Johnson thought of Gibbon as a kind of a devil on earth? STUDENT: As a matter of fact yes. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: Well, go into that. Why would he have been regarded with the kind of horror with which he was regarded by many very respectful people of the time? STUDENT: I like him. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: Come on now, somebody. Yes? STUDENT: It seems like he doesn’t have the fear of hell because he doesn’t believe in it. MUDRICK: No, I mean he’s not a Christian, and it’s perfectly clear— STUDENT: Well, if everyone else is locked into this— MUDRICK: Well, let’s try to state it as impartially as possible [laughing]. 83

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: It reminded me that Pascal and him are so different. MUDRICK: Pascal and whom? STUDENT: And Gibbon. MUDRICK: Oh yeah. STUDENT: One doesn’t want—you might as well believe in it, because you won’t get anything by not believing in it, and Gibbon— MUDRICK: Oh—you mean the bet, Pascal’s bet, yeah. What have you got to lose? I mean, if you believe and it turns out that the religion is true, you’ll get to heaven. If you believe and it turns out it’s not true, the same thing will happen to you that would happen anyway, I mean you’ll be annihilated. So believe. Which is a little silly, obviously, because belief doesn’t work that way. In fact it’s beneath Pascal to have said something like that, I never understood . . . He must have been in a particularly terrified state of mind to say something like that. I’m sure that a number of you are responding with this profound silence in part because you haven’t read enough to answer the question, which is too bad. And you certainly should. In one sense, at least, the rest of the course is all downhill. There’s certainly nothing like that assignment—for next week I want you to read the Hume volume [An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding]. And Hume is much easier to read anyway, and this is a much shorter volume. And he’s also very important. Well, I’m also willing to move back a little and try to or begin to discuss this question of mountains to be climbed, and also of the preponderance of nonfictional literature in the eighteenth century. I mean if any of you have any ideas about either of those issues, I’d be interested. Yes? STUDENT: You said that nonfictional is in prominence in the nineteenth century— MUDRICK: Eighteenth. I would prefer not to put it that way. I’m not sure that I would disagree with that, but that’s not really what I said. I said that the eighteenth century is the century in which it becomes clear that the term literature not only includes nonfiction, but that the nonfictional works of the eighteenth century really predominate in importance, or in the feeling that they give you of the age, over the fiction. Now I don’t mean to run down novelists like Richardson or Sterne or even Fielding, really, or Defoe or Smollett. It’s just that they don’t seem quite as central to the age, quite as important to the age. Now obviously other tremendously important things are going on, and outside England, after all, the French Revolution occurred toward the end of the century, and that’s one of the reasons I’ll have you read Burke on the French Revolution. It is in every respect the key modern century. And Gibbon is certainly one of the most important men of the modern world. Well, maybe I can try to get you to come through the back door and explain to me why Gibbon is so important. Is it that he’s important simply because he saw Mount Everest and climbed it? It’s certainly one of the best instances of a very deliberate choice to become a great name. In fact I don’t know of anybody—you get something of the same kind of feeling about Milton’s attitude when he undertook to write Paradise Lost. That is, he decided that he was going to take the biggest subject there was, 84

Week Six infinity [laughs], and so he took it. But you also know that other people took subjects like that and that they made a terrible botch of it. But obviously the extent to which Milton succeeded measures the grandiosity, at least, of his talent; I mean he gives you some impression of the size of infinity, and that’s one of the reasons it succeeds. You almost have the feeling that anybody who had been smart enough in the eighteenth century to take up the subject of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and to write about it as it was possible to write about it in the eighteenth century for the first time, would have made his name for all time. That’s not really true, but it comes closer to being true I think than about any other work. And Gibbon very deliberately mulled over in his mind from the time he was a boy what he was going to do, and he finally chose this subject, and he was absolutely right, and then he did it, he just did it. Day after day after day he did it. And at the end he knew perfectly well that he would be immortal. As soon as the first volume was published it was clear to everybody that he would probably be the most famous historian who ever lived, and the first volume was published when he was thirty-nine years old, and he spent the rest of his life acknowledged, really, as the greatest historian who ever lived, having undertaken the most important historical subject ever. So that deliberateness, that conscious choice is itself astonishing. And I don’t know of any parallel elsewhere. I myself happen to think that (I don’t want to quash discussion . . .) I don’t think that the book is as good as it might have been. I think that there are many obvious defects and deficiencies and disproportions. So I don’t think it’s the kind of achievement that the Life of Johnson is. The Life of Johnson is inconceivable without two corresponding geniuses of very different kinds. You cannot imagine the Life of Johnson—well, for one thing you have alternatives which allow you to see what the Life of Johnson would have been like if Boswell had not only not been a genius, but also if he had not been the kind of genius that he was. He couldn’t have been for instance another genius like Johnson—that wouldn’t have done any good; he couldn’t have been a genius like Burke; he had to be the Boswellian kind of genius to write the Life of Johnson. And I say, you have the alternative of something like Hawkins’s Life of Johnson, which is a very interesting book, and the Johnson who is in that book is a very interesting man. Not as interesting as Johnson the writer, but still a very interesting man. But the Life of Johnson is one of those works of art which are in effect a miracle, because they depend on such a miraculous conjunction of the right person being met by the right person at the right time, both of them being sufficiently distinct from each other, so that each gains from the presence, the existence, the friendship and the love of the other. It otherwise is unimaginable. And in fact there is nothing else like it in the world. There is no other book remotely like Boswell’s Life of Johnson. On the other hand there are many histories which are certainly, detail by detail, at least as effective as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For instance Thucydides seems to me a far greater historian than Gibbon, and by the 85

Mudrick Transcribed way a much smarter man. Which is not to say that I don’t think Gibbon is very smart—I do, I think he’s very smart. I wish you wouldn’t allow me to fall into this pit of negative statements, because I have the feeling that none of you read any of this material, so I just keep falling forward onto my face. Yes? STUDENT: What other modern historian do you think has done such a good job? MUDRICK: Oh none. STUDENT: But are you saying that there is another person who if the circumstances might have been such that another person could have taken this material and done a better job? And do you know a specific person who could have done it? MUDRICK: Well, I think Hume could have done it. I’m not even sure that the American historian Prescott couldn’t have done at least as good a job—I’m not sure. Oh! I think Motley could have done it, I think Motley would have done a marvelous job—maybe a better job. STUDENT: How long is Motley’s book? MUDRICK: Very long. STUDENT: So it’s not just a matter of one person who has a kind of temperament that is deliberate, and can write something— MUDRICK: Well, you know something? I’m not so sure that that’s true of Gibbon. He certainly had persistence and perseverance [inaudible] continue, and he continued for twenty years, and he knew the material. But I do think that one of the characteristics of the book is an odd kind of scrappiness. There are disproportions which are not strictly accountable on the ground that he has so much material to cover. He also is not very skillful in suggesting changes of mind and changes of attitude in his characters—he’s not fundamentally a good novelist. He doesn’t have the talent of the novelist for suggesting varieties of response in the same personality. So that for instance when he has to—he will give you a long list of characteristics of a certain emperor, and he will say he’s this, he’s that, and he’s the other thing, and he tries to give you a coherent image of an emperor. And then the emperor does something which doesn’t particularly fit with that conglomeration of qualities that he’s assigned to him, and what he says is, He acted uncharacteristically at this moment. Well, that may be, but it’s not really a very successful argument. Certainly you couldn’t get away with it if you were a novelist. And I think the really great historians don’t do things like that. I think they are able to persuade you that there is both more and less consistency than Gibbon imagines in character. Gibbon doesn’t have a very fine imagination for human nature. He has a lot of opinions . . . STUDENT: He doesn’t know human nature. MUDRICK: Well, I don’t know that I would make that flat a statement, but I think it’s the kind of statement that you could make more fairly about Gibbon than about almost any other great writer, or that is, writer of his stature, of his achievement. A man who deals with human nature has to be dealing with human nature all the time. Yes? 86

Week Six STUDENT: In that aspect it reads as sparse of real humanity as Gibbon’s life was artificial and sterile. It just seems to reflect his personality and his relation with what happened— MUDRICK: Oh, I’m getting very depressed, because it sounds as if we’re just going to walk all over Gibbon [inaudible]. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with what you—there’s a lot more to say, because I have to keep coming back to the fact that this is one of the two great books of the eighteenth century, and probably, all things considered, because of the magnitude of the subject . . . Look, if Sir Edmund Hillary had tripped and fallen a thousand feet on his ascent of Mount Everest, and had just barely made it by some sort of accident to the top, but he was still the first to make it, it would be an incredible achievement, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is an incredible achievement. It’s not a miracle like the Life of Johnson, but it’s an incredible achievement. Yes? STUDENT: Do you think one reason it is, is because people didn’t have the big idea of—like I’m not sure how much people had already considered the Roman Empire as the basis of their own civilization. MUDRICK: If you had asked somebody point blank—after all (people like Johnson), the basis of an education in Europe of the eighteenth century was the Latin classics. The Greek classics were often thrown in, but you had to know the Latin classics. And when Johnson went to the Continent he spoke Latin to the people that he met. And learned men who saw each other, I mean learned men from different countries would speak Latin, and even learned disquisitions were written in Latin. All civilized Europe knew that Rome was the father and the mother of modern Europe, no question about that. It just hadn’t occurred to anybody to tackle the subject, and also to tackle it in that way. Because, you see, he’s not writing the history of the Roman Empire or the history of Rome, he’s writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—he’s taking the end of it. He does refer obviously to earlier aspects of Rome, but he was the first one who—see, the others lived the big idea, but he took it as a topic. And for reasons which I don’t really understand, nobody had thought of it as a topic before. It just hadn’t occurred to anybody. And why I don’t know. There are great mysteries in human life and in human history and I think this is one of them. Gibbon came along at exactly the right time—it’s not only that, of course. The eighteenth century was the first time in which the Christian role in the last centuries of the Roman Empire could be examined without simple praise. That is, you could almost call Gibbon the first civilized atheist writing with impunity. Up until that time you were almost certain to be—it would be the equivalent of being burned at the stake. But you’ve got to remember also how extraordinary an effect, an impact the Decline and Fall had—that it was a bestseller. That it was sold—I’ve forgotten, but I think the first volume sold out in a week in 1776. So you see, everybody was ready for it. And that kind of historical fluke is extremely interesting. How did he know, and how could it have happened, and why was the eighteenth century so ready for it? Well, it was the Age of 87

Mudrick Transcribed Enlightenment, and people were ready for various kinds of air-clearing. And after all, the great Americans in the American Revolution (and it is wonderful that Gibbon’s first volume comes out in 1776) but the people who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence were, almost without exception, Deists. And Johnson by the way would have considered a Deist to be—that’s just a fancy name for an atheist as far as Johnson is concerned. A Deist is a person who believes in effect in the watchmaker God—that is, he set things going 4004 years ago and then stepped aside. But people like Washington and John Adams and Jefferson—they were all Deists, and they certainly didn’t accept—in the most formal or formalistic way—they didn’t believe in the Christian God. Yes? STUDENT: Is there a great deal more of materials available today than— MUDRICK: Yes. And as the editor tells you, there’s of course especially a lot more material about the Eastern Empire and about Mohammedans than there was at the time. STUDENT: Those “effeminate Asians” [laughing]. STUDENT: No—it was the Syrians. The Asians were “servile.” MUDRICK: Well, if you want to get into that . . . Gibbon is certainly responsible for a lot of the distinction that’s made between the West and the Orient—that is, that the West is the place of democracy, the place of freedom of individuals, and the Orient is the place of despotism, where people kowtow before the rulers, and execution is particularly horrible, and so on. And it’s all very well to say that this is a kind of simplification which people like Gibbon offered to the vanity of the West and of Europe. The only trouble is, from whatever I’ve read, it turns out to be absolutely true! [Laughs.] Those fucking Orientals! [laughing] That is, what they did was indeed to put their feet on the neck of anybody they had conquered, turned them into slaves . . . There is something about the history of Europe which is extraordinary in many ways. I think the whole history of Europe from the Greeks on down, I mean from the great city-states of classical Greece, up until the eighteenth century—I think that Europeans and people of European extraction have a great deal of reason for a kind of ethnic pride. That insofar as you believe in the significance of the individual and freedom of action and freedom of belief, and civilizing influences like no more torture of prisoners—the ameliorating influences of what we normally call civilization—I don’t think there’s any question at all that Europe has it all over Asia. STUDENT: Well, what do you think of—I mean just so many horrors come to mind. MUDRICK: You mean like India and China? STUDENT: Well, I mean I’m not very familiar with the specifics of their histories so much as I am with Europe. I mean think of all the Spaniards [laughs], who are some of the most— MUDRICK: Oh! I don’t mean that horrors don’t happen in Europe all the time, and the horrors which have been perpetrated by Christianity—I mean Gibbon is very eloquent about that, of course. I think however that the horrors which are—I think there is almost always somebody somewhere in Europe who regards it as 88

Week Six a horror. Even when Hitler comes along there are people in Europe who regard it as a horror. But I remember—one of the interests of course of literature is that you can really range through the world. I mean you can sit in your own room and read these books and nobody bothers you, and you find out about all sorts of places. And of course I’ve read a lot of books about the Far East, and Chinese civilization is certainly a very interesting civilization (the very little I know about it). But whatever you want to call something which eventually got codified in the ethos of the ‘sixties and in certain parts of Africa as “reverence for life” never seems to have penetrated very far into Asia. I remember a collection of Chinese short stories put together by a Chinese scholar (I mean himself Chinese) from all the way back, I mean back to practically the birth of Christ, and all the way up through there. And one of the most fascinating aspects of those stories, apart from whether they’re good or bad, is that apparently in Chinese civilization there wasn’t anything like the reverence for life that we take for granted, or even the kind of interest in the gratification of certain appetites which leads one to respect, if not like, at least a certain kind of body, say a female body, which is capable of providing pleasure. I remember a story in an anthology of Chinese fiction that I didj—a wonderfully interesting story, by the way, about a very clever thief who gets away with all sorts of things. And at one time (I wish I had the piece here) he captures a beautiful woman, and he has to find out something from her, so first of all he says I’ll spare your life if you tell me something. Then she tells him something, and then he says look! and cuts off her head, and then he goes on to the next adventure. And there is not a suggestion in the story that anybody would have been shocked or horrified by this. And apparently the only person who was at all interested was the woman herself [laughs], I mean because she didn’t want her head cut off. Now that kind of story could not be written anywhere in Europe from— STUDENT: When was it written? MUDRICK: About the eighth or ninth century AD, I think. And there are other stories like that. But no such story could be written anywhere in Europe (except by a maniac) from say the time of Pericles—well, from the time of Homer—it’s just inconceivable. And that seems to me very typical Asian stuff. That is, that kind of interest in individual human life which developed very early in the West doesn’t seem to have developed in the Far East, and I don’t have any idea why, except that maybe agricultural conditions were so different. Maybe the fact that people were swept away by the millions in floods and earthquakes and so on—you just got used to dead bodies, and so one dead body more or less didn’t matter. And yet that doesn’t make sense, because Europe was swept by famine. The Black Plague, which swept across Europe twice in Chaucer’s life, in the more virulent attack disposed of half the population of Europe. So they were used to seeing dead bodies. And of course children died—Gibbon tells you, you remember, That is, he reviewed it.

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Mudrick Transcribed in his memoirs about all his siblings who died, and he makes it clear that you simply expected that infants died, that that’s what happened; if there were five children you expected four to die in infancy. So I don’t really understand it. Now maybe Christians would like to take credit for that, except they would be wrong, because this goes back to the Greeks. STUDENT: Maybe it’s a little bit ironic that the actual events differ so much from the presentation [inaudible]. I don’t know, I wish I had more knowledge of ancient writings of Western civilization. MUDRICK: Well, how ancient? STUDENT: Well, even the Greek things—I don’t really have that much— MUDRICK: Oh no, it’s clear that already the Greeks have a kind of interest in individual human life. I mean if you read, for instance—well, if you read Homer it’s perfectly clear that individual life is the final criterion. Homer is really more interested in individual lives than he is for instance in notions of patriotism and so on. The great moments in the Iliad and the Odyssey—well, especially in the Iliad, I think, as I remember it—have to do with the pathos of great figures dying. I mean certainly, Hector’s momentary cowardice when he flees from Achilles, Achilles’ grief at the death of Patroclus—these are really big moments. And I don’t get the impression from the little that I know of Far Eastern literature that individual deaths matter that much, or individual lives matter that much, ever. And I don’t know why this is. It might be pure accident, I mean it might be what I think is the most incredible historical event ever, and that is the development of Greek civilization. In one place at one time in the middle of nowhere for no particular reason—that I can see. I can’t see any reason why the Greeks in practically less than one century did everything or invented just about everything that has been regarded as intellectually valuable in Western civilization. STUDENT: The gods. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: Maybe. So maybe the pagans were right after all. Yes? STUDENT: I forgot what I was going to say. MUDRICK: All right. Yes? STUDENT: But couldn’t the difference be partially that the Greeks believed in the soul? I’m sure maybe not as early as Homer, but certainly with Plato the idea of a soul came into being. MUDRICK: Oh, Plato is a very late and a very sophisticated writer. We know very little about the ancient religions; we know very little about what kind of belief was involved. You remember Johnson says something very interesting (I think he says it in the Life somewhere) and he said (I think Boswell was talking about religious toleration) and Johnson said it was all very well for the Greek philosophers to talk so freely and easily with each other, because they didn’t have any serious religious beliefs, that these were just abstract ideas to them. STUDENT: Gibbon talked about that too. MUDRICK: Okay. And I think that that’s a fair way of looking at it. I don’t really have the feeling that even Homer believed in the gods that he had intruding—certainly

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Week Six not in the way in which, say, a Spanish peasant believes in the Virgin. I don’t think so. STUDENT: None of the Greeks seem to have believed that they didn’t have a right to question everything, even if they believed in it. MUDRICK: Yes. But Johnson would argue, you see, that the reason they felt that they had the right to question whatever they believed in was that they didn’t believe in anything very strongly. And that’s a plausible argument to me. I would rather it were not so, but it sounds to me like one of those goddamn smart arguments that Johnson comes up with that I wish he wouldn’t come up with—when he says, for instance, Every man has the right to say exactly what he thinks about anything, and I have the right to knock him down for it. [Laughter.] And he says that the reason that he will not tolerate toleration is that when somebody expresses an opinion which is contrary to his, it weakens his own belief in his own opinion. And that’s very plausible too. How many of us can stand up against contradictory beliefs strongly expressed? It’s very hard to. Johnson doesn’t want to deal with non-Christians or atheists because they weaken—I mean obviously if everybody said that the Christian dispensation were the true one, we would all feel very secure (except a few Jews in hiding). [Laughter.] But imagine what it’s like to be an embattled Christian with all these people around you making fun of what you believe. And for the first time, in the eighteenth century it was possible for people like Gibbon to come out of the closet. I mean you might say that atheists up until the age of Gibbon were closet atheists. Gibbon is the first one who told his mother that he was an atheist. Mom, I’m an atheist. What do I do? STUDENT: Go to your room and [inaudible]. [Laughter.] MUDRICK [laughing]: Probably true. He didn’t; he just developed a hydrocele. [Laughter. End of first side of tape.] STUDENT: But they don’t have to defend any tenets, basically, and they know that a lot of their beliefs are unpopular, and so—I mean, they don’t have any conviction, I mean— MUDRICK: Oh come on! oh come on—there are some people with conviction! STUDENT: If they had conviction, why would they have to argue against evolution, if they had conviction? MUDRICK Well, a lot of them think that evolution is bunk—I don’t know what you mean. And they certainly believe it’s against the word of God. No, I’m sure there are a lot of sincere and [inaudible]. STUDENT: Are they really disturbed, though, like they were in the nineteenth century by new geological evidence? MUDRICK: Well, they’ve been able to absorb that since. When there’s so much of it that it can’t be denied, it no longer matters. [Laughs.] I mean you see it Was still possible for people in the nineteenth century to say that the world began in 4004 BC—the Archbishop Ussher. And then all of a sudden people like Darwin came along, and the early geologists, and then it was really disturbing and unnerving

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Mudrick Transcribed and troublesome. But now, when the case is clear, you can just dismiss it all. There’s so much of it that you almost can’t see it. I mean it’s like the word Asia on a great big map—you can’t see it anymore. So then you say none of it matters, and you start all over again. STUDENT: So they wouldn’t be bothered by it. MUDRICK: They wouldn’t be bothered by any of it. Yes? STUDENT: Is it because of not the sanctity of individual human life? Like I guess Iran is an Asian country in a sense–I mean they’re not Western in that sense, right? MUDRICK: Well, Iran is the modern descendent of Persia, which is the very image of the Eastern despotism that the Greeks were fighting against, I mean the Greek enemy was Persia. It was the Greek defeat of Persia at Marathon which made possible the battle of Marathon.) STUDENT: Is that why It’s possible for the human-wave attacks in Iran right now as they attack the Iraquis? MUDRICK: Well . . . STUDENT: But it doesn’t seem like a popular technique in modern warfare except for there. MUDRICK: I’m sure you can get fanatical Christians somewhere, but I do agree that that tendency—certainly you get things like that in the early years of Islam, I mean you get human-wave attacks all the time. And of course the business which embarrasses a good many modern Muslims, that is, that all these warrior were being promised harems In heaven was inciting them to do this—and it’s true! I mean, whether you like it or not . . . It’s like the excuses that modern Christians make for certain aspects of Christanity, but the fact is that that’s the way it was, and that’s what they were fighting for. Yeah, I do think certainly that theoretically, or hypothetically at least, human-wave attacks, that sort of thing, is incompatible with what developed in Western civilization. This is not to say that there aren’t all kinds of horrors . . . Christianity itself, of course, is a Western phenomenon, and depends to a large extent on the ascendancy of the individual, the glorification of the individual, the insistence on the individual’s soul. It got all mixed up of course, and people began to feel that they knew more about your soul than you did, and so they could tell you what to do with it. STUDENT: What were the Eastern beliefs at the time that may have led to the carelessness for human— MUDRICK: Well, you know as well as I do what the major Eastern, especially the Far Eastern beliefs were. You know what comes out of India—you know Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on—that is. India is the seed of everything, it’s the beginning. If you want to be proud of ancientness, certainly the two civilizations that you would want to belong to are India and China. Because all original beliefs in supernatural phenomena come out of India and China, that is, anything above say the worship of sticks and stones, almost. But why those beliefs were so associated with a kind of passivity and anti-individualism I don’t know. I don’t really don’t understand it, and I have never seen a satisfactory explanation of it. And it 92

Week Six may be that you’re dealing in matters of this kind with things as mysterious and inexplicable as mutation (just to show you that I know that word). That is, when scientists are discussing mutation, that is, they simply have to wait for a gene to get out of whack. They have no way—well, now they of course (I’m sorry) with these genetic laboratories and so on—but up until this time, in a state of nature you can’t foresee a mutation—it just occurs. Once it occurs, there it is, and it produces a different kind of organism. And I suppose you could say that there was something about the social and economic organization of India in, when, the third century BC, the fourth century BC, which conduced to that kind of belief, and that it was simply carried on, because religions have a very odd—that is, they long outlast what you would think would be conditions which would make them obsolete, Christianity being an obvious instance. So once that set of circumstances allowed this kind of a set of—and I’m sure that it had a lot to do with who happened to be around at the moment. There may well have been a couple of very forceful intelligent men who started things going whose names are simply lost to history. Obviously we know the name of one of them, I mean Buddha certainly was an important influence very early. And once these things get started they establish a momentum of their own. If I were forced to give an explanation I would say something like that for the East. And I would say that the great miracle of the West is classical Greece, and that that determined the future course of Europe and the West. And that too it seems to me is just one of those inexplicable mutations, that when the invaders came over the Northern mountains into Greece in about the tenth century BC, whatever intermingling occurred produced these explosive consequences. Yes? STUDENT: Is this your impression of eighteenth-century Europe, that it’s a kind of historical mutation? MUDRICK: No. No, and I’m glad you brought that up. In fact you give me an opportunity to go back to something I said at the beginning of the hour. There’s nothing flukey about Gibbon. As Voltaire might have said, if Gibbon hadn’t existed, he would have had to be invented. If there hadn’t been one big Gibbon, there would have been twenty small Gibbons—and of course Hume is a kind of Gibbon. [Inaudible because of laughter] see all these little monkeys [inaudible]. That is, he really is the spirit of the age. Once political and economic developments have gone so far, once for instance the development of constitutional monarchy had gone to a certain point in England, and once the Industrial Revolution had begun, and once technology had begun to develop, and once the middle class had begun to spread and become prosperous, there was really I think no alternative to the eighteenth century [laughs], it just had to happen. If you see the distinction I’m trying to make—the eighteenth century is inevitable. I don’t think classical Greece is inevitable, and I certainly don’t have any kind of understanding which would enable me to say that fourth or third century BC India was inevitable, or fourth or third millenium BC India was inevitable, or that first millenium China was inevitable. I don’t see that. I mean we don’t know. Maybe it was inevitable in the same way if we had all the preceding history, or we would 93

Mudrick Transcribed think it was. But what I was going to say was, whereas Johnson and Boswell are not inevitable. They are freaks, they are mutations, in important ways. You could not predict either one. And the conjunction of them is unimaginable. It is one of the most remarkable coincidences in history. It’s certainly the most remarkable literary coincidence in history. You had your hand up. STUDENT: Well, I was just going to say, Gibbon was. MUDRICK: Do you understand the distinction I’m trying to make, whether you agree with it or not? Don’t you have the feeling when you are reading certain books that it’s inevitable that this book was written at this particular time, let’s say, and about another book written at the same time, it is not inevitable that this book should have been written at this time, this book is a freak, this guy is a freak, this is very strange and it doesn’t belong here, and it’s just an instance of how many different things can go on among different human lives, that some human lives represent the era and the place they exist in, and certain others don’t really. Yes? STUDENT: Gibbon’s work is based on just reading, he didn’t have to meet another person to make it possible. Boswell and Johnson had to be two people— MUDRICK: I’m waiting for people to force me to make qualifications about Boswell and Johnson, but since you won’t I’ll have to make them myself. I don’t think that what I said about them is in the least incompatible with also saying that Johnson is of course one of the most representative figures of the eighteenth century, and that he’s a luminary of the Age of Enlightenment, that he is representative of the eighteenth century also, and so is Boswell. They are both representative of the Age of Enlightenment, and this doesn’t seem to me to conflict at all with what I said otherwise. Yes? STUDENT: One reason why Gibbon is sort of inevitable is, if you consider the Middle Ages to be a time of storing up of information and just recopying it and sort of categorizing it, this is like the ultimate in indexing of a kind of information. I mean you may disagree with that, but it’s certainly a large— MUDRICK: All right, at least it gives me an opportunity to make another kind of comment. The kind of chronicle writing which was done certainly in the monasteries in the Middle Ages, insofar as it had a conscious intention, had the intention of course of glorifying Christianity and demonstrating that Christianity was the only true religion, and that all kings who conformed to Christian edicts and who supported the Christian cause were great, and so on. Obviously there are monkish writers who are more honest and more honorable than others, and there are also writers of chronicles in the late Middle Ages who tend to get away from that kind of rationalization and justification. Gibbon of course is the first writer deliberately to set out to demonstrate that Christianity is only one more social phenomenon. That is, it’s not the truth, in terms of which all phenomena must be explained—that is, that Christianity is not a phenomenon at all, it’s a fact, it’s a truth, it’s what’s been brought down from heaven. Moreover, Gibbon himself says that. He says, Now you understand (he says it in the typical Gibbon-ironic way) he says, Now you understand I’m not going to talk about revelation, which we all know is true. I’m not contesting that, I’m just 94

Week Six going to talk about Christianity as a social phenomenon. And that’s the way he excuses himself. But nobody was allowed to talk about it in that way. I don’t mean they weren’t allowed in the sense that this was the Eleventh Commandment or anything, it’s just that nobody—first of all nobody would have thought of it, and after a while nobody would have dared, and finally Gibbon comes along at exactly the right time, when he both can think about it and dare. And I think (as you must have observed if you were paying attention at all) as he goes along he more and more drops any pretense of being respectful, and more and more he makes it clear that he thinks that he’s dealing with Halloween phenomena [laughter], that Christianity is just some great big costume party, that it’s ridiculous. The chapters which of course horrified people like Johnson and Boswell were chapters fifteen and sixteen in the first volume, which were the chapters which concerned themselves with the development of Christianity— they’re the earliest ones (I think it was printed here as chapter twelve or chapter thirteen). Yes? STUDENT: That’s a sort of a funny thing—I think that Gibbon, he represents at the same time a kind of a monkish attitude. I think that he could have appeared in medieval Europe and been fine as a person, I think he would have just been Gibbon. Now on the other hand, like Johnson— MUDRICK: You don’t mean that he would have believed what he— STUDENT: No, I’m saying that he would have been a person— MUDRICK: He would have been delighted to accumulate the material, but he would have had a different attitude toward it. STUDENT: Right, I think he still would have been Gibbon. I mean if you’d seen him eating or something [laughs] he would have been the same. But on the other hand Johnson and Boswell, even though they represent . . . Out loud they say yeah, we’re for all this old stuff—but they are so strange. MUDRICK: No no, I like that, I think that’s very good. I think that as human beings Johnson and Boswell are much more modern than Gibbon, that Gibbon represents all the modern historical tendencies in . . . Gibbon is very much like the modern intellectual, and let’s see if I can define that. All you have to do—well, you associate with people who are probably modern intellectuals, and you may well be one yourself. [Laughter.] Give me some of the beliefs of modern intellectuals, tell me what you know. You go to a cocktail party and there are modern intellectuals there, and what would be said? Just give me some of them. Yes? STUDENT: I heard yesterday while eating dinner with this boring girl, she said that Henry James is culture, layers and layers of culture, and that’s what she’s looking for, culture. MUDRICK: Very good, okay—she’s looking for culture (she’s not looking for that fourth altar [laughter].) Anybody else? . . . Oh come on now. STUDENT: All cultures are equal. MUDRICK: Yeah, that’s very good as a matter of fact. That’s the anthropological heresy—you know, all cultures are equal to each other, and when the Aztecs have human sacrifice, that’s just as good, relatively speaking, as a culture in which 95

Mudrick Transcribed there isn’t human sacrifice, because human sacrifice is one of those things which are all right, I mean if you like TEARING THE HEARTS OUT OF LIVING HUMAN BEINGS—it’s just something that one religion happens to practice! And there’s nothing wrong with it, everybody knows that, isn’t that so? Sure, you’ve all known anthropologists. And a great big fuss is made about literacy— this is particularly true of people whose only pride is in their own literacy. A great deal of fuss is made about literacy, BUT IN FACT THE MOST ILLITERATE ABORIGINE—HAS AS INTERESTING A CULTURE AS WESTERN CIVILIZATION. That’s so, isn’t it? That’s for sure. Well, you know it goes down to the—all the political convictions are for instance identifiably in a spectrum which can be called left-liberal, which means that you believe all these things and you don’t do anything at all about them— except occasionally you vote, something like that. And Reagan is a bad joke, and so on—you know all these opinions. And as a matter of fact what you can do is to appear at any one of these parties, take a drink, recite them, and then go home [laughter], because you know that you will have said everything that will be said at that gathering. STUDENT: Attitude toward books, too. MUDRICK: Attitude toward books. STUDENT: Something about knowing where all the books are and you don’t read them. MUDRICK: Yes, that’s it. You’re a kind of walking—well, you respect books but you’re not a pedant. One thing you’re not is a pedant. You know what the function of a book is, and you may not know something but you would know how to get to it. And of course the sneers at people who don’t know various obvious things. YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW THAT THAT FLICKERING OBJECT UP THERE IS A PLANET, RATHER THAN A FIXED STAR? YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT THE EVENING STAR VENUS IS NOT REALLY A STAR? WELL! I MEAN, I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO WITHDRAW IMMEDIATELY. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Also the attitude towards movies and things [inaudible]. It’s basically like that culture [inaudible] open-mindedness. The things that—we know that they’re better, but we have to keep an open mind, and we don’t say these things. MUDRICK: Well, isn’t Gibbon the modern intellectual in that respect? He knows exactly what is right about everything. He doesn’t have any doubt about what’s— and there are various things that might strike you as not being in the modern vein of intellectualism. But I think you can explain—for instance, he deplores the loss of manliness among the Romans: they weren’t citizen-soldiers anymore, and when they were citizen-soldiers things were great, and as soon as they stopped being citizen-soldiers things were no longer great. However, if you begin to count a little you realize that this is very strange. Rome itself is also an incredible phenomenon. I mean that this wretched little city could have dominated the world is almost beyond belief. I mean, Gibbon himself tells you that at the farthest extent of its size—and this was long after the Roman Republic, 96

Week Six this is in the time of Honorius—there were 1,200,000 inhabitants of the city of Rome. Well, the likelihood is—I don’t remember whether this is ever stated anywhere, but I cannot believe that in the time of Julius Caesar Rome had more than a third or a half million people. And this wretched little township dominated the known world! and had these armies and so on. Well, once of course the great push began—those very curious movements of large groups of people, huge tribal masses moving for instance from Asia—I mean if you think about that extraordinary series of events of tougher and tougher barbarians coming out of northeastern Asia [laughter], and pushing the slightly less tough barbarians toward Europe until they finally begin to overflow . . . One of the most remarkable incidents in history is that incredible decision made by the Emperor Valens to allow the Visigoths across the Danube into the Empire—it’s a marvelous epic notion. But when you think of what must have been finally an absolutely irresistible push, what you wonder (as Gibbon himself wonders) is, how the hell the Empire could have held out as long as it did! And what’s he talking about? I mean, this business of how, if they had all exercised daily, gone to Nautilus, and volunteered for the army, all 250,000 Romans—that is, when two million Visigoths are crossing the Danube [laughter]—what the hell is he talking about? I mean, talk about inevitability! How can you possibly resist—in fact, when Gibbon begins to explain how none of these awful things will happen again—do you remember, toward the very end? I’m sure nobody here got that far, but he’s explaining how in modern Europe none of these bad things can happen anymore, because in fact there is a Republic . . . This is an example of eighteenth-century optimism, and an interesting and justifiable kind of optimism. It’s cocktail-party optimism, and it’s what people would have been saying, oh, probably in the late 1920s—just before the stock-market crash, and before Hitler came on the scene and so on. There were all kinds of peace conferences and agreements about disarmament, and it was agreed that no civilized country would ever go to war again. We had arrived at a point where there was—just as Gibbon could say, There is now a Republic of Europe and there is no possibility of these awful things happening, because also, he said (and I’m sure some of you can recognize this argument), We now have such awful technological weapons in Europe that none of those barbarian tribes from Asia would they tried to invade we would blow them out of the water. [Laughter.] (It really is wonderful how these arguments recur.) So we’re all safe, and Europe is fine, we don’t have to worry—so don’t worry, people, there’s not going to be a decline and fall of Europe. It is interesting how when Gibbon’s guard gets down, how naïve he appears to be. Because ordinarily he seems to you this cynical, sophisticated character who is knocking Christianity, and chastising and chiding the Roman emperors for not being braver than they were. He does go on for me a little bit too long about how pusillanimous this guy is and how contemptible that guy is, and so on. I think when you’re an historian you ought to tread very carefully, talking about the bravery or cowardice of other people. And he really throws those words around all the time. In fact there doesn’t even seem to be a middle 97

Mudrick Transcribed way. You would think there was somebody who occasionally made a sensible decision to surrender, but he very seldom gives any such idea, and I think that’s a mistake. It’s very hard to write about history for that reason, and my own feeling is, if you’re going to write history—I love history, by the way. If I had it all to do over again I would start by writing history. And that’s the only thing really that I’m interested in writing now, and everything I write is more or less disguised history. You can write about the virtues of people, and you can certainly write with great admiration about their bravery, their courage, but you ought to be extremely careful trying to decide whether they’re cowardly or not. Because there are many human situations in which a decision to yield, to give up, to withdraw, is not really definable as cowardice in any serious sense, and I think Gibbon uses that notion much too freely. Yes? STUDENT: He contradicts himself—not that contradictions are wrong, but he has a lot of different information, and he doesn’t seem able at any one time to— assimilate it all. MUDRICK: No, I think that’s true. No, I think there is a lot of unassimilated material in Gibbon. In fact it’s surprising for a book which he brooded on for so long and which took him so long to write that there is—unassimilated is certainly one good word, and another which kept occurring to me as I was reading this this time . . . You know, I don’t think I had quite the same impression when I was reading the unabridged version. And I don’t know why. It may be that I was simply so overawed by the mere length and by all the footnotes that I didn’t think so, but I was more struck by a sense of disproportion this time than I ever had been before. It seemed to me that he wasn’t exercising a kind of elementary literary grace, that sometimes he was hurrying over things, and he would try to get away with summaries which were not really satisfactory summaries. By the way, there’s a surprising amount of awkward writing too, I think. There are times, it seems to me, when you find it hard to tell exactly whom he’s talking about—there will be problems for instance of pronoun reference. Also it’s hard to figure out what somebody is supposed to have done, or when he is supposed to have done it. It’s not as elegant writing as it is cracked up to be. It’s not really as careful as it ought to be and as it pretends to be. There’s a great show of accuracy and balance, but it isn’t really that accurate or that balanced. Yes? STUDENT: In Gibbon it seems like there was something so perfect in his death. The way he says that he’s going to live for another twenty-five years and die the next day—I just thought that was so perfect. [Inaudible] how pompous he was, and knowing it all, and yet so disjointed or so out of touch or something. MUDRICK: All right—no, I see what you’re getting at, and there is something in that, and this goes back to what I was saying about the, I guess what I would call the campus intellectual. Gibbon is a smart aleck. He’s about as good and intelligent and gifted as a smart aleck can be, but he doesn’t get over being a smart aleck. He’s a know-it-all—but he doesn’t know it all. Know-it-alls never know it all, and that’s one of their problems. A man like Johnson, who doesn’t

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Week Six profess to know it all, and who’s a terrible intellectual slob in many ways, and who reads hastily and only by inclination, and never in order to gather things together—but you know you can trust him in everything that he says about a particular—well, I have to be careful here because I don’t want to get involved in that problem of the Lives of the Poets. I really do exclude that, I think that’s a special case. But almost anything at all that he says about a writer—when he’s talking about a writer in the Life of Johnson, when he’s talking to Boswell or anybody else—that is pure gold, that material, because this is an absolutely firstclass mind, stored full of information and reading, which brings to bear all that information and all that reading on the text at hand. And even though Johnson by our standards, by the standards of the campus intellectual, is a much more biased and even bigoted man than Gibbon, he is much more trustworthy! Because for one thing you know exactly where he can’t be trusted. Gibbon can’t be trusted anywhere, partly because he’s fatally attracted to (I think) one of the most unfortunate developments of modern literature, which is I suppose what would have to be called modern irony. And modern irony is something which doesn’t really exist. Modern irony is a development as interestingly modern as sentimentality. Sentimentality was virtually invented in the eighteenth century, and so was modern irony. And if you want to know what modern irony is, the obvious text is Byron’s Don Juan. Yes? What modern irony—Jervey, yeah [calling on a student]. STUDENT: No no . . . MUDRICK: If anybody wants to say anything about modern irony I would be delighted. I don’t want to lecture on this—tell me about it. STUDENT: I was going to say, it’s just something I encounter sometimes in short stories and all over the place. You aren’t sure how much the author knows and how much he’s faking. It’s like when you’re talking to some people—the tone of voice, and small gestures that can be learned almost anywhere—you could pick them up from the street and then you use them, and it’s almost like a stock manner of presentation. And as a matter of fact the more you read, it becomes like an oval wheel, and you aren’t sure which side is up and which side is down, and how the person— MUDRICK: And that’s good, because one of the principal characteristics of modern irony is its universal destructiveness. That is, you don’t know where you are, and the author is essentially saying to you, If you like the joke I’m making, assume that what I’m attacking is not worth anything at all. If you don’t like it, assume that I’m just being mildly humorous, that I don’t really fully mean what I say. Chaucerian irony is not like that at all, and Jane Austen is not like that at all, because Jane Austen’s irony makes perfectly clear what is valued and what is not valued. But Gibbon-irony is really directed toward indicating to you the superiority of the person who’s talking—not really anything useful about what he’s saying but his own superiority. It’s essentially a kind of snottiness. Yes? STUDENT: It’s like it doesn’t identify its targets, really, it just sort of has targets.

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Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Or it assumes that everything is a target. I mean, the function of mind is to run down everything, because everything in the last analysis is contemptible. Life is contemptible, people are contemptible. Yes? STUDENT: When I was reading Heart of Darkness I just thought a lot of that was in earnest. But I get really confused when I think about when Jane Austen is being ironic because I hardly notice it. I mean I know that she’s being amusing or wry, but I don’t understand how come they’re both called ironic writers. MUDRICK: Because there’s more confusion about the term irony than about any other term in literary studies, because people don’t know what it is. I want to read you something like this. I was hoping that I could nail Gibbon on this irony thing, and finally (gods bless him) about ten pages from the end he gave it, he just gave it, and there is no excuse for this at all. You remember his last and rather impressive and dramatic representation of the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. So they finally managed to get into the city, and he’s describing the awful things that they do. And he says: In this common captivity the ranks of society were confounded, the ties of nature were cut asunder; and the inexorable soldier was careless of the father’s groans, the tears of the mother, and the lamentations of the children.k Okay? Nothing wrong with that, that’s perfectly all right. It’s a little stodgy— it’s almost Johnsonian. And Johnson could write something like that but you’d know—if you were reading Johnson you would know that Johnson could hear and feel every moan, and so there would be a kind of depth about that. But reading Gibbon, you know that part of this is rhetoric. But then he says (and this is unbelievable, really is unbelievable): The loudest in their wailings were the nuns . . . Well, now what’s the first thing that you would say in respect of that? STUDENT: How does he know? MUDRICK: HOW DOES HE KNOW? How does he know? But that’s not the end of it, it gets much worse: who were torn from the altar with naked bosoms, outstretched hands, and dishevelled hair . . . Well, he’s just making a Hollywood spectacular there, because he doesn’t know. I mean [laughs] this is just done with— STUDENT: There’s no footnote saying [inaudible]. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Penguin, 1980), ed. Dero A. Saunders, p. 680. All italics in the passages that follow are Mudrick’s emphases. k 

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Week Six MUDRICK: This is the naked corpse, and so on—okay. But then (and this is pure Gibbon): and we should piously believe that few could be tempted to prefer the vigils of the harem to those of the monastery. Listen to that, and hear what he is saying! “We should piously believe” (that is, if we were decent, we Christians [laughter]) we ought to believe (if we weren’t awful jerks) “that few” (that is, none of us—few, you understand, only a few) “could be tempted to prefer the vigils of the harem to those of the monastery.” You don’t understand what he’s saying? STUDENT: He’s saying most of the nuns would rather be in the harem. MUDRICK: Well, he’s saying that’s what we should believe—whether it’s true or not I don’t venture to say. Because, you see, I’m the detached observer, I understand that I’m superior to everybody, including those nuns who are being raped and tortured and murdered in Constantinople four hundred years ago. And I’m sitting here in my study with my hydrocele [laughter], my servant coming in from time to time with a pot of tea and sherbet, and so on—and you can hear him giggling [giggles] and so on. Now this is what we ought to believe. Now there are probably some among us who would say [whispering] that nuns preferred the harem to the convent! I mean, anybody who writes that is a pig! At the moment that he’s writing that, he’s a pig. There’s just no excuse for that at all, no justification for that at all. And that is modern irony, that’s a very good instance of modern irony. What do we know? What does he demonstrate there? First thing he knows is that no nun is serious. [Laughs.] I mean everybody knows that nuns can’t be serious. You couldn’t become a nun for reasons of conviction, it’s just some crazy fluke—your family wanted you to be a nun. Or a travelling convent came through town [laughter] and you decided that you liked it. Just an aberration. Not only that— you’ve got to remember that nuns are primarily women, and you know what women are like! [Laughter.] You know that if a woman is given a choice between a harem and a monastery (monastery by the way is used like convent here), she would really choose a harem, because women are hot numbers anyway. (That’s part of it—that’s part of it.) STUDENT: Some of the them are. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: You’re correcting me on the basis of your own experience. STUDENT: No, I’m just . . . trying to be ironic. MUDRICK: Just wondered. I like to find out on what authority you people make generalizations like this. You know, I read in the Sunday Parade magazine that in seven out of ten sexual experiences that women have, they have orgasms. That’s according to the latest study. It’s also true that Jesus is going to come down for the Second Coming next Tuesday [laughter] (just before this class). I love statistics, I really love statistics. I love the polls that come up with this kind of information. Well anyway, that’s apparently the sort of poll that Gibbon took shortly before he wrote this sentence [laughing]. 101

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: He asked the nuns. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: Ask the nuns, that’s right. I’ve spent my life among campus intellectuals, or at least two-thirds of it, and I think it’s a phenomenon that you should learn to recognize, all of you. For one thing most of you have spent several years in this company, and you may yourselves well be such people. And I am myself, of course, a campus intellectual. I mean I am. I do my best to correct as many of the stigmata as possible, but it’s well to think hard about the Socratic injunction, Know thyself. And you’ve got to know what it is that you take for granted, what you think of as of course true. Because of course anything you take for granted of that kind is almost certainly not true. Especially if it’s not shared by ninety percent of the general population it is almost certainly not true. And what you’re harboring is just a kind of snottiness and snobbery, and a very uninteresting kind of snobbery too. And it’s a good idea to try to identify that quality, that cast of mind. It’s a kind of cant, and it gets us back to what Johnson said to Boswell: Clear your mind of cant. It doesn’t matter how many forms you adhere to. You can say “Sincerely yours,” you can say “I am your humble servant” in every letter you write, but don’t think those things. Don’t allow those things to penetrate your mind. Don’t allow yourselves to think things like seven-out-of-ten, or nuns are fundamentally hot numbers who are only waiting to be initiated into harems, and so on. (That’s kind of extreme, but it’s Gibbon after all, I didn’t [inaudible].) And I think it’s a good idea to learn to recognize that kind of mind, and to understand the difference between, say, those biases, those prejudices characteristic of a mind like Johnson’s, and even those sillinesses characteristic of a mind like Boswell’s on the one hand, and on the other hand that kind of deadening, campus-intellectual set of convictions, this sort of secular religion, which is infinitely less interesting than Christianity, and which of course makes Christianity one of its obvious targets. And Gibbon, for all his gifts, he’s one of them.

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Week Seven 6 November 1984

MUDRICK: I simply don’t think there is any way of studying literature without tackling everything that’s written in the languages that you can read with comparative fluency. I suppose the only exception that I would make (and I don’t make it for myself, by the way) is material dealing with the upper-most mathematical reaches of, say, physics. I try to read that stuff, I’m a subscriber to Scientific American, and I look through every article that appears in that magazine, and I make about as much sense of it as most of you make out of Hume. But still I try it, and I think it’s a very good idea to keep trying it. I don’t think there is any alternative, if you’re a serious student of literature, to trying to read everything. I don’t know, as a matter of fact, of a better definition of a person who’s seriously interested in literature. A person who is seriously interested in literature tries to read everything, and is interested to try to read everything in the languages in which he reads with a certain degree of fluency. I know that’s true for me in English; it’s also true for me in French, I mean if I see anything in French. I will very often not go out of my way to look for something in French, but if something turns up I will read it, and I think that’s the way you have to be. Otherwise you’re not really seriously interested in literature and you’re just wasting your time, and eventually you will punish other people for the fact that you have taken up a subject that you’re not really interested in. Since all of you know that there are enough such people ensconced in the job already, you are doing a disservice to the human race by adding yourself to the number. And there’s nothing bad about not being interested in literature. There are many people who live long happy lives without being interested in literature—or even music [smiling]. It’s a deprivation. STUDENT: Are you still as fluent in French as much as you were, say, when you studied it in college? MUDRICK: As far as reading is concerned I’m more fluent. I virtually can’t speak it, because speaking is one thing that you cannot let go of. I grew up for instance with Yiddish being spoken to me all the time, I mean up until the time I was twenty. Certainly at home Yiddish was spoken more often to me than English, and I was stupid enough, and snobbish enough, not to speak it in reply most of the time—I was the only one in the family who didn’t (I was the youngest). But still I could speak it, and I could understand every word. And moreover I read it 103

Mudrick Transcribed fluently. I would read the Yiddish newspapers, and I could read of course all the Hebrew texts, that is, the sacred texts. But I stopped it as soon as I left home, and I didn’t speak it anymore. And though I can still understand it—after all, twenty years of growing up with it, it tends to stay with you. So I can still understand somebody speaking Yiddish, but I can’t speak it myself at all. The French, I simply didn’t keep up the speaking of it. The one occasion when I tried hard to speak it in France—I was in France for a couple of weeks (it was 1970), and just for kicks I tried to speak it, and it took me about a week to get to the point where I could speak with some degree of ease. But I read it very fluently, I read it with no trouble—except colloquial French, I simply don’t know the language. I know formal French, but I don’t know for instance street French. I mean it’s as foreign to me, say, as some of Jervey’s dialect in his stories. But there’s some French of course—one of the great things about French, if you have any grounding in it at all, is that some of the greatest writers write the very purest and most straightforward style—somebody like Voltaire, who is easier to read I think than any other great writer who ever lived—he has a clearer style. It’s almost impossible to misunderstand Voltaire. I’m sure that some of you, having just read Hume, are delighted to hear that [laughter]—or tried to read Hume. And I have to say that certainly the one volume that we’ve had this quarter (this is true, isn’t it? I’ll say it, and then you’ll contest with it) I think it’s the only volume that doesn’t fall under the advice that I tried to give you at the beginning of the quarter, which was, don’t try to read every word, don’t try to understand everything. Skim, if necessary. You obviously can’t do that with something which is a kind of landmark in skeptical philosophy, in which he won’t allow you to fall back on what he calls nature, that is, the habits of thinking and feeling which you develop simply as a result of growing up as a member of the human race, and conducting conversations with other people on ordinary matters. You’re being required to think in ways which are different and, I think it’s fair to say, more rigorous than you customarily do. And the rigor is of a kind which keeps rejecting nature, which keeps challenging the bases of your associations with most people, and the basis of your feeling about language. But it’s good that you should do that from time to time too. If you don’t do it then you simply don’t stretch your mind. And I didn’t see any point in trying to warn you of this in advance, since I think if you had any idea what you were going to have to put up with, there probably would have been a little rebellion from some of you. I don’t mean to be philosophical in a way that Hume of course would reject with contempt—that is, the notion of philosophy. (It is wonderful to have the kind of confidence that Hume has with his philosophy—that is, dismissing ancient philosophy as a waste of time—people like Aristotle and Plato and Democritus and Protagoras—such trash. [Laughter.]) And of course, you know the general use of a word like philosophy to mean approximately, what, emotional prejudices—something like that—which of course is not what Hume means by philosophy. Hume means by philosophy, as a matter fact, the literal meaning of 104

Week Seven the word, which means “love of truth.” It comes from the Greek roots meaning “love of truth.” And he’s interested in finding out what is really so. Okay. Does anybody have any questions about the paper? Because it’s due in two weeks, and I would like to have some, I really would. Somebody eating soup? What kind of soup? STUDENT: Minestrone. MUDRICK: Oh, vegetable soup. STUDENT: It’s got a beef base. MUDRICK: Probably . . . . Come on now. Or would somebody simply say something about the paper that he’s writing? I mean, not necessarily a question but a statement. Yes? STUDENT: Are there any real specifications that you want? MUDRICK: You’ve taken classes with me long enough to know that that question doesn’t make much sense. However, I’m delighted you said something. [Laughter.] I can use all the help I can get. Yes? STUDENT: I’m writing a paper on Gibbon, and I was reading Gibbon and I’m feeling a little more lost when I’m reading him, so I’m— MUDRICK: What do you mean, lost? STUDENT: I read it, and the more I read it the more confused I become about— MUDRICK: But tell us how you become confused. STUDENT: I get no perspective of what’s going on. MUDRICK: You mean you get no notion of what kind of man he is, or what kind of attitude he has toward things? STUDENT: No, I get that feeling. I’m more interested in Rome itself when I’m reading the book. I don’t get a feeling of what is going on. MUDRICK: Can anybody clarify that for me? because I’m not sure— STUDENT: It’s detailed but yet— MUDRICK: Are you talking about the Decline and Fall? STUDENT: Yeah. So I’m reading other books to get more of an overview. STUDENT: Yeah, you have to go look for other things because he doesn’t give the information very—suddenly he’ll say, yes, and they had this many beefcakes. [Laughter.] Procopius was a wonderful man, and at the same time you can’t believe his anecdotes too closely [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Well, it is an astonishing—I think if I was surprised by anything reading it this time, at least in this particular edition, I was surprised by a kind of chaotic quality which I didn’t remember. Well of course we all start with prejudices, and certainly all of my prejudices when I was young were on Gibbon’s side, it was very exciting to me. I remember the first time I read—I have the original Modern Library Giant edition, which nobody here has, I bet, because the Modern Library edition which came out later was in three volumes: I have the original two-volume set, and I read it in that. And it was very exciting to me, I mean the notion that somebody could challenge established religion that directly, make fun of it, and also distance the ancient world in that way. Because the ancient world for me had been populated up until that time with remote and indistinct 105

Mudrick Transcribed and rather godlike, or at least mythical and legendary figures. I remember, obviously, a passage that I read over and over again (it’s funny how big a thrill—it gives you an idea of how things are changed) but I remember reading that passage about Theodora, oh, nine thousand times, something like that—well, at least twenty. STUDENT: But the thing is, I think she’s more interesting—I think all those people are more interesting, and Gibbon doesn’t bring it out. MUDRICK: He sometimes suggests the ways in which they are interesting so as to make you want to read somebody else about them—yes, I think that’s true. There is almost never in Gibbon a satisfactory full-length portrait of anybody. So that if you come to something like the representation of Julian you think, aha, this is a guy he really likes, and he’ll give him a good—but he doesn’t really. It’s mostly complimentary words, epithets, and every once in a while he seems to lose his way. I’ll tell you, I got a very strange reaction to the book this time: I don’t think Gibbon is a very good writer. And he’s not a highly accomplished writer. He’s a person who happened on a marvelous subject. It’s just one of those crazy historical instances. If you think for instance of the difference between him and Hume (which most of you are not prepared to appreciate), Hume has also struck on a very original subject, but it’s an original subject of course which requires enormous intellectual powers and intellectual exertion. And however much you understood what he was trying to say, I think you do understand that he is making extraordinary exertions and that he is genuinely interested in arriving at truths which nobody has attempted to arrive at in the same way or with the same intellectual exertion. But I don’t particularly feel intellectual exertion in Gibbon. He happened, by an extraordinary combination of luck and personal and historical circumstances, on the greatest of all historical subjects. And he was certainly a man who liked to read. If you want to talk about anybody who fulfills the prescription which I was making at the beginning of this period (I’m a little embarrassed to have to say so) Gibbon is probably a better instance of that than anybody else I’ve ever known, and I don’t much like him. He obviously read everything. Everything that he came across, certainly everything that was remotely associated with the subject that he was interested in, he read. He was a genuinely learned man—he was a bookworm! For him the world consisted of libraries full of books. And I know what that feels like, because that was certainly true for me when I was young. I mean the other worlds being excluded because I didn’t have access to them, I simply chose this. And moreover it’s possible to make an astonishingly happy life out of that world, even though you are living that life as a result of being excluded from those areas that you would prefer. For instance if I had had a choice I would much rather have been a great athlete or a great lady-killer. And I was a pretty good athlete, but not of anything near professional caliber. And the ladies didn’t share my enthusiasm. [Laughter.] So I had no alternative—I had libraries of books. And that’s another thing, you see—why I think all explanations about what terrible things are done to you when you’re young, and so this brutalizes and cripples you for the rest 106

Week Seven of you life—such explanations are always very partial. I mean I could make the most pathetic statement about my wretched early years. [Laughter.] And another thing that I for instance was mad about were movies. I went to movies all the time, sometimes five, six evenings a week, because it cost ten cents at the neighborhood theaters at the time. And I was absolutely dazzled by the heroes and heroines of the ’thirties in the movies—I mean people like Carol Lombard, Claudette Colbert .  .  . Irene Dunne (my God!). And I was very happy, sitting there watching these things [laughing]. And when people talk about things like vicarious pleasure and all the terrible things this does to you, it’s ridiculous, I mean pleasure is pleasure. And especially when you’re young, you don’t make those distinctions. It’s like the arguments that are used about growing up in ghettos, and all the awful things that happen to you and the sense of deprivation—once again, you don’t feel the sense of deprivation. And it’s not even that you’re stupid or that you’re excluded—you know perfectly well that there are other things. I mean certainly, looking at the movie world of the ’thirties, you knew all about luxury—you knew about great big cars and fancy dinners and so on. But I didn’t have a sense of deprivation watching them. In fact I was rather delighted to participate [laughter]—you know, sitting there in the movie theater, and certainly reading the books and having access to the libraries. I give this to you as an instance that you must never allow yourself to be misled by the notion that happiness can be defined in very simple and usually highly materialistic ways, including in materialism the notion of sexual gratification and masses of friends with whom you share all sorts of interesting connections—all that is bullshit. I remember one of the things that I was irritated by in Shakespeare fairly early, when Macbeth is brooding about the fact that he’s led a wicked life, and this has deprived him of all the satisfactions of middle and old age like “troops of friends,” and I can see these wretched cocktail parties where people mill around, or maybe barbecues. That is, it’s really an image which is taken out of TV commercials—essentially Shakespeare’s mind is working at the level of a TV commercial: Isn’t it wonderful to have all these friends! Once again, I’ve never seen that it was so wonderful to have all these friends. For one thing it takes up all your time [laughs] so you can’t do anything else. Mostly when you’re with people you like, you scrape over the same material over and over again, it’s so dull! [laughter] and boring! All those notions are not really serious notions about what constitutes happiness. I remember my oldest brother, who eventually got a lot of money and started travelling, and it was clear that he was travelling—he became a kind of tourist—because he understood that this was what you did with your money, and he obviously was miserable. [Laughter.] He wasn’t interested in buildings [laughs] or cities. I’m not much either, and I know when I travel . . . for me it depends a great deal, almost entirely as a matter of fact, on whom I’m with, I mean the one or two people that I enjoy being with. And then I could be with them anywhere, I mean that’s fine, unless it were extremely physically uncomfortable [laughter], I mean I wouldn’t want to be on a trip to the moon or anything. Even 107

Mudrick Transcribed nowadays, when jet planes and so on are so fast, I still don’t like the job of travelling itself, it’s very annoying. Well, I do have material here that I want to look at. Yes? STUDENT: When you talk about yourself or Gibbon, you talk about people who did one thing partly because they were excluded from other things. One of the nicest things about Hume is, he seemed to have all sorts of choices—that is, he seemed to do what he did just because—he went right toward it out of a kind of love for it, which didn’t involve being excluded—at least that’s what he seemed to feel about it. MUDRICK: I’m not sure I follow you. You mean that he for instance was interested in being a philosopher. STUDENT: Well, you read books partly because you were excluded from other things— MUDRICK: Oh, I see—whereas Hume is not like that. STUDENT: He could do anything he wanted, this was the only thing he wanted to do. MUDRICK: Yes. And of course it’s perfectly possible that it was really the only thing that I wanted to do. [Laughs.] You see, you never can tell because you can’t relive your life. It may be that I simply thought I wanted to do the other things because you were told over and over again by society that these were things that you wanted to do. STUDENT: And it’s perfectly possible that he was excluded from other things and just thought he— MUDRICK: That’s right, and just thought that he wanted to do that, and it doesn’t matter. As long as he enjoyed himself [laughing]. There’s a funny comparison that Burke makes between Boswell and Gibbon at one of the meetings of the Literary Club which bothers Boswell a good deal. This is a meeting, and this is—really, it’s astonishing. If you think of the people who are together on an occasion like this (this is from the journal itself so you get the real names): Burke, Boswell, Gibbon, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson—they’re all just sitting around talking. Now I must admit that if it were possible to run into people like that, I mean if these were your friends, I would be interested in attending a gathering of that group, say once every two, three weeks, something like that—that would be fine. And I still think it’s the most astonishing combination of people who were ever associated this closely and this often. I don’t know of any other group that represented such an extraordinary constellation of talents—and really talents of different kinds. I’m just going to read Boswell’s [searching for the passage] . . . and Boswell reports in the journal at much greater length than he ever does in the Life of Johnson, because Malone is always saying cut, cut, cut, and only give what Johnson has to say, but here he gives what—oh, and of course, Sheridan—that is, the playwright—The School for Scandal and . . . what the hell is the other one? STUDENT: The Rivals? MUDRICK: No. Yes—yes. Burke maintained that emigration made a country more populous. GIBBON. “That sounds very like a paradox.” BURKE. “Exportation of men 108

Week Seven like all other commodities, makes more be produced.” JOHNSON. “But there would be more people were there not emigration, provided these people have food.” BURKE. “No. Leave a few breeders and you’ll have more.” JOHNSON. “Nay, there will be more if there are more breeders. Thirty cows in good pasture will produce more calves than ten cows, provided they have good bulls.” BURKE. “There are bulls enough in Ireland.”l (That’s a joke by the way—you know what an Irish bull is. Well, look it up if you don’t.) JOHNSON (smiling) “So I should think, Sir, from your argument.” BOSWELL. “You said men like other commodities encouraged by exportation. But a bounty is given for corn, none for men. Though indeed, those who go gain by it.” SHERIDAN. “But the bounty on exportation of corn is paid at home.” BURKE. “That same thing.” JOHNSON. “No, Sir.” SHERIDAN. “A man who stays gains nothing by his neighbor’s emigrating.” BOSWELL. “I can understand that by emigration more people will be produced in a country. But country not more populous. For they issue from it. (You notice by the way that Boswell is occasionally omitting connecting words which he can fill in later, but they never were. I mean occasionally it’s ungrammatical in the sense that a verb is omitted.) “There is a flow of people. It is an encouragement to have children to know that they can get living by emigration.” SHERIDAN. “Yes, if there were an emigration of children under six years old. But they don’t emigrate till they’d do for themselves some way at home.” FORDYCE [This is a famous doctor and lecturer on medicine.] “The most unhealthy countries, where most destructive diseases, most populous: Egypt, Bengal.” JOHNSON. “Countries most populous have most terrible diseases. That’s the proposition.” What’s so astonishing to me about this—I’m sure you don’t make much sense out of it, but consider the intellectual effort required to get down this stuff! I mean Boswell is sitting there, he doesn’t know any shorthand, he’s participating in a conversation himself—you can’t really be writing this fast. Moreover you can’t give other people the impression that you are taking down everything they are saying, and apparently Boswell did not—he carried most of it in his head. Anyway . . . Mr. Sheridan, talking of eloquence, said, “Don’t mean to flatter, Mr. Burke; when posterity read one of your speeches it will be difficult to Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778 (McGraw-Hill, 1970), ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle, p. 235. l 

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Mudrick Transcribed believe you took so much pains, knowing for certain no effect, not one vote gained by it.” —because Burke is the great politician of the age, the great political orator, as you’ll find out when you read the volume for next week [Reflections on the Revolution in France]. BURKE. “Waiving your compliment to me, I shall say in general that it is very well worth while to speak. A man who has vanity speaks to display his talents. And if a man speaks well, he gradually forms a consequence in the general opinion which sooner or later will have its political reward. Besides, though not one vote is gained, it has effect. We see, though an act passes, it is modelled, it is softened in such a manner that we see plainly the Minister has been told that Members are so sensible of its injustice or absurdity from what they have heard that it must be altered.” JOHNSON. “And, Sir, there is a gratification of pride. ‘Though we cannot out-vote them, we’ll out-argue them. They shall not do wrong without its being shown both to themselves and the world.’” BURKE. “The House of Commons is a mixed body. I except the Minority, which I shall hold to be pure. But I take just the Majority. It is a mass by no means pure, but neither is it wholly corrupt, though there is a proportion of corruption in it. There are many Members who will not go all lengths; there are many who are in Parliament only to keep up the consequence of their families.” (check end) Now what I’m trying to get you to listen for, because this is extraordinary in a number of ways: these people are all speaking completely characteristically, and they are speaking in a way that Boswell himself would never speak in, in a thousand years. He is not inventing their arguments—he couldn’t invent their arguments. These are of course the great men of the age, and Burke is a very closely reasoning speaker. And really, to me it’s a kind of—if Hume will pardon me, it’s a kind of miracle [laughs], because I don’t understand how he does it. I don’t think it’s ever been done before or since, certainly not when reporting the conversation of such extraordinary and such extraordinarily different men. JOHNSON. “We are all more or less governed by interest. But interest will not make us do anything whatever. In a case which admits of doubt, we try to think on the side for our interest, and come to act so. But the subject must admit of diversity of colouring. It must receive a colour on that side. In the House of Commons there are Members who will not vote what is grossly unjust or absurd. No, Sir, there must always be right enough, or appearance of right, to keep wrong in countenance.” BOSWELL. “There is surely a majority who have places or want them.” 110

Week Seven And Burke says something which is not completed, and Boswell as a matter of fact gives a substitution, or gives an abbreviation which allows him to indicate what it is that he wants to write down later. BOSWELL. “Well, now, let us take the common phrase ‘place hunters.’ I thought they had hunted without regard to anything in the way, just as the huntsman (the Minister) leads, looking only to the prey.” GIBBON. “But taking your metaphor, you know that in hunting there are few so desperately keen as to follow without reserve. Some do not choose to leap ditches and hedges and risk their necks, or gallop over steeps, or even to dirty themselves in bogs and mire.” BOSWELL. “Well, I’m glad there are some good quiet moderate hunters.” Burke said in any body of men in England he would have been in the minority. He always has been in minority. SIR JOSHUA. “House of Commons like a private company. How seldom is anybody convinced. Passion and pride rise” —which also is an interesting comment. That is, when you’re having a discussion or an argument with anybody, or in a group, it’s extremely rare that anybody’s mind is changed about anything. So it’s curious that people even bother to argue. Sheridan asked what would be consequence if Minister never spoke. Burke said he’d soon go out. It appeared on trial this session. We talked of Irish language. Burke said it was not primitive. It was Teutonic, a mixture of the northern tongues. Much English in it. Dr. Johnson said, might be radically. But he said English and High Dutch had no similarity to the eye, though radically same. And they talk about Dutch for a while (that is, Johnson and Burke). Burke talked of Scotland; said he’d be glad to see a dissolution of the Union—not between England and Scotland, but between Scotland and Scotland: they stick so close. No independency can be. He could not be for little proprietors against united body of great ones, could we but see a division among the great ones. Well, there’s a lot of this, which Boswell, if he decides to use it, expands, and it appears in the Life. But you get some idea of how Boswell was taking notes, or eventually wrote down this material, making some kinds of abbreviations or abridgements. Here’s the exchange about Gibbon and Boswell: Talking of the similarity between Erse and Irish, Burke said, “They’re as near as a Scotsman and an Englishman: as Mr. Boswell and Mr. Gibbon.” I, it seems, was off my guard and started as if not pleased 111

Mudrick Transcribed [laughter], which Burke, Sir Joshua, and Gibbon all observed; and then there was some amusement to see Burke in fault and se tirer d’embarras. That is, people are amused to see that Burke has made a social gaffe: he’s compared two people and one of them has shown that he doesn’t wish to be compared to the other, so Burke has to think of something to say. “No, no,” said he, “Mr. Boswell speaks very good English.” —which is a tricky way to do it, you see. That is, he’s getting out very cleverly. He’s saying that Boswell can’t represent the Scots because he speaks such good English—we have to have some Scotsman who doesn’t speak as good English as Boswell. But that’s not the point—Boswell doesn’t want to be compared to Gibbon at all. “Let it be Mr. Boswell and my Lord Advocate, or Mr. Gibbon and my Lord Advocate.” GIBBON. “Or David Hume.” BOSWELL. “With all my heart: Mr. Gibbon and David Hume.” [Laughter.] And one of the most interesting points about this kind of exchange is that you get a very different sense of Boswell than you get most of the time. Much of the time you get the impression of this busy little man buzzing around and trying to get somebody to say something important, or reporting . . . That’s a smart man! And of course, he really strikes a blow, because what he’s saying is, yes, I disapprove of Hume as much as I disapprove of Gibbon, and they are two people who should be in the same arena together. And indeed they are, of course—that is, they’re both infidels, as both Boswell and Johnson would call them. And here’s something that will please a lot of you. This is one of the noble lords that was there: Lord Ossory said he absolutely could not understand Hume sometimes. [Laughs.] Talking of the House of Commons as of men in general, Dr. Johnson said, “As ’tis said of greatest liar that he tells more truth than falsehood, so it may be said of worst man that he does more good than ill.” STUDENT: Who said that? MUDRICK: Johnson. Which is true. And it’s a very interesting point as a matter of fact, that it’s almost impossible to be wicked enough to do more evil than good. STUDENT: It seems like I read that someplace other than— MUDRICK: Yes—you read it because Johnson said it, and it’s in the Life. STUDENT: But I don’t know if I read it in the Life or someplace else. MUDRICK: That’s my impression anyway. 112

Week Seven It was proposed by Burke that as Dean of Derry’s hogshead of claret was near done, he should be written to to send another of the same. “Let the expression be a happy ambiguity, so that we may have the chance that he sends it as a present. Sir Joshua must write in name of Club.” I like that too. That is, they have this huge barrel of claret and it’s almost finished, and it’s been sent to them by a member of the Club, the Dean of Derry, a man named Thomas Barnard. And Burke says, Let’s see if we can get it for nothing, so let’s write the letter in such a way that it will be ambiguous. You know that trick? of trying to make a request in such a way that if the person misunderstands it in the right way you’ll get something for nothing, but if he understands it all too well—that is, you’re trying to get something for nothing—he really can’t blame the way that you’ve asked it because it permits itself to be understood as, Of course I meant that I would pay for it! [Laughter.] So all these great men of the eighteenth century are going to put their heads together [laughter] to see whether they can get a freebie. And Johnson says: I am willing to offer my services as secretary. [This gets into the Life, of course.] SIR JOSHUA. “As many as are for Dr. Johnson secretary, hold up your hands. Carried unanimously.” BOSWELL. “He’ll be Dictator.” JOHNSON. “No, the Club is to dictate to me. I am only to write for wine; and I’m quite disinterested, as I drink none. I can’t be suspected of forging the application. I am only humble scribe.” BURKE. “Then you shall prescribe.” BOSWELL. “Very well. ‘Tis the first pun today.” GIBBON. “No, the bore and the bull.” BOSWELL. “True. No, that is only a play of words, not a pun.” JOHNSON. “Were I Dictator, you should have no wine.” BURKE. “Then you should not have me for your master of horse, your magister equitum.” JOHNSON. “No, you should have no wine. It would be my business cavere [and then he quotes Latin, which means, ‘To take heed that the State suffer no harm’], and wine dangerous. Rome was ruined by luxury.” And here too, you see, there’s a little nudge at Gibbon, who according to the general opinion believes that Rome was ruined by Christianity. So, there’s that wonderful kind of little by-play—it’s also wonderful that these men could talk to each other. So you get the wrong impression if you think—you remember that Boswell tells you that Johnson was rather unhappy as the Club expanded and people were introduced into it with whom he didn’t have intellectual sympathy. But this didn’t prevent Johnson from talking, and it certainly didn’t prevent people like Gibbon and Boswell from talking. They all talked, they apparently talked a blue streak all the time. And they were of course trying to outsmart each other all the time too, so that you get two very interesting instances of—I mean, that Boswell is competing on equal terms with Gibbon when they’re getting out of that comment that Burke makes, and Gibbon 113

Mudrick Transcribed says—or you remember it was Gibbon who suggested Hume as the Scotsman with whom he was to be compared, and I think you have to believe that that’s one of those innocent remarks which, even for the man himself, carry more meaning than he wants it to carry. He doesn’t want to be thought of as somebody who is to be compared with somebody simply because they’re both infidels—he’s just trying to think of another important Scotsman. And Boswell says, “With all my heart: Mr. Gibbon and David Hume.” That’s it. If you want a comparison, there you have it. They’re interesting people. Now I’m going to read to you what is the most interesting passage in this volume, I mean to humanize Hume a little bit more. [A student groans.] No? don’t think I should? This is Boswell’s account of his last interview with Hume. Boswell of course was fascinated by the notion of an unbeliever dying. And Hume was decent enough to die at great length [laughter] and was freely available to all visitors. He was an apparently extremely good-natured man, and of course Boswell lived in Edinburgh too and he knew Hume very well. So he visited him while he was dying and asked him all sorts of questions—this is the more typical Boswell, this is the Boswell that you’re all familiar with. On Sunday forenoon the 7 of July 1776, being too late for church, I went to see Mr. David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just a-dying. I found him alone, in a reclining posture in his drawing-room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of grey cloth with white metal buttons, and a kind of scratch wig. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present. [He was very fat up until his last illness.] He had before him Dr. Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric. He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end. I think these were his words.m Then I love this next sentence, it’s one of the marvelous and absolutely inimitable Boswellian sentences: I know not how I contrived to get the subject of immortality introduced. [Laughter.] Here’s this guy lying there dying, you come to visit him and you say, Little by little I brought up the topic of immortality. [Laughs.] Yes? STUDENT: Is that comparable to like, Seeing as how I had the great man at hand . . . [Laughs.] MUDRICK: It hadn’t occurred to me—what do you think about immortality, kiddo? He said he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke. I asked him if he was not religious when Boswell in Extremes, p. 11.

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Week Seven he was young. He said he was, and he used to read The Whole Duty of Man; that he made an abstract from the catalogue of vices at the end of it, and examined himself by this, leaving out murder and theft and such vices as he had no chance of committing, having no inclination to commit them. Does that ring a bell for you? That’s his notion of necessity. You remember when he’s talking about necessity? Well, one or two of you may remember. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Can you reread it? MUDRICK: Okay. [Rereads the last sentence.] You remember when he’s discussing—he does this at least twice, because he very often repeats his arguments (as . . . some of you must have noted). He says that if you argue for liberty, what he calls the doctrine of liberty, then you can’t hold anybody responsible for anything because you have no notion of character. If for instance a person commits a murder, he could just as easily not have committed a murder, by the doctrine of liberty, because he has freedom of choice. Consequently since that murder was not committed by the man in character—it was only, so to speak, an accident—you can’t hold him responsible for it. The reason that you hold a man responsible for a murder, or any other act, is that his character necessitates his doing it. Now I know this is very tricky, I’m not going to argue (and I don’t mind later arguing all these things) but it is an interesting notion. It is certainly true that in the eyes of the law—even in the eyes of the law—we tend to consider the sin—or the crime, I should say—much less significant, or much less severely punishable, if it’s committed by a person who was acting, as we say, uncharacteristically. Isn’t that so? Of course it is. STUDENT: The notion of motive is connected to that. Why did you want to do it? If you can’t connect the motive with your character and your wishes— MUDRICK: Yes—yes. But it’s not only your wishes, because it could be a passing wish, it could be a transient wish. If you think of motive as deriving entirely from character, then of course you’re arguing right along with Hume, who says that that makes the act necessary, because you have the kind of character which produces the kind of motive which results in the murder of somebody or other. And I understand that. I mean if somebody says to me for instance, you’re a good man because you’ve never committed a murder, what I would have to say is, the idea never even occurred to me as a joke. Or rather it could only occur to me as a joke, because I don’t think literally that I could commit a murder. Now we needn’t go into things like, for instance, if you were a soldier would you kill somebody in war? Of course I would, because I don’t have convictions of that kind. That’s a different matter. In effect war is a game in which the rules of life don’t apply, something like that—at least for most people—and essentially what you’re doing is playing tin soldiers, or maybe some kind of computer game, and the fact that it happens to be a human life is really irrelevant. But in the ordinary circumstances of life it seems to me that the argument that Hume uses here is interesting, and I’m delighted that it’s characteristic. 115

Mudrick Transcribed So do you understand that? I’m very pleased to have any illustration of Hume’s notions. Now of course there are other problems there. What Hume is saying over and over again when he talks about necessity and liberty is that really we all agree, and the notion that there is disagreement about this is just a misunderstanding of terms—he says that over and over. I don’t think that’s what bothers us. What bothers us, really, is a notion that at one point he dismisses (I’ve forgotten now how he dismisses it), which is the notion that if things are necessary, then they have to go back all the way to the first cause, God, and everything that has happened since then has been determined. He tries to get rid of that, but it’s pretty hard to get rid of if you work with the doctrine of necessity. [End of first side of tape.] Well, I think that also, religions depend to a very large extent on inducing the conviction that not only are they right, that people who adhere to it are right, but that everybody else is wrong, and probably dangerously wrong. And of course, convictions of this kind necessarily lead to persecution of outsiders, there’s no way around it. There’s certainly never been a religion that I know of which didn’t persecute outsiders if it had the chance. Obviously this is one of the reasons that tolerance is a good thing. Tolerance is not a good thing because it permits religions to get along with each other; it’s a good thing because the few people who aren’t escape death and mutilation. I misstated that. [Inaudible] was thinking of, the trouble is, two thoughts crossed in my mind. One of the books that I reviewed on Voltaire many years ago—a crazy book by some sort of nutty American fundamentalist, who was sneering at Voltaire for preferring England because there, there were many religious sects in competition, whereas in France the Roman Catholics had everything, and so of course they were permitted to persecute. And they were not only permitted, they went out of their way to persecute everybody who didn’t conform to Roman Catholicism, even other Christians—maybe especially other Christians, like the Huguenots. In any case, obviously for somebody like Voltaire, it’s not that he believed that twenty-three religions were more true than one; it was just that when they were fighting each other, in the meantime the little guys could escape. It wasn’t like little guys being trampled by the twenty-three—quite the reverse—the little guy didn’t matter anymore. I had a strong curiosity to be satisfied if he persisted in disbelieving a future state even when he had death before his eyes. I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state. He answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn; and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist for ever. That immortality, if it were at all, must be general; that a great proportion of the human race has hardly any intellectual qualities; that a great proportion dies in infancy before being 116

Week Seven possessed of reason; yet all these must be immortal; that a porter who gets drunk by ten o’clock with gin must be immortal; that the trash of every age must be preserved, and that new universes must be created to contain such infinite numbers. This appeared to me an unphilosophical objection, and I said, “Mr. Hume, you know spirit does not take up space.” [Laughter.] I may illustrate what he last said by mentioning that in a former conversation with me on this subject he used pretty much the same mode of reasoning, and urged that Wilkes and his mob [you remember Wilkes is the radical politician] must be immortal. One night last May as I was coming up King Street, Westminster, I met Wilkes, who carried me into Parliament Street to see a curious procession pass: the funeral of a lamplighter attended by some hundreds of his fraternity with torches. Wilkes, who either is, or affects to be, an infidel, was rattling away, “I think there’s an end of that fellow. I think he won’t rise again.” I very calmly said to him, “You bring into my mind the strongest argument that ever I heard against a future state”; and then told him David Hume’s objection that Wilkes and his mob must be immortal. It seemed to make a proper impression, for he grinned abashment, as a Negro grows whiter when he blushes. Is that true by the way? STUDENT: Oh no. [Laughter.] They turn red. MUDRICK: They do turn red, all right. Well, so much for Boswell’s knowledge of Negroes. But to return to my last interview with Mr. Hume. I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes. “Well,” said I, “Mr. Hume, I hope to triumph over you when I meet you in a future state; and remember you are not to pretend that you was joking with all this infidelity.” “No, no,” said he. “But I shall have been so long there before you come that it will be nothing new.” In this style of good humour and levity did I conduct the conversation. Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. [Laughter.] (If you wonder, by the way, Boswell himself at this time was thirty-five years old.) I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr. Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger 117

Mudrick Transcribed eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. You remember by the way that Hume likes the word annihilation. He uses it at least a couple of times, very strategically so that you will understand that that’s what he believes, that’s what he means. But I maintained my faith. I told him that I believed the Christian religion as I believed history. Said he: “You do not believe it as you believe the Revolution.” “Yes,” said I; “but the difference is that I am not so much interested in the truth of the Revolution; otherwise I should have anxious doubts concerning it. A man who is in love has doubts of the affection of his mistress, without cause.” I mentioned Soame Jenyns’s little book in defense of Christianity, which was just published but which I had not yet read. Mr. Hume said, “I am told there is nothing of his usual spirit in it.” He had once said to me, on a forenoon while the sun was shining bright, that he did not wish to be immortal. [This is another interesting argument.] This was a most wonderful thought. The reason he gave was that he was very well in this state of being, and that the chances were very much against his being so well in another state; and he would rather not be more than be worse. I answered that it was reasonable to hope he would be better; that there would be a progressive improvement. [He’s now practically talking transmigration of souls.] I tried him at this interview with that topic, saying that a future state was surely a pleasing idea. He said no, for that it was always seen through a gloomy medium; there was always a Phlegethon or a hell. “But,” said I, “would it not be agreeable to have hopes of seeing our friends again?” and I mentioned three men lately deceased, for whom I knew he had a high value: Ambassador Keith, Lord Alemoor, and Baron Mure. He owned it would be agreeable, but added that none of them entertained such a notion. I believe he said, such a foolish, or such an absurd, notion; for he was indecently and impolitely positive in incredulity. “Yes,” said I, “Lord Alemoor was a believer.” David acknowledged that he had some belief. I somehow or other brought Dr. Johnson’s name into our conversation. [This somehow-or-other business is (inaudible because of laughter).] I had often heard him speak of that great man in a very illiberal manner. He said upon this occasion, “Johnson should be pleased with my History.” The reason he says that, by the way, is that, oddly enough, Hume more or less shared both Boswell’s and Johnson’s political opinions—they were all Tories. So 118

Week Seven that Hume’s history contains very favorable accounts of Charles I, the king who was executed. Nettled by Hume’s frequent attacks upon my revered friend in former conversations, I told him now that Dr. Johnson did not allow him much credit; for he said, “Sir, the fellow is a Tory by chance.” I am sorry that I mentioned this at such a time. I was off my guard; for the truth is that Mr. Hume’s pleasantry was such that there was no solemnity in the scene; and death for the time did not seem dismal. It surprised me to find him talking of different matters with a tranquillity of mind and a clearness of head which few men possess at any time. Two particulars I remember: Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which he commended much, and Monboddo’s Origin of Language, which he treated contemptously [sic]. I said, “If I were you, I should regret annihilation. Had I written such an admirable history, I should be sorry to leave it.” He said, “I shall leave that history, of which you are pleased to speak so favourably, as perfect as I can.” He said, too, that all the great abilities with which men had ever been endowed were relative to this world. He said he became a greater friend to the Stuart family as he advanced in studying for his history; and he hoped he had vindicated the two first of them so effectually that they would never again be attacked. Mr. Lauder, his surgeon, came in for a little, and Mr. Mure, the Baron’s son, for another small interval. He was, as far as I could judge, quite easy with both. He said he had no pain, but was wasting away. I left him with impressions which disturbed me for some time. You know, you must never misunderstand Boswell. He may sound to some of you like a silly ass even in situations like this, but these are matters of the utmost concern to him. And he really is trying desperately to get Hume to admit that there is a God [laughs] and that the soul is immortal—that’s what he wants to do. Minor matters [laughs]—dealing with a man who’s sixty-five years old and who is the outstanding skeptical philosopher probably since the early Greeks [laughs] and whose whole life is based on that. Speaking of his singular notion that men of religion were generally bad men, he said, “One of the men” (or “The man”—I am not sure which) “of the greatest honour that I ever knew is my Lord Marischal, who is a downright atheist.” (This by the way was a man who was virtually Boswell’s sponsor and foster father during his first trip to the Continent. He’s a very high official, he represents the King in Scotland—in fact I think he’s practically like a viceroy of Scotland.) 119

Mudrick Transcribed “I remember I once hinted something as if I believed in the being of a God [this is Hume, you understand, speaking about the Lord Marischal], and he would not speak to me for a week.” [Laughs.] He said this with his usual grunting pleasantry, with that thick breath which fatness had rendered habitual to him, and that smile of simplicity which his good humour constantly produced. That too is wonderful that Boswell can say that about a man whose convictions horrify him—horrify and frighten him. When he spoke against Monboddo, I told him that Monboddo said to me that he believed the abusive criticism upon his book in The Edinburgh Magazine and Review was written by Mr. Hume’s direction. David seemed irritated, and said, “Does the scoundrel ” (I am sure either that or “rascal ”) “say so?” He then told me that he had observed to one of the Faculty of Advocates that Monboddo was wrong in his observation that —and then Boswell leaves one of his very rare blanks; apparently he didn’t remember exactly what Hume had said— and gave as a proof the line in Milton. . . .n It was amazing to find him so keen in such a state. I must add one other circumstance [indeed he must, if you know Boswell] which is material, as it shows that he perhaps was not without some hope of a future state, and that his spirits were supported by a consciousness (or at least a notion) that his conduct had been virtuous. He said, “If there were a future state, Mr. Boswell, I think I could give as good an account of my life as most people.” But that’s the best he can get out of Hume. It is an amazing age, in the sense that you get the impression that practically anybody in it could talk to anybody else, however different their opinions were—and there was a very wide range and diversity of opinion. And the person who is the catalyst, the go-between, the facilitator, and the accomodator, is Boswell! Wherever you turn you discover that it’s Boswell who—he knows all these people, he brings them all together. I mean if you think of the range of people that Boswell knew in the eighteenth century, and that he put in touch with each other, I mean if you think that Boswell was talking to Rousseau and Voltaire about Johnson [laughs]—something like that. It’s an amazing age. I’m inclined to think that probably there were more individual great men in the eighteenth century than in any other century. The only Mudrick’s omission

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Week Seven exception I would want to make (and I’m using the term great men in I think a special sense, in the sense in which Johnson is a great man. You don’t really think of Johnson so much as a great writer, you think of him as a great man) the only exception that I would make is Athens in the fifth century BC. But that’s something else again, because what you think of are not so much great men—it’s not that they aren’t great—as great figures in particular fields. So that you think for instance of somebody like Socrates, whom you certainly would think of as a great man, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Pericles, Aristophanes . . . STUDENT: I think the problem with the Greeks, though, is they become almost mythological. I’m not sure, because everything I read about them—like somebody like Socrates—you read about him as a man, and he seems to have done so much. He went to war, and supposedly he was the last one to give ground at this place, and whenever the laws allowed it he married more than one wife—and all that kind of stuff, and you think, boy, this is a really diverse and interesting person, and at the same time that he supposedly carried on all these dialogues. It’s odd that— MUDRICK: You mean because it’s too remote, and you can’t trust the material like you trust later material? STUDENT: Well, I don’t know, I don’t know whether to believe it. These Greeks, they seem to be such perfect people. MUDRICK: I don’t know about that. They certainly give the impression of extraordinary intelligence and curiosity and .  .  . novelty—that is, originality, incredible originality—since they invented everything. [Laughter.] That is, they invented Western civilization, there’s no question. And insofar as the Western world is different from the Eastern world, I don’t think there’s any question that it’s the result of the influence of the Athenians of the fifth century BC. The Athenians of the fifth century BC are the ones who are direct— talk about necessity! and talk about coming all the way down—it’s perfectly clear that the Greeks invent not only all the arts and sciences of Western civilization, but all the technology and all the politics. And if you think of the East, you understand that that was excluded from the Greek range, and it has none of these things. The East has what the West has only as a result of having borrowed it very late from the West. It’s like the Japanese in classical music—I mean the Japanese would simply borrow classical music the way they borrowed their alphabet from the Chinese two thousand years ago or three thousand, whenever it was—so they borrowed classical music from the West after World War II. But Greek civilization—or Athenian civilization, because it really is Athens, and it’s Athens in one century—it’s as a matter of fact Athens in one half of a century. It’s Athens in the second half of the fifth century BC which invented everything. Yes? STUDENT: You know, your remark about the East having less regard for life— MUDRICK: Yes. STUDENT: I was fortunate enough the day afterwards—my roommate had a dinner party—he’s from India, and we had several Indians assembled there with 121

Mudrick Transcribed all this stuff—the rioting and all going on in India, and we were listening to the BBC— MUDRICK: You mean after the assassination. STUDENT: Right, right, and the killing of the Sikhs, and the death toll, in three minutes it went—and the people were all making jokes, they were saying, Oh, in India they can’t even count the bodies. And they were saying somebody was shocked that there was five hundred in one place, and these people are shocked by fifty. It was very interesting, and I told them that, and they didn’t make any comment about whether they had less regard or—I don’t know. It was interesting, though. MUDRICK: Well, there is of course the fact also that (and I certainly don’t mean to make fun of facts of this kind) India unquestionably, well, considering its size, is the poorest country in the world. And obviously it is a very common sight in the streets, say, of Calcutta to see people dead on the street. And I don’t want to make fun of that or anything like that. I don’t really think that’s associated either with what I was talking about. I’m really talking more in an historical perspective. That is, I think that if you read Eastern philosophy or examine Eastern religions, consider them with any seriousness, or try to get some sense of Eastern politics—through history, irrespective of what’s been happening in the last fifty or a hundred years—I think there is that lack of reverence for life. And I don’t say that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I happen to believe that it’s a bad thing, but maybe that’s just because I’m corrupted by Western civilization. What the Greeks made possible was secular life. What the East never made possible was secular life. In fact I think that’s probably as good a definition of my preference for the West. Because I’m a wretched, ruthless Jew-atheist, and the only thing I’m interested in is secular life, and in the East there’s a sense in which you’re always trapped by larger, abstract, religious or semi-religious considerations (tradition, that sort of thing) and I have no interest in any of that—except insofar as it provides stability if it does. I mean I don’t want rioting in the streets, I’m afraid of that—I don’t want to be murdered. But apart from that I have no interest in those mass agreements. Most mass agreements seem to me dreadful. Yes? STUDENT: You said it had something to do with—well, I’m talking about the modern period— MUDRICK: Because I think that too many other considerations come in. I mean the fact is that India was a colony of the British Empire for many years, it was bled and exhausted, and that’s true of course of African countries too, so if you simply point to the fact that the African countries and India and a number of other countries are very poor, it doesn’t seem to me that you’re really illustrating what goes on in the East. As far as I know, for instance, they’ve done a pretty good job in a place like China, at least as far as preventing starvation is concerned. You certainly don’t hear about it. If people are starving, they’re starving in far corners where they don’t allow tourists. I suspect that there isn’t much starvation of that

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Week Seven kind, but China certainly shares the frame of mind that I was talking about, the lack of real interest in individual lives. Yes? STUDENT: Well, in this article I read about . . . Sikh-Hindu article, it concluded with something about I guess 150 or 300 people died in a “nice” Sikh development— MUDRICK: I know that story—I saw that story in the paper this morning. STUDENT: And a doctor—a doctor—from around the corner or something says, well, they died, but they’re gone now and we can’t worry about it, and we’ve got to look to the future. And then the guy concludes with a dog gnawing on the thighbone of a dead Sikh. MUDRICK: No, I know, but I’ll tell you, what bothers me about a story like that is that there’s a sort of condescension in the person telling it. I’m sure horrors like that could easily happen at various places in the Western world—and they do happen. I mean these motives to revenge—after all, there were lynch mobs—you of all people! I mean what is he talking about? I mean, lynch mobs in the South and lynch mobs in the West—you can get lynch mobs anywhere. And maybe the fact that India is so densely populated means they can kill more people at once—I mean they couldn’t collect too many people together to kill them. Moreover many of the people were working people. I mean certainly the plantation owners are not going to permit too many slaves to be killed, they gotta have them to work the fields. Occasionally you catch a cowboy loping across the plains and you string him up, and so on. No, there’s enough cruelty and brutality to go around, but that’s not really what I’m getting at. STUDENT: You mean attention to detail. You see, these people, they’re really interested in political—but I suppose that’s true of all young people. They get politically active at some point, and really interested in “big issues” and— MUDRICK: Wait until you read Burke. Burke is fascinating on just such matters, because Burke lays out the problems of the twentieth century. When you read the remarks on the Revolution, you will see that what he is confronting you with are all the political dilemmas, paradoxes and enigmas that you’ve been worrying about since you were young, since you read about what was going on in the ’sixties, since you read about Marxism and revolutionary activities, and what you owe the state, and what banners you should march under and so on—Burke forces you to confront all those issues, because all those issues come to a head for the very first time in history with the French Revolution. And Burke saw them instantly, and it almost doesn’t matter what position he takes, though he of course takes a very strong negative position against the Revolution. What matters is, he sees the issues, that he sees them all perfectly clearly. And once you’ve read Burke, if you’ve read him with any care at all, you are a little more nervous about subscribing to any notion that any cause necessarily must attract your full sympathy, your faith, your unquestioning acceptance, and so on. You’re going to have a little more trouble feeling that way in the future. Yes? STUDENT: I read a passage in Hume that said that he believed in tradition and custom as the basis of all—

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Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Yes. STUDENT: Is that what Burke believes also? MUDRICK: Yes. STUDENT: So you consider them to be— MUDRICK: That’s one line that equates them. Philosophically is an unfortunate word to use here—I mean once again, if we’re talking in ordinary conversation you’re using the word philosophically in a quite understandable way, but you’re not using it in the way in which Hume wants you to use it when he’s writing his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And by the way, I should say that Hume himself knew perfectly well that that line of development that I’m talking about, from the ancient Greeks, is what made him possible. That is, Hume himself is inconceivable as a public figure (so is Gibbon) without the line of development that proceeded from fifth century BC Athens, and that such people didn’t exist in the Eastern countries at all—you simply don’t find such people challenging the whole basis of tradition and custom while saying that certain aspects of tradition and custom have to be maintained. It’s also interesting that you use the word custom, because you remember the “philosophical” way in which Hume uses the word custom, how careful he is to say, that in fact all we have, philosophically, is custom, because we cannot reason in the way in which we think we reason. That is, all Western philosophy—all philosophy—depends on the association between cause and effect, and there is no way of establishing a rational connection between cause and effect. Yes? STUDENT: Well, I was thinking that with something like, he mentions things like gravity and elasticity. Suppose you got something like, you have Newton’s laws, and then you get something like relativity—all these things—but you couldn’t come up with those without the gravity having the effect and the cause of gravity in the first place. MUDRICK: You mean cause and effect. STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: What he would say is custom—that is, we’ve never seen an apple fall up. We’ve seen twenty-seven apples falling from trees and they always fall down, so custom leads us to associate these two, that all we have is association of ideas— something like that. I am not a very good philosopher, so all I can do is tell you . . . He makes me very nervous. There are a lot of things that he says, particularly about necessity, that I can’t quite follow as well as I would like to. Or if I can follow him as well as I would like to, it seems to me that what he’s presenting is a platitude in the guise of philosophy, and that he needn’t even have said it. That’s not true about what he says about cause and effect, also what he says about personal identity. That is, you remember he says there’s no such thing as mind. There are heaps of perceptions, but there’s no container. I was amused by an image he uses late, when he talks about the mind as a theater, in which there are things on the stage, but then he hastily withdraws that. But you mustn’t take that image too seriously, he says, because I don’t mean that there is really a place which holds these events or perceptions. So that really it’s actors out in the open, 124

Week Seven or in a void, and that they’re just associated there. And he has the decency of course eventually to give up the argument. He says no, I just don’t understand it. As far as I’m concerned, any philosophical reasoning about personal identity evolves eventually into flat contradiction. There are two principles which I arrived at which cannot both of them be true at the same time, and I can’t work it out. Did you have your hand up much earlier? I’d be very grateful for any kind of discussion of any of these points. Yes? STUDENT: I read in the Times today an article—you know how they have it on the side all the time, on the front page? MUDRICK: Oh yeah, yeah—I know. STUDENT: Did you read that article today? MUDRICK: No I didn’t. STUDENT: It was about how they’re doing research on— STUDENT: Artificial intelligence. STUDENT: Yeah. They can’t figure out why a person knows that when you pour water into an empty bucket with a hole in it, it’s going to drain out. It’s the same thing about the cause-and-effect thing, about the billiard— MUDRICK: It’s custom. That is, you’ve done it a number of times. You know a child might well not know it. STUDENT: Right. But why don’t they know it? MUDRICK: You know, I have a very interesting experience of that kind over and over again which proves that sometimes even custom can’t overcome stupidity. [Laughter.] It happens to me all the time. I find it almost impossible to believe that if you pour one liquid into another with too much force, it will fling itself up. So I always have trouble pouring water into a teapot, because the custom that I’m working on is that if you pour something into a container up to the level to which the container is full, then it will simply fill itself up gradually. But I can’t somehow force myself to understand, except by the most extraordinary effort of mind (or something, I don’t know), that if you pour a tea kettle too fast into this, it will slop over—doesn’t matter whether it’s full or not. So there are instances in which we stubbornly resist custom. [Laughs.] Yes? STUDENT: One that took me a long time to get used to was something like pouring a heavy, kind of denser liquid into something like water. Like you’re filling up a blender or something, like maybe orange juice concentrate, and there’s water in there, and I could never figure—my mother once said, “Just fill it up till it’s up to here. You can pour the concentrate in till we think it’s up to here.” And I said, “Well, how’s it going to get up to there?” I couldn’t figure out that the water— because it was going down to the bottom. MUDRICK [laughing]: Yes—a kind of infinite bottom. [Laughter.] STUDENT: And I didn’t believe her when she explained it to me. MUDRICK: Well, another thing that often gets me is when you use something like a mechanical beater, and if you have it at just the wrong place, the liquid sprays 125

Mudrick Transcribed in all directions. [Laughter.] That’s another thing which I don’t quite believe. Because obviously the liquid is supposed to stay in the place where it is, it’s supposed to be obedient. [Laughs.] And I am sure there is some sort of anthropomorphic notion which is going through my head, that a liquid should just lie there while it’s being beaten. [Laughter.] You know, like girls. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: Everything, though, that you’ve said—these things, they’re kind of mystifying to you. They’re advanced concepts, you know what I mean? They really are advanced things. It’s like that idea, you know, if you have a container and you poke holes at different degrees from the thing, the distance that it shoots out will be proportionate—you know, the ones at the bottom will go out farther than the ones here. And that’s something, you know—I remember when I first learned that—that’s something you wouldn’t think of by yourself necessarily. It’s the same with displacement, or whatever. Once it’s explained to you— MUDRICK: Yeah. Hume does make a distinction—it’s an extremely important distinction, and I confess that I have a little trouble following it—the distinction between the mathematical sciences on the one hand, and what he calls “matter of fact” on the other. Two-plus-two-equals-four is of course mathematical and there’s no quarreling about that, it’s something which—it’s demonstrable. Moreover demonstrable things, as in mathematics, have—there are impossibilities in that area. That is, two plus two always equals four and can never equal anything else. You can’t conceive two-plus-two-equals-five, whereas you can conceive the opposite and contrary of any matter of fact. Yes? STUDENT: He also makes a distinction between conception and belief, like you can imagine that— MUDRICK: That’s good. STUDENT: —this will spout out those holes the way it does, but if you haven’t had enough experience of it, you don’t really believe it, so it surprises you. But you can conceive of it. MUDRICK: Yeah, I can conceive of the water leaking up, or the liquid, which I put the beater into at the wrong level, splashing, but I don’t believe it! [Laughs.] I’m too smart for that! STUDENT: Maybe you should do it ten times in a row. MUDRICK: Yeah. Very messy. Yes? STUDENT: Do you find that sort of like in the same category, though, as when you make a mistake or have an accident? You put an egg on the counter and knock it off or knock the glass over, and you didn’t intend for that to happen—is that the same type of thing? Because that’s the only equivalent I can really figure. You know, when things happen against my will—you know, accidents. I think, I didn’t plan for that to happen, and it shouldn’t have happened. That’s about the only—is that the same? MUDRICK: I don’t think so. I think you’re getting into something which is fairly close to Freudian explanation of certain events. I mean, there are certain things we really want to do, though we don’t know that we want to do them [in a mock-serious tone]. So for instance we place the glass of water very close to the edge of the 126

Week Seven table, so that when we make an inadvertent movement of our arm, and gesturing at some point the glass flips off the table, smashes on the floor, and that’s because we want to humiliate ourselves or attract attention to ourselves. I suppose what I believe about such matters—I’m almost inclined to accept the Freudian explanation—well, it’s almost the only Freudian explanation I’m willing to accept about anything, because it does seem awfully odd—and I notice that I, too, that I myself constantly take risks of that kind, and the excuse that I give myself is some economy of motion or economy of action. That is, it’s too much trouble to do something else and it’s convenient to have it here, so you bring everything together, for instance. Very often when I’m working on an article—This seat is too comfortable. I gotta have a book here and a book there. And of course the table is too small and books are being balanced on places where they shouldn’t be balanced, and moreover I know that if the book falls from where it’s balanced, probably I will lose the place and I will bend the pages of the book, but I will do it. And I can’t understand that kind of perversity except on some such explanation as a desire to punish oneself. STUDENT: Except that you don’t need to go that far, I mean you can just accept that you did it. The intention was apparent, I mean you knew what the result— MUDRICK: Yeah, I think you almost always do know it. STUDENT: You don’t have to understand the motives. MUDRICK: Yeah. I’m very suspicious of any ascription of motive anyway, except the motives—that is, I come to class and my motive is to conduct a class—that motive I believe in. But I don’t believe in almost any other kind of ascription of motive. Yes? STUDENT: But I’m thinking of situations that you don’t foresee. The parallel I’m making is, it’s difficult for you to imagine that that’s going to do like that, you just don’t think of it that way in your mind. It’s similar like, let’s say you’re doing something and your mind’s occupied, and suddenly something just happens and— MUDRICK: No no no, I’m afraid I have something worse than that (it really applies more to what he was saying): Indeed I have a perfectly clear conception of its happening—I know it can happen—but I’ll be goddamned if it’s going to happen, I don’t believe it’s gonna happen. I conceive it as happening, but that’s not— STUDENT: Do you see it happening? MUDRICK: Well, I see it happening when it happens. [Laughter.] But I also see the possibility, and there is something in me which stubbornly refuses to believe that it’s going to happen, at least in this instance. Something like, It wouldn’t dare to happen—not to me. [Laughs] Something like that—I mean the laws of physics simply don’t apply to me. STUDENT: Well, it’s like I can conceive of myself dropping that egg. This just happened to me the other day—I pulled one out and it just, it slipped out of my hand! And I know that’s a possibility, and immediately when it happened I knew that it was so, that it had happened, and I was thinking, but that shouldn’t have happened! 127

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Do you carry groceries from a car? You have too many groceries to carry from the car. You do not want to make two trips. You know that the grocery bags are carefully calculated according to strength so that if you hold them by the top they will break just before you reach your door [laughter], and scatter everything over the ground, and break everything that’s breakable. And you do it. [Laughs.] STUDENT: But still you imagine: For some reason this bag will hold. MUDRICK: This one bag will hold, because it’s my bag. [Laughs.] STUDENT: It’s the idea of just taking a risk, so you try to control that. MUDRICK: It has something to do with the idea of control, I think that’s very good. STUDENT: It’s just that the thing you know about is the better alternative than the unfamiliar. The alternative is to take the risk and know that your books are going to fall over—or do something that’s unfamiliar, just find a new place. So you’re choosing the familiar and the risks, other than the situation you don’t know about. MUDRICK: Well, what would be the unfamiliar? STUDENT: Leaving the books elsewhere. MUDRICK: Or putting them on the desk, which is a foot and a half away. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Routine is much easier than facing something that you don’t— MUDRICK: No, I know all about it, I’ve done that too. No, I think we do defy the universe. We’re really trying to disprove Hume—that’s part of what we’re doing. We’re trying to disprove necessity—I think that has a lot to do with it. We don’t want to believe that there are certain things we are not allowed to do. Hume would say by the way that that too is determined [laughs], that of course anybody who knows you, would know that you’re the perverse kind of person who likes to prove that the laws of the universe don’t apply to you, so that’s been determined too. Maybe you couldn’t see it yourself because you’re on the inside. Yes? STUDENT: This doesn’t have something directly to do with that, but I was wondering about that sort of thing. I was talking to Uriah about a new discovery they made about another state, and they can’t conceive of it, and he was trying to come up— MUDRICK: You mean another State of the Union, or another state of being? STUDENT: No, a physical state. He was saying something that they came up with in a structuralism class about what words are and how we can know things, and I said, well, that’s a moot point, the universe is composed of fills and voids, and then I said that— MUDRICK: Sounds like you said girls and boys. [Laughter.] STUDENT: But he said there’s another thing, though, and I can’t really conceive of this, but they said that there’s another state between matter and energy, that they think that energy also has matter, and for some reason this gives some sort of— STUDENT: What does that have to do with structuralism? MUDRICK: Also I don’t see what’s so novel about that, because according to Einstein all matter is conceivable both as particle and wave—it’s just the way you think about it—and particle obviously is substantial, and wave isn’t. All matter exists in both forms, so it’s not a question of an intermediate state, it’s that you look 128

Week Seven at matter in one way or you look—you remember how Hume makes a distinction. He says that causation is either the conjunction and repetition of this conjunction between objects or the mind’s transition from one object to another customarily. And these are two different ways of looking at the same thing, and there’s a difference there. I just don’t—you may be misrepresenting these people. I’m sure they’re all frauds, but that’s all right. They’ve probably heard of wave and particle, so it’s hard for me to believe that they wouldn’t have brought that up because it would sound very fancy. If you bring terms from physics into a discussion of literary criticism then you’re really high class.

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From a Class on The Writing of Narrative Prose This section contains transcripts of tapes from three quarters of this class: Springs and Fall of ’83 and Spring of ’85. Between thirty and forty students were present at the class meetings in ’83, between twenty and thirty in ’85. All of these tapes are incomplete.

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FALL 1983 Week One September 29

MUDRICK: The way I conduct this first [inaudible] I conduct this first meeting primarily in order to spare your feelings as much as possible, but even more importantly my own. The class ordinarily meets just once a week at this time, and it goes on until what I used to call ten of four until the advent of the digital watch. Unfortunately people don’t know about ten of four anymore; they know about three-fifty, which unfortunately sounds to some people like three-fifteen. The class meets from one to three-five-0 every Thursday. And the most important thing I can tell you, especially those of you who haven’t taken the class before: please don’t take this class unless you can attend regularly and through the whole session. It’s very important to me. I don’t regard this as a drop-in class. I regard this as a drop-in class even less than most, because there’s probably a strong temptation to do it. And please don’t yield to that temptation, please don’t take the class if you’re going to be an occasional visitor—especially when there’s a chance that something by you will be read. So that’s the first thing. STUDENT [entering the room]: Hello. MUDRICK: Hi. (Just an old flame.) [Laughter.] The first meeting I’ll try to make statements about how the course is going to be taught, and then give you an illustration of how I work with the papers, and then there’ll be a break. I usually say that the break will occur after about an hour—usually it takes longer than that. But in any case, if you’re anxious to get out, don’t worry, you won’t be stuck here for the full two hours and fifty minutes. You’ll be able to get away after about an hour or so, and that will make it better for the both of us. If you intend to take the class you will come back after that ten- or fifteen-minute break, and then we’ll conduct the class, and you’ll be able to pick up a card then. So I would appreciate it if you would restrain your impatience to leave for at least the first hour. After that, I mean beginning next week, the class will meet for two hours and fifty minutes, and there won’t be a break. And I know that’s a kind of marathon session, and all I can tell you is that that’s the way I like to conduct it. I have conducted it by breaking it up into two sessions during the week in the past, 131

Mudrick Transcribed and that has its advantages. I prefer it this way because I think that something is likely to get going after an hour or so; there’s likely to be a kind of continuity of feeling. It is exhausting (it’s sometimes exhausting to me) and some of you just can’t stand it—your span of attention is not that good. You can always go to the bathroom or something. But there isn’t a regular break, I want to make that clear. There’s no misunderstanding, we just keep going. So the important thing about attendance and about the way the class operates is, please do not take the class unless you are going to attend regularly and through the whole session. And please don’t ask me for permission. I do grant this permission occasionally to people who’ve taken the class before, but I won’t to anybody who has never taken it before (that is, permission to come in an hour late or leave an hour early). I just think there are certain advantages, at least the first time, to getting a real soaking, that you can’t get by coming in only part time. Even the boredom, it seems to me, is an advantage. Life is full of boring situations—you might as well start early. Also we have to help each other, and you’ll learn something about that too. I mean if it’s boring it’s at least partly your fault. So help. Do come resigned to attending the full session. The other thing—oh yeah, there won’t be any breaks during the meeting. The class is conducted very simply. You turn in stories, and I read them aloud—I don’t identify the author. One of the nice things about having a fairly sizable class is that it takes a long time before you figure out who’s writing what. These wretched little cozy classes in which you have five or six people, and after a while you know—I mean as soon as the first word is read you know who wrote it. And then you begin being very careful, you walk on eggshells, you don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings because you don’t want them to hurt your feelings, and it’s just a pain in the ass. The great virtue of a class of this size is that it really is anonymous. So you’re not going to get at least personally offended by having your incapacity to write exposed to public opprobrium. That doesn’t help too much—I’m aware of that too. Because oddly enough, even though you’re not identified, you know who you are. And if you are—if your story is being made fun of, then you will take it that you’re being made fun of: your feelings will be hurt, you’ll be outraged and crushed, humiliated, depressed, and so on. And there’s nothing I can do about that. I know there are a number of things that you want me to do, I mean you want me to be (as you might say) kind. The trouble with kindness is that it takes a long time. That’s really my only objection to kindness. If it were possible to be kind as quickly as it is possible to be cruel or funny, I would be kind all the time. You are reminded of this, by the way, when you’re a teacher if you have students in your office, and after a while the smile freezes on your face, with students sitting there . . . I’m not talking about you (because he was in my office this . . .). No, I just mean [laughter], you don’t wanna say, What the fuck have you been sitting here so long for? Why are you bothering me? What do you want from me? You have nothing to say, you have nothing on your mind, you’re not interested in anything I say, and you 132

Week One sit there like a lump. I have other things to do. I mean I can read the Nexusa [laughter]—all kinds of possibilities are open to me. But there you sit. So kindness takes time, and I’m against it for that reason. Wit, on the other hand, is very brief—making jokes, I mean it’s in the nature of a joke—“Brevity is the soul of wit.” So I try to make jokes. And some of you don’t like my jokes, particularly when they’re directed at you, or when you think they’ll be directed at you the next time. I try very hard to be funny, as hard as possible. And sometimes it doesn’t come off, and sometimes it comes off all too well. But jokes are almost the highest form of criticism, as a matter of fact. And you all know that; you all know perfectly well that when somebody makes an ass of himself, the best way to dispose of it is to make a joke. It’s quick, it’s effective, it’s even friendly in a way— in the last analysis it’s friendly. But a lot of people can’t take it. And since that’s my way of operating I’m afraid you’re stuck with it. You’ll get an opportunity, I would assume, to observe some of that in the first pieces that I read. What do you think about that? I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever said this quite in this way before, and of course there are a number of people who are continuing with this class. Because I think even some of you who think I’m a pretty good teacher still think I’m too nasty, and don’t think I take enough care with people’s feelings. How do you feel about that? STUDENT: Who, me? MUDRICK: Yeah. STUDENT: Well, you don’t know everybody in the class, and I think that when you’re talking about using humor, I think of how I use it in my friendships and how other people use it, and with certain people it’s just the best way to criticize a person or something that they did. As you say, if someone makes an ass of himself and you can make it into a joke, it’s friendly but at the same time you’re saying how you feel, and that’s always nice. But . . . MUDRICK: Doesn’t work in class. STUDENT: But when you don’t know someone, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. MUDRICK: All right. I have to go through this rigmarole too and I apologize to those of you who’ve been in the class before, but this is very important to me. I mean, what I’m going to say now is of the highest importance. I would not tear papers apart—say they’re no good and say they don’t work—unless I believed that all of you are capable of writing good fiction. I do believe this. I think there are some of you who have taken this class about six or seven times and still don’t believe that I believe this, but I do. That is, I do think it would be cruel to—I mean it’s like attacking a paraplegic for not doing a marathon. If you can’t do something you just can’t do it, and it’s wrong for people to make fun of you if it’s physically or mentally or morally impossible for you to do something. But that’s not true. For me the most interesting fact about the writing of fiction, and I think this is not true of any other artistic medium: you are all experts. The campus newspaper.

a 

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Mudrick Transcribed You don’t know it but you are. And you’re experts for a very simple reason—because you’re in command of the medium, which is ordinary colloquial speech. I mean that’s where it all comes from—you’re all masters of that. You don’t know it, in part because you very seldom allow yourself to speak your own language. You’re usually speaking somebody else’s language. You’re usually sucking up to somebody else, you’re trying to speak formal English, you’re trying to evade some responsibility, you’re trying to ingratiate yourself to your parents or your superiors—something like that. Or, for that matter, because don’t get the idea that what I’m saying is that street speech is the real speech—very often it’s the phoniest speech of all. Like locker-room male speech, which is the phoniest and most disgusting of all phony speeches. I mean fuck, shit, piss, and so on—very very boring, very dumb, and completely inexpressive of anything except male limitations. So I’m not talking about what often passes for colloquialism, I’m talking about your own native language, which you’ve been speaking, after all, since you were about one year old. I mean if you aren’t a master or mistress of it, who the hell is? But it’s just that you don’t speak it very often; you save it for special occasions. And the purpose of a class like this is essentially to let you get back to it. You have to reclaim it, and if you reclaim it you’re writing as well as anybody can write, I mean you’re writing as well as Tolstoy. But you don’t believe this now, and all I can keep telling you is that I believe it, and from time to time you’ll see evidence of it in what comes out in the class. Somebody will come up with maybe a paragraph or a sentence or a whole story which will be absolutely amazing. It will come from nowhere and very often from a person who has turned out the most awful nonsense before. So I would be very grateful to you if you would grant me—if you would make that concession, that possible concession: In spite of what he says, in spite of how rude, cruel and unfunny he is, that he does believe that. He keeps saying it, so until he has proved it beyond any possible doubt, I’ll believe that he believes it. I do believe it. I believe something else, which is that you’re in a better position to write good fiction than I am. And this too is not the result of self-pity or self-judgment, it’s simply the difference in age. I mean you’re at the right age, you’re still able to get in touch with your own language, and it gets more and more difficult as you get older. And you make other choices—other choices intervene, other choices are made for you. You still don’t know enough of the jargon languages to have any language but your own. The only language you have is your own. You’re a mess when you try to handle jargon languages because you can’t write expository prose. You can’t write professional prose of any kind, you’re not skilled enough yet. And mastering that kind of language very often pushes out the native language—the native language just goes. So you’re still young enough for all of that. You’re young enough to write fiction—that’s what it amounts to. This is not true of any other artistic medium. It’s certainly not true about poetry, by the way, which is an entirely different matter.

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Week One Does anybody have any questions so far? I’d be very grateful for any questions, especially from—and there is no such thing in the classroom as a stupid question. That’s one thing you ought to get [inaudible]. Yes? STUDENT: How do you get graded? MUDRICK: I’m glad you asked that question (and this brings up a question that you raised). This is a Creative Studies class, and in Creative Studies the grading system is entirely different from what it is in L&S. There is no fixed number of units. For instance suppose you take a writing class in L&S and it’s listed for four units. The teacher will tell you (I assume) at the beginning of the quarter that you’re expected to do this much work and you’ll turn in so many papers during the quarter. And if you are on pass/not pass and you turn in enough pages, you’ll get a pass—he’ll give you four units. If you’re in for a letter grade then he will judge not only the quantity but the quality of the work that you turned in. Obviously if you are able to invent a new form, a new genre, and you are able . . . It’s conceivable to me—well, it’s conceivable to me that one might write an adult science fiction story, but I don’t really believe it. I just think that most of those stories are a blend of wish-fulfillment and obscure power urges which are related to rape, I guess. [Laughter.] They’re really a form of pornography. Science fiction is a form of pornography. You’re not satisfied with cars or walking; you want to take a rocket to the other side of the universe or something. And these I think are rather vulgar sexual sublimations. [Laughter.] But, I’m willing to consider anything, I really am very open [inaudible because of laughter]. I think, for instance, it’s very hard to write interesting pornography. Pornography exists for a very obvious purpose. It doesn’t exist for a public session of embarrassed young people who don’t know each other. Moreover, you see, that might almost be a definition of fiction—it’s a story which conceivably would interest almost anybody of any age in company with a group of other people of different ages, and so on. If it only appeals to a certain group for a certain reason then it’s not fiction. And this is not to say—for instance I think pornography is wonderful, and I think one of the great developments of the twentieth century is the freeing of pornography. I’m sorry, I know that that’s getting beyond popular opinion nowadays, especially among women—who don’t enjoy it the way men do, which is too bad. In fact I don’t recall that I ever said that about fiction before, I think that’s true. I think if we all like it, it’s fiction. Or if none of us is made exceptionally uncomfortable by it, it’s probably fiction. Otherwise it’s something else and it’s appealing to group interests or curiosities or special needs. For instance men are embarrassed by that sort of romantic fiction that women buy in supermarkets—Savage Love .  .  . Passionate Disgust [laughter] .  .  . Tortured Desire . . . Sticky Fingers [laughter]—men are just embarrassed by that crud. On the other hand, men are not embarrassed by pornography if they’re examining it by themselves—they’re very excited by it, it’s terrific. In fact they can’t think of anything else while they’re examining it. [Laughter.] So this is one of the

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Mudrick Transcribed divisions between the sexes. We want to bring the sexes together here in this class. We want them to share experiences. [Laughter.] It’s very hard to write about certain kinds of human experience. This is not to say that you shouldn’t try. In fact the harder it is to write about them, maybe the more obligation you have to try—if you’re adventurous, and I bring up pornography . . . One of the hardest things to write about is sexual experience, almost impossible to write about. Because almost invariably it turns into pornography, partly because you can’t make it individual enough, you can’t make it seem belonged to the people to whom it’s happening. It tends to be bigger than both of us. Or smaller. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: Can we read our own stuff? MUDRICK: I would probably make special concessions to people who’ve taken the class before because they know what they’re doing. Those of you who’ve not tried to write fiction before, in a sense have an advantage. Because if you’ve tried to write a lot of fiction, especially under unfortunate auspices, you’ve got all the wrong ideas. You think of stories for instance as mechanically put together, you think of high points and low points and development and all that crap—has nothing whatever to do with good fiction, nothing. That’s the sort of thing that if this were the 1930s you could maybe get published in Collier’s Magazine. But fortunately you can’t think of becoming a successful writer anymore of fiction. It’s almost impossible because it’s all been taken over by television. All the popular magazines which used to publish fiction simply disappeared because nobody bought them. Everybody was watching television instead. So there’s no such thing as the well-made story anymore and it’s not even worth thinking about. And if you asked me, What is a story? I think a little while ago I gave the best definition I could give. It’s a statement about human beings which would be of interest to almost any person in the world. I almost don’t know any other way to define fiction. There’s no such thing as the form of a short story. Short stories differ incredibly in length, they differ incredibly in subject matter, in tone, in presentation—in almost every way. They usually have something to do with relations between human beings. You are as capable of writing a completely successful one as anybody else in the world. And that’s true, I mean it’s just true. And your experience is available to you. I know students sooner or later say, I’m so sick and tired of reading about life in Isla Vista, or this or that—and then all of a sudden you get a story about life in Isla Vista which is completely fresh. I remember a story (I think it was turned in last year) about a guy who’s living in a dorm—I guess this was a dorm, not IV. I’m not sure—I think it was a dorm. It’s some kind of party situation in which he is the only one who isn’t drunk. Very good, beautifully done. And what happens is that you forget that you’re reading about a special place. It’s not that you forget— you know you are, but you know that it’s completely fresh, and you’re reading about interesting human beings who are in relation to one another, that’s all. So there’s no such thing as too restrictive a setting. The fact that you’re young, the fact that not much has happened to you . . . You can of course write 136

Week One banally, uninterestingly about these events. For instance you can write about your childhood and you can be very sentimental about it. You can misrepresent it in various ways and then it’s uninteresting. Unfortunately we are likely to be most banal and most like everybody else when we misrepresent our experiences. Our lies are very uninteresting usually, because they’ re like everybody else’s lies. We’re all trying to misrepresent ourselves to other people in the same way. And we’re of course not very different from everybody else. We just barely can recognize each other much of the time. Okay? Are there any other questions before I go on to reading one or another of these stories? Here is something without a name on it, and here is another thing without a name on it. You will, by the way, in the future put your names on your stories. The trouble is, if you don’t put your name on it I’m not sure whether I know you or not. STUDENT: There’s a name on the back of that one right there. MUDRICK: This? STUDENT: No, the one in your right hand. MUDRICK: Yes. And I don’t know the name so I’ll read it. I like the title. Oh, by the way, don’t forget: always put a title on your stories. Titles are very important parts of stories, or as a matter of fact any piece of writing—they really change the quality of it. For instance I love the title of this: “Ralph the Butcher.” [Laughter.] Why is that a good title? I mean it may turn out to be a lousy title in connection with the story, but it’s certainly a provocative title. If I saw, for instance, a table of contents in a magazine with fiction in it and I saw the title “Ralph the Butcher” I would turn instantly to that story. Yes? STUDENT: I think it’s a good title because it appeals to several different tastes. If you like the phony story: When I was young I’d run and get five-cent candy from Sid at the Deli. Or else, if you like macabre murder stories . . . [Laughter.] MUDRICK: It appeals to almost everybody but vegetarians. [Laughter.] And of course— STUDENT: Well, I’m a vegetarian [inaudible]. STUDENT: I’m a vegetarian [inaudible]. STUDENT: I’m a vegetarian and I love it. MUDRICK: Well, you like to have “far out” experiences. [Laughter.] And certainly a large part of the effectiveness of that title is the metaphorical extension of the word: we know that butcher is very very often used for somebody who is not, except metaphorically, a butcher. I mean we know that it’s used about people who dismember corpses, so it has all sorts of possibilities. Butcher is a wonderful word anyway. It’s one of those words which, for reasons that are very hard to explain, sound like what they stand for—it’s a wonderful word in that way. There’s something about that ch sound that’s very effective. [Laughter.] All right, “Ralph the Butcher.” For awhile Ralph the Butcher was coming over on Saturday nights to drink and sleep with my mother. She was between husbands at the 137

Mudrick Transcribed time. My sister’s father was long gone and she had just divorced mine for the second time.b Well, that’s a terrific opening paragraph, it really is. I’m sorry, some of you are going to object to this cutting up of a story to make comments, and I’ll do it less as the quarter goes on. But for one thing I want to accustom you to thinking of these things in pieces, and piece by piece. Let me read that paragraph again, and listen closely and see what you think about it and, even if you don’t think it’s effective, why I think it is. [Rereads the paragraph.] The only objection, by the way, that I have to that whole paragraph is the slight ambiguity of the pronoun “she” in the last sentence. The writer really ought to repeat “my mother.” So it should read, “My sister’s father was long gone and my mother had just divorced my father for the second . . .” I’m sorry—you see, this is such a complicated set of relationships [laughing] that we have to be absolutely sure where everybody—it probably could be made a little smoother, but we do know who is who. Why is it effective? Or why do you think it’s not effective and why do you simply wonder—don’t hesitate to disagree, by the way. Yes? STUDENT: It introduces a lot of people right away. MUDRICK: It introduces a lot of people, but you know, a lot of the time that makes trouble, a great deal of trouble in fiction. And certainly one of the things I will say about some story [a female student, having just entered the room, walks over to another female student and gives her a smack on the lips] (All right, watch it!) [laughter] one of the things I will say sometimes is, you’ve introduced too many people at the beginning of the story and I can’t make distinctions between them. But that doesn’t really apply here. The writer has managed marvelously to bring in all these people, and it seems almost like a kind of rabbit hutch—and I mean rabbit! I mean these are people who engage in rabbity activities. [Laughter.] Anybody else? Yes? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Yeah. You know what I think is almost the most masterly thing in the whole thing? The first two words: “For awhile.” That is, you notice how the writer sets up that vibration in you: Well, what happened then? Because if you simply say, “Ralph the butcher came over every Saturday night to drink and with my mother,” you see how much flatter that is. You introduce a whole new, really, a kind of fourth dimension—literally the fourth dimension because that’s what time is—time is the fourth dimension. And you get all the pathos of time: Ralph the butcher and mom had a great time for a while. [Laughter.] Something happened! And don’t forget about what butcher means in other respects.

I have obtained a copy of this story from the writer and, for reasons which will be clear later, have made no grammatical corrections save those of spelling. b 

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Week One I have to say, you see, when I read a paragraph like this—I don’t know this guy, I don’t know who it is, and it’s nobody who’s ever taken a class with me. I think I’ll say this, I think maybe I’ll just put it on the board and then point to it with a pointer whenever it happens: Tolstoy couldn’t have done it better. For what has been done so far, this is as well as it can be done. Nobody who ever wrote could do this better. And you don’t believe that—most of you don’t believe this. And it’s too bad that you don’t. How could it be better? Treating these people and these circumstances, how could it be better? Could you possibly be more interested in these people than you are now? more interested in finding out WHAT THE HELL HAPPENS AT THAT HOUSE? what happens to all these It’s terrifically exciting, it really is. All right, so you think I’m getting overheated. [Laughter.] There is excitement and excitement. But if you’re seriously interested in writing—if you’re seriously interested in people—you are interested by this, and you do want to know what’s going to happen. And as a matter of fact you’re so interested that you don’t really even pay attention to the skills that I’m pointintg out, which is the highest form of art. I mean, it could be something that you overheard on the street: For a while Ralph the butcher was coming over on Saturday nights to drink and sleep with my mother. It’s something you could hear in a restaurant at the next table. And it wouldn’t surprise you and you certainly wouldn’t think of it as the opening sentence of a masterpiece of fiction. And yet it reminds you of where great fiction comes from. It comes from very ordinary human activities and very ordinary statements about them. All right. Maybe I’ll try to read on for—should I pull myself together and try to read the rest of this story without— STUDENTS: Yeah. MUDRICK: I should, okay. I’ll keep my mouth shut except for reading the stories. All right, I’ll do it. I’ll try very hard not to betray any reaction. In fact I’ll start over. For awhile Ralph the Butcher was coming over on Saturday nights to drink and sleep with my mother. She was between husbands at the time. My sister’s father was long gone and she had just divorced mine for the second time. I love it, I love it. All the mathematics too [laughing]. You begin to want to diagram things, it’s like parsing sentences. [Laughter.] I mean, who belongs where, and when was she doing this, and so on. Ralph was the butcher at the neighborhood grocery; Ralph Eaker of Eaker Brothers Market. Ralph was as pale and rotund as his white porcelain glass-fronted meat counter. Ralph was growing bald but what little hair he had was short fine and yellow, like it had been dyed with tobacco smoke. His eyes were watery and the color of his skin was white to shades of milky gray. He always wore a limp white shirt and a 139

Mudrick Transcribed bloody apron over a pair of those little bitty black and white checkered trousers that you always associate with bakers and cooks. Ralph didn’t have any ass and his pants hung limp on him. He always had a pint in the right-hand back pocket and a cigarette hanging out of the front of his mouth. Ralph had skinny arms and legs, drooping shoulders and an enormous stomach. He was sad-looking; he looked like he always expected people to walk up and hit him; and he couldn’t look you in the eyes as if he were ashamed for crying or about to. One Sunday morning my sister and I got up and our mother was in the kitchen making coffee. We heard someone snoring in the bedroom. We went in to see who it was and it was old Ralph. He was lying on his back with just the sheet over him. One bony white leg from the knee was sticking out from under the sheet. His foot was long and bony, white and ugly. He snored and snorted, gurgled and popped. One arm was under his head and the other was under the sheet holding his crotch. His stomach looked like a mountain on the bed. My sister and I went into the kitchen to see about breakfast and to try to be first with the Sunday funnies. My mother turned to us and said, “Coffee is ready. Go wake up Ralph.” She didn’t speak to either one of us in particular so we both went. We stood just inside the bedroom door and called out his name several times but he didn’t stir. Neither one of us wanted to go over and touch him to wake him up. My sister stuck her middle fingers between her teeth and the index fingers in her nostrils, pursed her lips and blew hard. When my sister whistled like that mirrors cracked and canaries went deaf. Ralph woke up too. He exploded into life and propelled himself off of the bed. My sister screamed and ran from the room. I stood there dumbfounded as I watched Ralph propel himself off of the bed across the room and into the wall on the other side. He bounded back and landed on his ass in a sitting position with his legs straight out in front of him and slightly spread, his feet almost touching the wall. He leaned forward on his massive belly and seemed to stare at the floor over his navel. His arms hung limp at his sides and his hands were in his lap. He started to shake and broke into a sweat and looked as if he might cry. My mother came into the bedroom with my sister behind her and wanted to know what the hell was going on. “Nothing,” I said. “What did you do to Ralph?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “Honest. He just jumped out of bed and ran into the wall.” [Laughter.] Ralph started to slide backward on the floor toward the bed. When his back touched it he raised himself up and sat on the edge. My mother helped him get situated and asked him what happened. He 140

Week One reached for the half pint and a package of Camels on the bedside table. With shaky hands he took the lid off the half and took a swallow of it from the bottle, a little dribbled down his chin and ran off to his belly. My mother lit a cigarette for him. “What the hell happened?” she asked. Ralph seemed to be waking up. “It was the war,” he said in a quavering whispery voice. He sat on the edge of the bed, supporting himself on his stiff arms. His hands gripped the edge of the mattress. He stared at the floor; his look was somehow blank. “It was the war,” he whispered, “the war.” Ralph the Butcher didn’t stay for coffee that Sunday morning. My sister told my mother how it all happened. She wouldn’t talk to me. My mother sat there and listened with sort of a smile on her face. After she heard it all she said weakly, “Don’t do it again!” “Okay,” we said. Somehow there seemed to be unspoken license. My sister and I both wondered how long it would be before we could call Ralph for coffee again. The next Saturday evening just before my sister and I were about to go to bed there was a knock at the front door. I answered it and there stood Ralph. He had a look on his face like “please don’t hit me” and a stack of comic books and candy bars in his hands. My sister spotted the candy bars and funny books and ran up to help me welcome Ralph. We invited Ralph in and I closed the door behind him. My mother came in to the living room from the kitchen where she sat at the dining-room table reading the paper and drinking whiskey. Ralph handed the peace offerings to my sister and I and my mother told us to make ourselves scarce. We returned to the room we shared with the funny books and candy bars. At twelve years old I enjoyed the fantasy adventures of Donald Duck with Huey, Louie and Dewey and Uncle Scrooge and Gyro Gear-Loose, the crazy inventor. I would also I think liked to have fucked Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. She had nice tits and a sexy body. This is a children’s story. [Laughter.] I prefer this kind myself (sorry—sorry). Well we didn’t wake Ralph for coffee Sunday morning, somehow it just wouldn’t have seemed right. But the Sunday after we did! My sister went into the kitchen and came back and told me that the coffee was ready. My sister and I walked into my mother’s bedroom. My sister stuck her fingers in her teeth and nose and blew hard. I yelled “They’re coming Ralph.” [Laughter.] Ralph exploded and jumped out of bed, ran across the room and slammed into the wall. My mother came into the bedroom and bawled us out and told us we shouldn’t do that to poor Ralph. She directed her admonitions at me. She tried to put scorn on her face but the laughter she was trying to hold in her gut kept diluting it. My sister 141

Mudrick Transcribed and I figured out what we could get away with and two or three times a month we would call Ralph for coffee. He did the same thing every time and so did my mother. She would come in and give us hell for being so mean to Ralph. Sometimes I think she did get madder than at others. I think she thought Ralph was either going to kill himself or tear down the house slamming into that wall two or three times a month. You think he’d a broke himself of it. Ralph came around less and less and finally stopped altogether. I’m not sure who was getting the best deal on meat. My mother or Ralph the Butcher. [Some students laugh, others groan.] All right, I didn’t write it! [Laughter.] My mother finally met Doc and got in solid with him. I went back to a boys’ home and my sister went back to collecting teddy bears from the drunks in the neighborhood bar. Ralph went back behind the butcher counter looking like he was afraid you might hit him or see him crying. He had a pint in his back pocket and a cigarette dangled out of the front of his mouth. STUDENT: [Inaudible] inappropriate— MUDRICK: What’s inappropriate? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Why is that inappropriate? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: He’s reading comic books. STUDENT: It seems like [inaudible] objection to locker-room talk like you were talking about before. I have nothing against profanity in a story— MUDRICK: I am aware of [inaudible]. [Laughter.] STUDENT: [Inaudible] and I couldn’t tell if the writer was male or female until that point, and it seemed like the wrong way to tell the audience who’s writing. STUDENT(I): Yeah. MUDRICK: You think so. STUDENT(I): It was abrupt—I didn’t know [inaudible]. STUDENT: [Inaudible] his sister. MUDRICK: Yeah, well, a girl can have a sister. [Laughs.] It happens. By the way, that’s—I’m sorry—let’s see, I will try very hard not to say this ever again during the quarter. There is one thing you have to watch out for when you’re writing a first-person-singular story. The reader does not know who you are; particularly the reader does not know your sex. You know your sex, that’s perfectly true, but the reader doesn’t. So if you write a story with the perpendicular pronoun, try to identify the sex and the approximate age of the narrator as soon as possible. It does make for trouble, it’s a technical difficulty that you should try to avoid. Yes?

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Week One STUDENT: I didn’t have trouble with that being out of place in the story; the only thing I didn’t get was whether that was a feeling that he had at the time or whether that was in retrospect, now looking back at pretty foxy Sheena. MUDRICK: Well, you know, he’s twelve years old. [Inaudible.] STUDENT: No, I’m not saying that’s my problem— MUDRICK: [Inaudible.] STUDENT: —I just don’t know whether he’s saying that that’s how he felt when he was reading them or that’s how he feels now that he’s thinking back—you know, in retrospect. MUDRICK: Well, maybe it’s the “I think,” the insertion of the “I think” in the middle of that sentence: “I would also I think like to have fucked Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. She had nice tits and a sexy body.” STUDENT: So that pretty much tells us that that’s what he thinks now, looking back. MUDRICK: Maybe. Or maybe more of a problem is that we can’t be sure what that “I think” is supposed to mean: whether it’s supposed to mean: I knew it at the time—or maybe I was in that kind of state of very early puberty or pre-puberty when I didn’t even know what I wanted—maybe that was what I wanted. So it could be more definite. But I don’t really think that the fantasy itself is out of place. STUDENT: No—I don’t at all. I just thought that the location of, where that thought originated . . . MUDRICK: Yeah. Yes? STUDENT: I can see how he could be interested in sex, but I don’t see reading Donald Duck cartoons when you’re in sixth grade. You know, sixth grade, because— MUDRICK: I hate to tell you, but I’ve seen students in this class reading comic books. STUDENT: Would Huey, Louie, [inaudible]? STUDENT: Well, you were a girl. [Inaudible.] STUDENT: [Inaudible.] [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Sh! Yeah? [calling on a student] STUDENT: The two didn’t do it for me. [Inaudible] Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey and Louie or whatever, and I thought that seems kind of young for a twelveyears-old, and then in the next breath he said— MUDRICK: Too old for a twelve-year-old. STUDENT: Yeah, and so the two didn’t go together. So one or the other seems out of place. STUDENT: No! At twelve you could be [inaudible]. You’re still a kid and you’re just getting— STUDENT: A hard-on. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: [after a pause]: He’s making me nostalgic. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] I thought it was a bit repetitious when he said, Ralph blah blah blah, Ralph blah blah blah, Ralph blah blah blah. MUDRICK: Maybe. There are some repetitions which I think are—for instance I think it’s pretty hard to believe—well, the repetition of Ralph going into the wall,

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Mudrick Transcribed maybe it occurs a little too often. Through the second time it’s funny, but I think the notion of their doing it every time Ralph comes over is less funny. STUDENT: No, my comment was, he used Ralph [inaudible] the first word in a sentence. MUDRICK: No, I know, I know what you mean—I was just getting at repetition. That’s—it’s difficult to argue that. I happen to like—I mean, I think what it’s supposed to mean is, these kids don’t think of that guy as he, they think of him as Ralph. That’s Ralph! Ralph is lying in bed. He really hasn’t become acclimated enough. [Laughs.] I mean, he’s not a he, he’s Ralph. And they’re accustomed to this parade of men who are in and out. If it were he it would be the same guy over and over again. STUDENT: It’s almost like he’s a Ralph, not Ralph. MUDRICK: Something like that, yes. This is a particular representative of the Ralph species. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: One thing—I just thought the second time they make him get out of bed—I thought the “exploded” was unnecessary and it took away from— MUDRICK: Yes, you’re right. No, that’s bad. And what’s funny about the second time, of course, and you were right— STUDENT: They were doing it on purpose. MUDRICK: Well, doing it on purpose, but “They’re coming Ralph.” [Laughter.] That’s what’s funny about the second time. And after that it’s just a kind of childish joke and it’s not funny. Yes? STUDENT: Do you know, or does it matter, if he’s naked the first time they see him? Because I thought that might be why his sister ran out of the room. MUDRICK: Oh, I don’t know. This is such a houseful of slobs that it almost doesn’t matter, I mean! [laughing] Obviously there would be so little distinction between them naked and clothed [laughing], you would probably not be able to tell, I mean! Because once have you these raggy people [laughing] about whom the issue of nakedness or not, it just doesn’t occur. I have something very interesting to tell you about this story after we finish the discussion which you will not know until I tell you because you have to have seen this story, and it’s a fascinating fact. But I’ll just hold that for a while. Yes? STUDENT: I thought it was interesting how in the beginning they were talking about cigarettes here and the thing in the back of his pants, and how they ended it the same way as they started. MUDRICK: Yes, and that’s deliberate, I mean that’s a kind of formal organization of the story which for me works, because you have these kids . . . What is morally interesting about this story? How could this story be changed in such a way as to be hopelessly banal and revolting? I mean, in a very easy way. Yes? STUDENT: If the kids regretted or felt bad about what they did. MUDRICK: If they regretted—that certainly would be part of it, yes. Yes? STUDENT: If they were doing it because he was an intruder in their house. MUDRICK [with mock pity]: If they felt this was somebody who was taking their mother away from them—yes. 144

Week One STUDENT: Ralph had taught them a lesson in the end and proved that they were bad. MUDRICK: Yes, or if they are suffering terrible psychological damage as the result of the fact that her mother is an easy fuck, and you how know how terribly children suffer when things like . . . It’s apparent that these are rolling stones in the universe [laughing]—they will just keep rolling until they hit a brick wall, that’s it. I mean essentially they’re like Ralph—you run until you hit a wall [laughing]. You’re not being taught a lesson in this story, are you. And that’s one of the wonderful things about first-class fiction. You are not being taught any lesson. You are finding out something about the marvelous individuality of human experience—that is, every human experience is different from every other. And if you can avoid the impression of giving the reader a moral lesson, you have already achieved a high kind of triumph, you really have. Even if you yourself are a terrible stuffed shirt and a puritan, reading or listening to a story like this you would have to be virtually hopeless not to be amused by it. It would get you out of your own moral limitations, in which sense it would be the most moral kind of story imaginable, because you would be blown out of your own preoccupations. Yes? STUDENT: There is sort of a disparity between the tone and some of the things mentioned. I’m not saying that that’s wrong— MUDRICK: Well, say what— STUDENT: It gives it sort of an absurd way of being, you know, for him to mention being in the war, and the way he always looks like he’s about to cry. MUDRICK: Oh, I’m glad you brought that up, because I thought that was terrific—I mean a wonderful and sudden change of tone which the author manages and never explains. That is— My mother lit a cigarette for him. “What the hell happened?” she asked. Ralph seemed to be waking up. “It was the war,” he said in a quavering whispery voice. He sat on the edge of the bed, supporting himself on his stiff arms. His hands gripped the edge of the mattress. He stared at the floor; his look was somehow blank. “It was the war,” he whispered, “the war.” Ralph the Butcher didn’t stay for coffee that Sunday morning. —and that’s the end of it. You don’t hear anything else. This is Ralph’s private life, which comes into the story because the kids have scared him. The mother isn’t impressed—and another wonderful thing about this story is the suggestion that nobody is affected by anybody else. [Laughs.] What I mean is, everybody has his private anxieties—there is no connection, no communication. You sleep with somebody, it doesn’t matter in the least, it’s just a way of passing the time. You give somebody the suggestion of your deepest fears and anxieties-it doesn’t make a dent, doesn’t matter in the least. 145

Mudrick Transcribed Another character that I love in the story is the mother who, though she feels that the children shouldn’t be doing this, nevertheless is rather amused by the notion of Ralph bouncing off the wall. At the same time she doesn’t seem to be cruel or mean—she’s rather likable. I mean, you even get the impression that she’s a good mother! [Laughs.] And imagine that: this mother who is doing everything which would get her put her in jail or deprived of her children in any reasonable court in the world, and you are persuaded by the writer of this story that she’s probably a good mother and that the children benefit by being with her. Isn’t that astounding? I mean, think of what fiction can do if it can do something like that! Yes? STUDENT: One thing that bothered me in this context was, I thought that everybody was a good character in a way, except that the end—there was a reference to what happens to the little girl and what happens to the little boy. I don’t remember what happens to the little boy but— MUDRICK: “I went back to a boys’ home and my sister went back to collecting teddy bears from the drunks in the neighborhood bar.” STUDENT: Yeah and . . . I don’t know. I didn’t like that. MUDRICK: You felt they should have stayed with their mother. STUDENT: I think it was cheap. MUDRICK: It may have been a cheap shot, okay. STUDENT: A cheap ending. MUDRICK: All right, okay. STUDENT: It bothers me because I was pleased with the rest of the story. MUDRICK: No, you may be right. The story is so off the wall that by the time you get to the end— STUDENT: It’s a Harold Robbins story at the end. He puts a Harold Robbins ending [inaudible]. MUDRICK [having misheard her]: I don’t think he means it to be horrible. No, I disagree with you about that. I think what the author is saying is, You can do anything to people and you can’t destroy them. And the fact that this little boy goes back to a foster home doesn’t mean a thing. He will grow up and be fine, and develop into a Wall Street broker or a college professor or a rapist and a maniac, and really nothing . . . I love stories which don’t tell you all the awful things that happened in your childhood as a result of which you have become the pig that you are. [Laughter.] Don’t write stories like that. You know—the awful things your parents did to you, and that one TRAUMATIC experience when your mother deprived you of that See’s chocolate when it meant more than anything else in the world. And all her kindness afterwards didn’t help cancel out that effect, and now you can’t pass any of your university courses, that’s the way it goes. It’s clear that these people just go careering through the universe [laughing]. They’re like little ball bearings, I mean they bounce off everything, they’re stainless steel, and nothing happens to them. Yes? STUDENT: Here’s a dumb question. What is collecting teddies from— MUDRICK: What is what? 146

Week One STUDENT: Collecting teddies from drunks in the— STUDENT: In bars. MUDRICK: I don’t really understand that myself. It seems like an interesting activity. [Laughter.] STUDENT: I can’t even see that as a metaphor, I can’t— MUDRICK: I know, I was trying to think of it as a metaphor—I thought maybe she was selling herself to drunks. STUDENT: A baby prostitute. MUDRICK: Is that what it’s intended to be? STUDENT: What is it now? MUDRICK: A baby prostitute. STUDENT: By collecting teddies? MUDRICK: Teddy bears. [Inaudible], because I think that some of you are champing at the bit and want to get away, and I’m not going to read anymore stories—I wanted to tell you the most astonishing thing about this story that you could not tell. Any reader of it in the English department (except me, and there are one or two other people in L&S) would be appalled by this—it is full of mechanical errors of the most trivial kind. It is, by any English department standard, illiterate from beginning to end—misspelled words with the wrong tense (occasionally I corrected them)—and it’s an astonishing story. [End of tape.]

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Week Two 6 October 1983

MUDRICK: This is called “Diamond District.” And this too is one that I read, at least an earlier draft of, in my office, and made certain suggestions, and whether they were carried out or not I don’t know. As I walked with the rest of my family down Broadway in midtown Manhattan, my father stopped to look in the window of a small formal-wear shop. He seemed intrigued and paused for a moment to look it over. “They might have a jacket for you here, Howard,” he said to my brother, who was getting married the following week and was looking for a white dinner jacket. “I don’t think . . . let’s not go in there,” Howard said. “I—I had a bad deal with the owner and he owes me twenty-five bucks.” He looked up to make sure it was the right place. “Yeah, Prestige Tuxedos. It’s a mom-and-pop store. This Jewish guy owns it, and they’re really hustlers.” “He owes you money?” My father asked. “Yeah. I bought a jacket from him which needed cleaning because of some water spots. ‘Don’t worry!’ he kept saying, ‘we’ll get it cleaned up!’ But I found out that the spots would be too difficult to clean, the garment could be damaged. And when I went back in here”—he pointed to the store—“to return the jacket, he made a face, but then he checked himself, he said, ‘Look, you’re a good customer’—I’d only bought one thing before from him—‘what else can I get you?’ So I told him I needed a pair of black slacks. The slacks went for forty-five dollars, so all he owed me was the difference of twenty-five.” He paused. “I’ve had the credit slip on me, and I’ve been meaning to go back in to pick up the slacks and the difference.” “Well, let’s go in,” my father said, eager to show Howard the right way to haggle with the Jewish retailers in New York. “Come on, I’ll go in with you.” Howard was taken off guard. “Well, maybe we should wait till Tuesday or Wednesday,” which meant waiting until my sister and my 148

Week Two mother, who were a few shops down looking in a window, weren’t around. “Besides, he’s got customers now, and he’ll probably brush us aside. I think it’d be better if we confronted him alone.” “But Howard, now’s a good time, while he’s busy. Don’t you see, we should go in now because he won’t want to make a scene, it would look bad for him. I’m telling you . . .” “Yeah, you’re right. Okay, okay, we’ll do it right now.” “Should I go in too?” I asked. “Yeah, I think it’ll look good,” Howard said. “Yeah, come in with us,” my father said. “I think you’ll learn something.” And then to Howard, “Let’s tell the girls we’ll meet them somewhere in about ten minutes.” We went in. It was a small place, with a high ceiling and limited floor space. Racks of jackets and pants went from floor to ceiling. Behind the small counter stood the owner, pale and sweaty, in his early sixties. He had several customers, which meant there was hardly any walking space; his one employee had to nestle himself among the racks for us to get by. When Howard had walked in, only the owner stopped to look up from what he was doing, but when my father and I followed, everyone Stopped and looked at us. The room was silent. “Hi,” my brother said. The man nodded. “I decided to keep the pants, but I’ll want my money back from the jacket.” “Sure, sure. I’ll need the number on the receipt.” Howard handed him the slip of paper. “José,” the owner said, and handed his employee the receipt. José went in back to get the pants. “So I’ll need the difference of the jacket and the slacks.” “Sure,” the owner said, and when José came back with the pants, he looked at the slip. He opened the register and laid down a ten and a five. “No,” Howard said. “the difference is twenty-five.” And as he was saying this my father (the customers were still watching), who along with me had been standing quietly near the entrance, shook his head and started to come forward, putting on a pair of dark sunglasses as he approached them. “No, no. . .” he started to say. The owner glanced at him and immediately said, “Okay, look.” He took a pen from his breast pocket and wrote out some figures in front of my brother and father. Howard fidgeted and gave an obligatory look at the numbers. “Twenty-one dollars it comes out to, all right?” the owner asked. “There’s tax on the pants.” Howard started to protest, but my father put a silencing hand on his arm. “That’s fine, that’s okay,” my father said. Howard snatched 149

Mudrick Transcribed the money and slung the pants under his arm. He turned around and started to walk out. “Thank the man,” my father said, restraining Howard’s abrupt pace. We went outside. “I’m never going back there,” Howard said. He looked at my father. “Dad what was this business about thanking him?” “Well first of all, the four dollars don’t make a difference, and then once the deal was settled, you should have shown him that you can still carry on, you say, ‘Thank you mister, so long!’” “Yeah . . . I’m never going back there.” “But Howard, don’t you see? This is all he knows, it’s how he makes his living.” “Yeah, I see what you mean.” He was thinking. “Yeah, that’s right. It’s a game and he knows it.” And after a pause, “You know, I don’t think I would have gotten my money back if you hadn’t been there. Thanks Dad.” He shook his hand. “It was terrific when you suddenly came forward. You were great too,” he said to me, shaking my hand as well. My mother and sister, a few doors down, waved when they saw us. “There are the girls,” my father said. Howard beamed as he led us to meet them. Okay. Yes? STUDENT(1):c I don’t understand why he wouldn’t have gotten his money back. I don’t understand his fear of the owner. Does anybody else feel that way? STUDENT(2): Yeah—l don’t understand why either. MUDRICK: You mean you wouldn’t have any hesitation at all about going back to get your money. STUDENT(1): Well, I have had—like he really didn’t want to go back and get it-he wouldn’t have done it if his father weren’t with him. I’ve been uncomfortable in that situation, but I’ll go get my money back. STUDENT(2): It’s not clear in the story why this guy is so forbidding and formidable that he wouldn’t want to go in. MUDRICK: He’s not made to appear forbidding. You know something? This seems to me an interesting difference between male and female psychology. My impression is—and you’re perfectly welcome to contradict me—that women are less likely to be intimidated by mercantile situations than men are, that a woman is much more likely to go in and complain about something or to demand her money back than a man is. Men are likely to be intimidated by commercial situations, or more likely than women are. STUDENT(3): How come you think that’s so? Do you have a reason? Because of what Mudrick will say, the reader should know that students (1), (2), and (3) are female. These designations apply only to this particular discussion. c 

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Week Two MUDRICK: Well, I may be wrong! STUDENT(3): You’re making an observation; I wondered why, if you had a reason— MUDRICK: All I can say is that this is the impression from the few images that swim up in my mind. STUDENT(3): But you don’t know why, you’re just— MUDRICK: Well, I think probably, especially as far as certain items are concerned, women do more shopping than men do. They’re more accustomed to shopping and they’re more accustomed also to bringing things back, which is very important in developing a kind of rhinoceros hide when you shop. Men hate to shop, usually, especially for clothes. I don’t think I’ve ever known a man who liked to shop for clothes. STUDENT: Here’s one. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: That’s fine, I’m sure there are exceptions. But certainly many, many, many women like to shop for clothes, and of course the very fact that women have such an enormous variety of things to choose from means that it’s much less likely that they’ll be satisfied at first strike, so to speak, and they often bring things back. So they get accustomed to dealing with merchants, with salesgirls. Men don’t. I think, generally speaking, men don’t. Yes? STUDENT: I think that maybe the father could have just played up as a little bit— maybe more supportive, because I know with me there’s a lot of times I do not want to go back in, but my father’s a real dealer and he— MUDRICK: And that’s the other aspect of the story, that this guy is the kind of guy— he of course is the exception to the generalization that I’m making. You know what I think is a mistake here? And it’s funny I didn’t catch this the first time around, but I think it’s important to understand, at least it’s important to my understanding of and feeling about the story, that the boy and his father are also Jewish. Now if you get the impression that this is a pair of gentiles going in to intimidate the Jew, it seems to me you get the wrong impression. The father is rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of confronting a peer. I mean this is the arena! [Laughter.] This is Daniel and the Lion! And if you think of it as some Gentile who is going to pull his weight against the poor little Jew then it’s just disgusting, it’s not good at all. STUDENT: Do you see where the father, though, is just a little bit more obvious? MUDRICK: A little! [Laughs.] STUDENT: Because if you get the image of a Jewish shopkeeper—the father, he pushed it, but he didn’t . . . MUDRICK: No, I think what you’re supposed to believe, and what I believed the first time I read the story, is that the shopkeeper sees the father coming in like that [makes an aggressive gesture], ready to go, and he says: Okay, that’s it [laughing]. I mean I’ve met my match—that is, I’ve met me, that’s what’s coming through the door. [Laughter.] And he knows this is the end, and so you don’t fight it. The boy he can handle. I mean, these mealy-mouthed second-generation Jewboys, who haven’t got a nerve in their bodies, them I can walk all over. [Laughter.] But Pop I can’t handle. 151

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: Yeah, I was thinking that Howard here is supposed to be getting married in a couple weeks, and Daddy has to go into the shop— MUDRICK: Yeah! STUDENT: But if now you said, maybe they’re Jewish, I know how the Jewish family always sticks close together— MUDRICK: Oh yeah. And I love that business about Let’s tell the girls. I mean, Grandma [laughter] . . . ninety-eight years old . . . at an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease [laughter] . . . She’s being pushed along in an automobile creeper [laughing] . . . But the girls—we’ll get the girls later. Yes? STUDENT: I particularly liked— MUDRICK: Sorry I made the joke. STUDENT: —the fact that they had to do their business while the women are away. MUDRICK: Yes. There are some things which are too serious for women. [Laughter.] This business of getting your money back from storekeepers—that’s a job for a man. STUDENT: It’s infuriating as hell, but it just seems typically masculine. MUDRICK: Well, it’s typically Jewish masculine, it certainly is that, and I really think this story isn’t as ethnic as it ought to be. It’s important that that be established, and it’s not as clearly established— STUDENT: I had no idea the customers were Jewish. MUDRICK: No, I know. Unfortunately, when I was reading it in my office I simply assumed without question that the people coming in were Jewish. And they all sound Jewish of course. Howard is obviously a little nebuch of a Jewish boy [laughing]. I mean his father will have to direct him in bed after he gets married. [Laughter.] The name Howard is wonderful too. They’re all named Howard-when they’re not named Irving. Yes? STUDENT: When the father was preparing to look intimidating he put on some sunglasses. MUDRICK: Yes! that’s a marvelous touch, I love that touch. STUDENT: I wish it were handled better, though, because I thought that he had stolen them—I thought he had taken them from a rack. MUDRICK: Yeah, yeah. This story as a matter of fact, I think, has some of the same problems, but not quite, as the story about Loreen. The story about Loreen was full of just problems of writing and putting it together. I love the conception of this story, it’s a wonderful idea for a story, I love it, and I wish it could be done very—but the trouble is, there are some stories-and maybe this is one of the things that you people have against me. There is a kind of organization which is almost the physical equivalent of wit. Certain kinds of stories have to be so beautifully done in order to make their point. It’s like the form of a joke. You know the problem that some people, including me, have telling jokes (and I do), and these people are having trouble telling these stories. Which indeed are hard to tell, because they require to be told with no mistakes; everything has to fit perfectly. It’s not that you’re getting extremely interesting characters that you can go on about indefinitely, it’s that there’s this little situation that you want 152

Week Two beautifully presented—I mean the confrontation for instance of the shopkeeper with Pop, with the old man, or the girls down the street, and Howard so afraid of asking for his twenty-five dollars back, and so on—all that. And it’s just not as well done as it has to be to make its effect, and if it’s not done almost perfectly it will scarcely make an effect at all. Whereas other kinds of stories can make a pretty good effect and be rather badly written, be rather clumsily organized. And that is interesting to me. And indeed I am interested in that kind of organization which approaches the form of a joke. And of course sometimes they are jokes— sometimes they’re comic. [Ten minutes later.] You know, I finally figured out—I’m sorry, I’ve been brooding about this all period. I’ve just got to say this, this is totally irrelevant. (It goes back to my brooding about . . .) I think I know what you people have against me [laughter], I really do. I enjoy myself in class, and you don’t like that. [Several students object.] Because you’re so accustomed to teachers looking as if they’re presiding at a funeral, that the idea that somebody would dare to enjoy himself and make jokes at the expense of the students and so on is appalling to you. And you’re all a bunch of prudes, essentially, in the classroom—you’re academically prudes. You don’t like that idea— STUDENT: Who has raised an objection to your making jokes in class? MUDRICK: Oh, I don’t know. STUDENT: I don’t either, and you’re taking this thing [inaudible] and it doesn’t have any foundation. MUDRICK: Look, I can have my opinion! I allow you people to have your opinions. STUDENT: But don’t base it on an opinion that we don’t have. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: I base it on my perception of what seems to me your collaborative opinion! STUDENT: Nobody’s telling you you can’t be funny in class. MUDRICK: It’s not a question of what you necessarily tell me explicitly. I draw inferences about your attitudes as you draw inferences about mine! What does that have to do with anything? This notion—after all [ironically], we are not being honest with each other, are we? and I am encouraging you not to be honest. Consequently there are all sorts of things that you feel which you haven’t told me, and this is one of them, that you HATE IT that I’m enjoying myself, and you want to bring me down to size. Last week, for instance, I tremendously enjoyed myself in class! STUDENT: So did we! MUDRICK: Well, some of you did. And then some of you don’t like the idea that a teacher should enjoy himself in this way, so you want to bring me down to (so to speak) your level. [Laughter.] I mean you want me to be presiding at a kind of funeral.

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Week Seven 17 November 1983

MUDRICK: It does seem to me that most of us, sure, we all have curiosity about people, but finally our curiosity can be baffled and we give up. I remember, for instance, I was waiting for a pizza in a pizza restaurant the other day and I had to wait for twenty minutes. I looked around, I looked at this person, I saw no looks “combining peace and perplexity”d—all I saw were completely blank faces, absolutely impenetrable to me, and finally I sat there looking at the table. [Laughter.] I don’t think I’m that different from those people. I don’t think it’s that easy to penetrate what’s going on inside people’s minds. If you can’t hear— STUDENT: Not in public. MUDRICK: Yeah, most people have to carry masks anyway. Sure they do, especially at places like that. Yes? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: By the way, that reminds me (since we only have one more meeting, no doubt you won’t do this). I’m sorry, just one little observation. I resent all the cracks about American fast food, which people make characteristically and you’re supposed to agree with automatically. I think a lot of the American fast food is tremendous. That’s fine, shake your head, you don’t know a fucking thing about food, you’ve never tasted good food [laughter], but you know that fast food is no good. Pizzas, for instance, can be marvelous, there are wonderful combinations— STUDENT: But not McDonald’s. MUDRICK: Does McDonald’s make pizza? [Several respond at once.] Well, I’ll tell you, I happen to believe that I make the best hamburger sandwich in the world, so I don’t eat McDonald’s . . . [Several talk at once.] But, I want to point out to you that Julia Child has said that the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder is an excellent sandwich. STUDENT: Yeah, well, when it’s fresh off the grill it’s better than the ones— MUDRICK: That may well be, that’s fine. But what I’m getting at is, don’t write stories in which you say “fast food,” and everybody is automatically supposed to agree. I think the fast-food emporiums for one thing are terrific. If you think of the dives you sometimes have to go into in places like Europe, and you think of A phrase from a story the class has been talking about.

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Week Seven marvelously clean places with the proper kind of plastic which can be wiped clean, and relatively sanitary and no rats running around . . . I think it’s terrific. God bless America. STUDENT(1): The nutrition you get in fast-food places remains so awful. I mean, you know— STUDENT(2): That’s not true either. STUDENT(1): —so much sodium, so much sugar— MUDRICK: Like practically all other American food that you’re likely to eat at home also, because people pour on salt and so— STUDENT(3): No! that’s out. MUDRICK: What’s out? STUDENT(2): McDonald’s has— STUDENT(3): Nobody pours salt on anymore. MUDRICK: McDonald’s has what? STUDENT(2): I don’t remember what it was in, but they just had a report by the FDA saying that McDonald’s has fairly good nutrition in their meals. STUDENT(3): They’ve traced stomach cancer among young children to weekly trips to McDonald’s. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Moreover you don’t even have to eat there—all you have to do is to make a weekly trip. [Laughter.] That’s how bad these fast food places are. So you just bear that in mind.

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Spring 1983e MUDRICK: This is called “Shopping.” She was standing under the sign that read FRESH MEAT. [Laughter.] Castlebaum was putting toilet paper into his basket when he noticed her. He liked the way she looked: tall, tan, a little big in the behind. She was wearing tennis whites and her hair was pulled back in a braid. Castlebaum pushed his cart up to the meat counter to get a better look at her. He liked what he saw and stood next to her. He was just about to ask if she thought the tri-tips looked any good when the butcher yelled “Nine,” and she walked over to the other end of the counter. She wanted angel shark and chicken breasts, but just enough for two. Castlebaum was trying to figure out if the other person was a husband, or a lover, or maybe a child when she turned to him and said: “You do like chicken breasts, don’t you?” He turned to see who was behind him, but there was no one there. “Me?” he asked. “Who else?” she said. “Uh . . . yeah. They’re fine,” he said. “I’ll saute them with some mushrooms and shallots,” she said. “Okay . . . good,” he said. “And we’ll get that wine you like, the Monterey Riesling,” she said. “What?” “Hurry, go get the rice,” she said, “it’s on aisle six.” Castlebaum wondered who she was and how she knew the things he liked. He wondered if she’d been following him around for months or something. He wondered if she was psychotic. He wondered why he was on aisle six looking for rice. He got the rice and went back to the meat counter, but she wasn’t there. “I’m over here,” she said. She was standing in the frozen section. “This kind?” he asked, holding up the box of rice. “Uh-huh. I’ll bet you’re tired of Dreyer’s,” she said, “let’s get McConnell’s.” She picked up a pint of Dutch Chocolate and put it in Castlebaum’s basket. I haven’t been able to determine the date of this class meeting.

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Spring 1983 “Who are you?” he asked. “Who are you?” she asked, pulling down some peppermint stick tea, his second favorite. “They’re out of Earl Grey,” she said. That was his favorite. “C’mon really, what’s happening?” he said. She was pondering English muffins. “You like the kind with the cracks, don’t you?” she said. “Yeah. The Thomas’,” he said. “I like the Oroweat. So . . . let’s get bagels. That’s a fair compromise.” “What the hell is going on?” he asked. “I’m shopping, how about you?” she said. Castlebaum was getting nervous as they headed down the cereal aisle. “Junk, junk, junk,” she said. “Even this natural stuff is full of sugar.” “Did the firm put you up to this?” he asked. “Nutri-Grain,” she said. “Huh?” “That’s what we’ll get,” she said, and put a box into the cart. She pushed the cart to the checkout counter. The automatic checkers sounded like a chorus of telephone operators. “Three twenty-two. One fifty-four. One seventy-nine,” they said as the items whizzed past. “Do we need anything else?” she said. “Yeah,” Castlebaum thought a minute. “How about some candy?” “You don’t even like candy,” she said. They waited in silence. When she was close enough she threw the TV Guide in. Castlebaum scanned the Enquirer headlines. The checkers droned and the box people hurried. “Thirty-eight forty-seven,” the checker said. The woman paid. The change came down the chute. “Thank you,” the checker said. Castlebaum got the cart and followed the woman out the door. Yes? STUDENT(1): I thought it was a very interesting idea and they did it pretty well. Why would this person—I assume that she’s doing everything that he likes, with a certain type of this and that. MUDRICK: Seems to be, yeah. STUDENT(1): But it doesn’t make sense that she would have a real taste for Dreyer’s Ice Cream, which he’s by now tired of, and then turn around and be very adamant about not having any sugar, even in a natural cereal. MUDRICK: Oh, that kind of incongruity happens with people all the time—just consult with your friends. STUDENT: I go to McDonald’s and I get a Big Mac and a Tab. STUDENT(1): Yeah, but why would someone who’s so concerned about having the Nutri-Grain—I’m assuming that she’s doing everything that he goes along with. 157

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Ice cream is healthy, especially if it’s McConnell’s, made with pure cream and 99 percent sugar—and then on the other hand you just happen to read student newspapers or whatever, which explain to you how it is that certain things are unhealthy, and all this sugar they pour into cereals and so on. Yes? STUDENT: One thing that gets a little bit annoying is that after every quote is “he said,” “she said”—half of them could be cut out. MUDRICK: Maybe. Yes? STUDENT: I thought it was great, and it was going along good, but it kind of fell a little flat right about the ice cream aisle. It was building up this really weird thing, but there was no possible answer for it and so it just didn’t answer it, it just kept repeating itself from then on. He just kept asking her and she said “Shopping,” and he followed her around. MUDRICK: The writer told me that the story had come out of a reaction to something—I don’t know whether all of you have experienced this yet. Have you been in supermarkets where they have that voice calling out the item? It comes from the place where sometimes you put things to get weighed—in that general area. STUDENT: At Safeway. MUDRICK: Yeah, the Goleta Safeway. Well, this is the girl who calls out the prices, maybe. She knows everything. Yes? STUDENT: At the beginning she was kind of just a piece of meat to him, and then her personality came out—all of a sudden she’s a person. MUDRICK: Uh-huh. Yes? STUDENT: At first I thought that was an unfortunate mistake— MUDRICK: What was? STUDENT: She was standing under the meat sign. MUDRICK: “She was standing under the sign that read FRESH MEAT,” yeah. STUDENT: But after getting into the flow of the story it didn’t seem such a mistake. MUDRICK: It all sounds very domestic. I certainly think that’s intended. And what is so domestic outside the home as a supermarket? It sounds very much like a mildly affectionate, but maybe slightly impatient husband-and-wife team going shopping for the day. He has a kind of instant wife that materializes in the supermarket—and where better than in a supermarket? It’s ideal. Yes? STUDENT: At first I kind of wanted to know, well, where is this woman really from, and how does she know all these things? But then at the end, the thing I kind of liked was the fact that you don’t know where she’s from and where she’s going. MUDRICK: What touched me was the indication of his personal preference. I read this before, I read it in my office, and I immediately reacted negatively to the first sentence, but luckily I went on to the end of that first paragraph and then I liked it. I just want to read the first paragraph. She was standing under the sign that read FRESH MEAT. Castlebaum was putting toilet paper into his basket when he noticed her. He liked the way she looked: tall, tan, a little big in the behind. 158

Spring 1983 What’s so nice about that is that of course what you expect is a characteristic perfect image, and this little touch of personal preference [laughing], some perverse personal preference, makes it very nice, and somehow associates it with the toilet paper and the fresh meat. STUDENT: Like a rump roast. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Yeah! something like that. I remember this friend of mine who had quite a dark sense of humor, and the last time I saw him we were walking through a supermarket, and we were just passing the fresh-meat counter when he pointed to something and said, “That’s me.” It was a roast of boneless clod. [Laughs.] A big sign there—BONELESS CLOD. I think it’s terrific, I love it. I think it’s very funny. No, I wouldn’t want any explanations—I think she just materializes, that’s all, because that’s what supermarkets are like. A supermarket is the only place in the world where you could live indefinitely and have a great time. If you were locked up in a supermarket you could live for years (and certainly if they let you have some of the girls there [laughing]). I think the writer had some kind of vision, and I was delighted when he told me what had provoked it, because that is really eerie. If you haven’t heard that, by the way, you must go—it’s the Goleta Safeway. I don’t know if any other places have— STUDENT: The computer actually says what the item is? MUDRICK: Yes! STUDENT: And the price? MUDRICK: And the price! in this very nice female voice . . . STUDENT: It’s not a computerized type of voice? MUDRICK: No! not computerized at all—a very nice female voice. STUDENT: On Star Trek they have this computer with a very seductive female voice. MUDRICK: Well, this is not seductive, it’s just a kind of cheerful checker’s voice. It’s a perfectly credible voice, there’s nothing phony or electronic about it. STUDENT: Well, maybe there’s nothing so great about it, it’s just a girl they pay to sit under there. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: I think the little touches are marvelous. I love the fact that he waits a while—well, everything—the little touches which keep reality in it. “You do like chicken breasts, don’t you?” He turned to see who was behind him, but there was no one there. “Me?” he asked. “Who else?” she said. And that too is just wonderful, because she knows him. He doesn’t know her but she knows him. And she’s a little impatient, I mean that kind of domestic impatience—the way women are with men they’re familiar with—not madly in love with, but they don’t mind having them around, I mean as husbands or boyfriends, something like that. They tolerate them good-naturedly, or a little impatiently. 159

Mudrick Transcribed “Uh . . . yeah. They’refine,” he said. “I’ll saute them with some mushrooms and shallots,” she said. She’s relenting a little. [Laughs.] Because after all, this is a guy she sleeps with and lives with, so now she’s going to make him a nice dinner. “Okay . . . good,” he said. “And we’ll get that wine you like, the Monterey Riesling,” she said. “What?” Really working at it now [laughing]. So it seems to me every time he gets a little nervous, wondering if he should question what’s going on, the author comes up with just exactly the right word or suggestion. It’s certainly what would happen—I think it would happen with me, I mean that’s the way I would react. “Hurry, go get the rice,” she said, “it’s on aisle six.” By this time she’s getting a little tired of this boor and she’s being reminded of what men are like: you indulge them too much and they really are disgusting. Castlebaum wondered who she . . . I love the name by the way, Castlebaum. I have no idea why that pleases me as much as it does, but it does. Castlebaum wondered who she was and how she knew the things he liked. He wondered if she’d been following him around for months or something. See, Castlebaum is the principle of realism. He never goes out on a limb. And if you wonder why he doesn’t run screaming to begin with, it’s because it’s a girl, an attractive girl. He doesn’t want to give up this opportunity. Even if she’s crazy she probably isn’t violent. She picked up a pint of Dutch Chocolate and put it in Castlebaum’s basket. “Who are you?” he asked. No, I love that, I think that’s very well done. STUDENT: I think they’re going to live together for twenty, thirty years, I don’t think she’s going to disappear at the end of the day. He went to the supermarket, he knew what he wanted . . . MUDRICK: And the way she replies to his question, Who are you? ‘“Who are you?’ she asked.” That’s what men are like. [Laughs.] Ask stupid questions . . . so you just ask right back. Yes? 160

Spring 1983 STUDENT: It reminds me of a story by Woody Allen where there’s this guy who goes to a sorcerer and he gets transposed into some book— MUDRICK: I know what you mean, yeah, I know the story. A favorite character of his, whom he has sexually available to him. STUDENT: And he takes her out of the book and brings her to New York. MUDRICK: Yeah, has her in a hotel room—although that gets tiresome to me after a while. The trickiness is too obvious and then he has to keep inventing. This is just long enough I think for the trickiness that’s used. “What the hell is going on?” he asked. “I’m shopping, how about you?” she said. Castlebaum was getting nervous as they headed down the cereal aisle. “Junk, junk, junk,” she said. “Even this natural stuff is full of sugar.” She talks very naturally. You cenainly believe in her, and you believe in the situation. That is, the situation is this. From our standpoint the guy is seeing things as they are actually happening, but it’s clear that they look very different to the girl. And eventually, simply because of the way she reacts and what she says, you feel that there are two planes of reality occurring in this story—there’s the girl’s plane and the guy’s plane. And you also get, it seems to me, a very interesting insight into the relations between men and women. Because fundamentally men and women believe they live on different planes anyway, so somehow that gets objectively embodied in the story. You wouldn’t be too surprised if a guy you knew started talking this way in a supermarket. You can never tell what they’re after, they always wanna make some kind of trouble. So maybe this is their way of playing some kind of game to get you interested in them again. And the author, it seems to me, manages to develop this in a most extraordinary way and with extraordinary economy. Yes? STUDENT: He’s also polite just long enough, which I thought was realistic. MUDRICK: But it’s not just polite, he also doesn’t want to lose this opponunity, I mean he’s a man in that way too. I mean if it turned out to be somebody’s grandmother his reaction would be entirely different, but it’s clear that he’s got beady-eyed intentions [laughing], which is pan of the comedy. He doesn’t want to question a good thing, he doesn’t want to (so to speak) look a gift horse in the mouth. I think it’s done very well, I love it. I think the handling of the dialogue is terrific. Okay. This is another one that I just read in my office. It’s called “A Letter.” Lindy’s mind was full of songs still, still counting out a constant if unsteady beat. She walked to that beat in a way, stamping it out with her tennis shoes, wearing it down. Like other nights, soon it would go away, and she could go home and fall asleep. She played the bass in a New Wave band, Eat Dirt. They worked at some of the smaller clubs in the city—that was on weekends. The other five days a week and sometimes Saturdays Lindy was a waitress at 161

Mudrick Transcribed a pizza joint in Berkeley. Most of her, however, was a musician. In fact if you asked her she’d probably tell you that all of her was a musician. Nothing about her was quite real when she was slapping some cheese down on a pizza or counting out change. Lindy played the bass, the acoustic guitar, the violin and the piano. It was getting late, and here and there bars were closing as the traffic grew thinner. Being midsummer and a warm night, Lindy wore only a thin orange tee-shirt under her army surplus jacket as she made her way towards the BART station. She always walked after the band finished for the night to slow her mind down. Otherwise she couldn’t sleep, even after a day like today where she had waitressed until seven and started playing at nine-thirty. Lights blinked off the glass of the dimly lit display cases as cars drove by and traffic lights turned from green to yellow to red. Lindy stopped in front of Biva’s, a shop where she bought most of her band clothes. It looked as though they were halfway through changing the display from summer to fall fashions. A few of the mannequins had only half their clothes on; several were completely naked and bald. Lindy noticed one in particular which was leaning back in what was supposed to be a seductive pose, though it looked more like it was carrying some heavy and invisible object in its arms. Lindy thought how painful it would be on the back. There was no expression in its flat blue eyes. Lindy was tired now and she started walking again towards the BART station. It had been a long day and she wanted to be home. Matt would be there, home from the library, already asleep. The lock to their apartment always clicked loudly when the key was turned. Lindy gave the door a hard shove, as it sometimes stuck, and went inside. The apartment was dark and quiet. She didn’t bother switching on the light, she knew it all too well. She crossed the living room, dropping her purse and jacket on the couch, making way for the pile of books she knew Matt most likely left beside it on the floor. Three small steps and the bathroom door was to the right. She flipped on the white light in the bathroom. The white tiles, the white walls, the sink, and the tub—everytbing seemed cold. Lindy looked at herself in the gray cold mirror without feeling, blue eyes looking at blue eyes. She was tired. Using the last bit of toothpaste, she brushed her teeth quickly before turning on the shower. Steam rose all about her in the tiny bathroom. She took off the baggy jeans and kicked them into a corner. The orange teeshirt and her underwear followed, making a crumpled pile on the floor. She stood under the warm stream of shower for a few minutes without even moving. She dozed for a second on her feet but shook herself awake. Slowly she shampooed her hair and soaked and rinsed 162

Spring 1983 her underarms. After drying herself, Lindy put on her long flannel nightgown that hung on a hook on the door. She was just about to go into their bedroom when she remembered that she hadn’t checked the mail that day. She flipped on the living room light and picked up the stack from the coffee table. It was there, a letter from the music academy. She opened it casually, as if it were the electric bill, expecting the worst. But no, she had been accepted. School started in September. “Yeah,” she said to herself as she sat down on the couch and reread the letter. After a third reading she realized how late it was and how quiet the house seemed. She stuffed the letter into her purse. “All right,” she whispered to no one. She turned out the light and went into the bedroom. Even though it was dark, Lindy knew what Matt would look like. He always slept on his side, curled up a little facing the window. She could hear his slow warm breath from the double mattress on the floor. She got under the covers and curled up against him, putting her arm across his chest. She lightly kissed the back of his neck, smelling the clean warm smell of the soft skin there. “Hi,” Matt said quietly as he turned over on his back. He put his arm across the pillow and Lindy laid her head on his shoulder. “Sorry I woke you. “That’s okay,” he replied. “I was awake anyway.” “Oh,” said Lindy. “Have a good day?” “Studied,” Matt said, gently touching the side of her face. “You got a letter from Boston,” he added simply. “I know.” “And?” “I got accepted, for September.” “That’s great,” he said, giving her a kiss. “Congratulations.” He turned over on his side again, away from her. “Thanks,” Lindy said without much enthusiasm. She lay there on her back, staring at the blackness, not touching him for a long while. “Lindy,” he said suddenly, quietly, still turned away from her. “Yeah?” “Don’t go,” he said so softly that she could barely hear it. She didn’t reply, knowing it was something he’d wish she hadn’t heard, something that he’d wish she’d forget about the next morning. “Goodnight,” she said finally, closing her eyes. “Goodnight.” [After a pause.] This is a story which comes to—this is a very “conclusive” story, isn’t it. It may sound strange to you when the whole issue is inconclusive, but you know damned well what this story is about, and you know what this story 163

Mudrick Transcribed is about in a sense in which you don’t know, or can’t define as specifically, what the story that I just read was about, the story about the supermarket. And does that make a difference, and in what way does it make a difference? Or what is this story about? . . . Anybody? STUDENT: Saying goodbye? MUDRICK: Well, she doesn’t have to say goodbye—she can stay. STUDENT: Fear of changes? MUDRICK: Well, it’s not just fear of change. I think you’re supposed to feel it’s a pretty cozy relationship. It’s not just change, I mean giving up a love affair is not as simple and unimportant as all that. Yes? STUDENT: Choices? MUDRICK: Choices, certainly. Choice. That is what the story is about, the story is about choice. And it’s about that kind of choice in which you’re going to lose. No matter which you choose you’re going to lose something, so it’s the most difficult kind of choice. In fact it’s the only kind of choice, because other kinds of choices aren’t choices—that is, you obviously have to do one thing or the other. This story is choice. Could you find a single word to give you a sense of what the last story was about? Certainly it would be much harder, much much harder. You might be able to come up with something but you probably wouldn’t feel nearly as satisfied. You know, once you get to the word choice, that that’s what this story is about. And you might even begin to be a little nervous, once you’ve decided that, about the introductory material. You might say, Do we need that much of a buildup to arrive at what the story is about? STUDENT(1): In the middle section, especially when she comes into the apartment, it might have been done to set a mood, but I don’t think it was entirely effective in setting the proper mood for that dead-evening feeling that came at the end. MUDRICK: That’s very good; I think you’re quite right about the author’s intention. I think that is the author’s intention, and it’s not even necessary for the moment to decide whether it works—it’s certainly what’s intended. That is, the author isn’t stalling at that moment, trying to hold off from what the story is going to come up with, but the author is trying to establish a mood in which the disclosure will have greater effect: what things are like at the end of a hard day, even if you happen to be in the same apartment with somebody you’re very fond of. Once again I think there’s a kind of crux of discussion involved here. I don’t know whether I can rouse any of you to talk about it, but I think the issues here are fascinating, really. I think if you could arrive at a satisfactory way of describing why this story works or doesn’t work for you, you would learn something. Yes? STUDENT(1): Well, the reason I’m thinking that the mood wasn’t quite set right was basically the sentence structure. There was a particular sentence that went, “Being a midsummer evening . . .” and it was slightly ambiguous because— MUDRICK: There were dangling modifiers occasionally, yeah. I think if they were corrected they wouldn’t make that much difference. 164

Spring 1983 STUDENT: Well no, but I mean if it’s intended or— MUDRICK: Oh no, I just think they’re clumsy dangling modifiers. It’s clumsy writing. Yes? STUDENT: I sort of disagree—I just overlooked those—I thought the mood was fine. MUDRICK: All right. What is the mood? STUDENT: I can’t really describe it in words, but to me I could just become that person MUDRICK: The girl? STUDENT: Right. I mean I could go through being a waitress, playing in a band, and then coming home and taking a shower. I could just feel her feelings. MUDRICK: All right. Yes? STUDENT(2): I would like for us to have a little bit more setup of the positives of the life she’s in right now. I felt like I knew the choice she was going to make, and I would like it better if I didn’t know what choice she would make. Like if she would just maybe think a little bit about why she loves this guy or why the band is important to her—the difficulty of the choice—because right now the choice doesn’t seem that difficult to make. MUDRICK: Yes? STUDENT(1): I don’t think you could do that though, because you’d ruin the mood— it would become sort of flighty if you did that. But the idea of the first part is really like a setting up of a song almost, and you’re supposed to feel what’s going on and then what’s coming. STUDENT(2): Okay, well, I could sense that mood, but then that doesn’t make the choice very difficult for me. MUDRICK: You mean you feel that it’s an easy choice for her to decide to go off to Boston and accept the acceptance. STUDENT(1): You think it’s a happy story? STUDENT(2): No, it’s not a happy story, but if there’s going to be some significance about the difficulty of choice, there has to be two things worthy to choose from, something to set up with the value of the relationship with the guy. What I see is that he likes her a lot—I don’t get that from her especially. MUDRICK: Yes? STUDBNT: The way she came to bed, and she reached over and put her arms around him—it’s very clear that they’re gestures of tenderness. MUDRICK: Oh, I don’t think there’s any question that the story indicates that she’s very fond of him and that they’re fond of each other. No, I think that’s clear. STUDENT: Well, that’s what I was saying to him. MUDRICK: No, I know. Yes? STUDENT: When she opened the letter up and there was no one else in the room, the way she reacted . . . MUDRICK: Yeah, she certainly wasn’t crazy with enthusiasm. You had your hand up, Bob. STUDENT: I was going to say that you can tell all those things. You can tell it’s going to be a hard choice because she does love him, and it’s not just him for her. MUDRICK: Oh yeah, sure, that’s certainly intended. Yes? 165

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: In the other story, in the supermarket, it seems like there’s sort of only one way to say anything—or there’s probably lots of ways, but there’s also a better way to say something, and somehow the guy manages to say the right thing and it makes a big difference in terms of what happens next. But with this one, I’m not sure why, but I get this feeling that it’s sort of sinking and sinking down until finally it hits bottom, which is that moment when he turns around and says “Don’t go” and she can’t say anything. And nothing else can be done, I mean it just seems sort of— MUDRICK: So you think it’s a kind of deterministic story. STUDBNT: No, not that it’s deterministic, but I don’t get the feeling from it that it’s going to go more places beyond that point. MUDRICK: But what does this mean to your feeling about the story, then? Does that make you less interested in the story? STUDENT: It does, it makes me less interested, because the story seems kind of inert somehow. And I don’t want to be too hard on it . . . MUDRICK: Why not? STUDENT: Because it doesn’t sound so bad, and the writing is good, and they’re convincing . . . it just doesn’t go anywhere. MUDRICK: You know, if you said that a story is inert you have said almost the worst thing that you can say about it. No no, I’m not disagreeing with you about it at all, I am saying you needn’t worry about saying anything worse [laughter] because the word inert is about as bad a word as you can apply. And it’s interesting to me since you weren’t here last week—what we got was a succession of inert stories. Inert was exactly the word. It didn’t occur to any of us at the time, it didn’t occur to me, but that’s exactly right—they were inert. Quite apart from whether this is inert or not, the quality of the writing of this is superior to the quality of the writing of the inert stories last week. Even if this is inert, the writing itself is still of a higher quality; sentence by sentence it’s more interesting. The stories last week were not, they were just dead, they were just inert. Yes? STUDENT: I wouldn’t say it’s inert but I would say that it really puts across a kind of a tired lifestyle that the girl lives, and it seems that her choice to go to Boston would be a positive one. She goes into the house and it’s dark and quiet—it’s kind of a dark mood. Her lifestyle is more inert I think than the story. MUDRICK: If I understand you correctly—I may be changing slightly what you intended but I think that’s very much to the point. My problem with the story as far as the mood is concerned is that that mood which is presented doesn’t seem to me the mood of this night or this moment, it seems to me the mood of her life—that is, that’s the way her life feels to me. I certainly don’t think that’s the author’s intention. I do think, by the way—I agree with every word you said—I think that that’s what’s wrong with this story, and what’s right about the other one. The other story opens up indefinitely in almost all directions, and this doesn’t. This 166

Spring 1983 closes down and down, and you’re really going down a dark funnel, and eventually you come to the bottom of the funnel and you’re trapped there, I mean you can’t get through. And I think it’s the most obvious kind of problem for a story which is about one thing, which can be summed up in one way. And the oddest thing about this is that most of you are so accustomed to reading stories of this kind, even professional stories, that you see no reason to reject them, and you think of your feeling of slight depression as a characteristic reaction to art. Well, it’s not a characteristic reaction to art, it’s a characteristic reaction to one kind of bad professional art. And it is bad, because good art does open up, it doesn’t close down, it opens things and allows you to see possibilities, it doesn’t give you so much the impression that life is always reducing itself. If you’re reading something which gives you the impression that life is reducing itself, it seems to me that you’re reading something about the death of the sun in five billion years, or maybe life in a nursing home for your grandparents or something like that—you’re not reading fiction. And fiction which is written like that, it seems to me, is not fulfilling its most elementary obligation. There is something joyous about good art! that’s all there is to it. I mean it’s exciting and interesting and enlivening. And anything which depresses you is not art! And it’s funny that people won’t accept that elementary thesis about art. Yes? STUDENT: That’s funny that you said that because [inaudible] I felt so clogged that I couldn’t say a darn thing unless it was about the man, the woman, and their relationship, because that was the bright spot, that was tenderness. And I thought, well, maybe this is a good feeling to go through. MUDRICK: No, I know! It is so odd how people don’t trust their feelings with respect to art: Art is something you’re “respectful of,” art is something you’re “impressed by,” art maybe is something that you are “depressed by.” It’s different from entertainment. I want to tell a story about myself, about the only person I ever knew who seemed to me an authentic creative genius, and it so pleases me that I rose to the occasion. It was the only time when I met and talked in a personal way with the great choreographer George Balanchine. And it was under circumstances in somebody’s apartment and things were going very nicely, and be obviously knew that I admired him greatly so he was being expansive. And he said, in a way that I know he said to many people before, he said (I made some complimentary remark about his work, that is, I said he was the greatest creative genius of the twentieth century [laughter]) and he said, “Oh, well, what we provide is an evening’s entertainment.” And the story popped into my head—I remembered (for reasons I’ll never know) I remembered a remark that Ezra Pound had made about art. He said, “Art is news that stays news.” And just at the moment that Balanchine said that, I realized what was wrong about what Pound had written. And it just flashed right into my mind like that, and of course I’d read it for the first time maybe forty years before (I mean the Pound remark) and I’ve seen it quoted a thousand times. And I said, “The American poet Ezra Pound said years ago that art is news that stays news. He was wrong—that’s a definition of history. 167

Mudrick Transcribed What art is, is entertainment that stays entertainment, that’s what it is.” And that’s true. So that Balanchine was right and I was right. And what you don’t understand, you people, is that art is entertainment! And if you’re not entertained, if you’re not interested, if you’re not pulled in, if you’re not excited, if you’re not enlivened, then there’s nothing there! Either that or you’re not reacting to it (I understand that). But if you think you understand it perfectly and you’re “impressed,” “depressed,” “upset” “feel solemn”—that’s not art. If anything that’s religion, I mean that’s church, that’s what going to church is like. That has nothing to do with art. STUDENT: Can anything negative or severely negative happen in a story then? MUDRICK: Of course it can! And you can still be exhilarated by it. You can be exhilarated by the way it’s treated, by the way it happens, by the skill with which it’s done. You are not drawn down into that funnel of hopelessness. [End of first side of tape.] I love supermarkets, I think they’re in some respects the greatest triumph of modern civilization, I really do. I think it’s almost incredible. I mean you people don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world. I can remember standing forlornly in front of, let’s say, a meat market in London and watching the flies settle heavily on the meat which has been displayed there for the last five days, turning green at the edges—and then looking at the prices on those things and wondering how people who make those salaries can afford them—and then going into a supermarket, where the stuff is packaged the way it is, in what some of you who’ve been raised in the youth movements would say, IN THIS SOULLESS STERILE WRAPPING WHICH MAKES IT VIRTUALLY INEDIBLE, BECAUSE YOU DON’T THINK ABOUT ITS CONNECTION WITH THE REAL ANIMAL. [Laughter.] Because what you believe is you should TEAR IT, LIVE, FROM THE HAUNCHES OF THE BEAST! No, really, Americans don’t appreciate the extraordinary things that they are given by technology. And so I find that a very touching and lovable story, I find the domesticity in it very moving. The notion that you can buy things like what they’re buying in the supermarket—toilet paper and chicken breasts and so on—it’s wonderful! The whole range of human experience! [Laughs.] I mean at least at both ends. Well, apparently my enthusiasm is not matched by yours. You’ve been spoiled—that really is the reason—you’ve just been spoiled. You don’t know how good you have it. [A student laughs.] Why are you laughing? STUDENT: I don’t know, I just feel like laughing. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Good, terrific—that’s the best reason. This is called “Two Men on a Bus.” The 32nd Street bus rolled along 32nd Street. [Laughter.] “I think my shoes are on fire,” he said, glancing down at the small flames licking at the tongue of his left shoe. [“Licking at the tongue”—I like that. A reverse image.] 168

Spring 1983 “I think you’re wrong.” said his companion. “Only your left shoe is on fire. What you should say is, ‘My shoe is on fire.’” He smiled politely. “And my foot.” “Your foot too? Are you sure?” “I can’t see through the smoke and flames.” Other people riding on the bus tried to ignore the scene. “If you look closely through the flames you can see that my foot is burning, in fact the leather of my shoe is just about gone now. Also, my sock has acted like a wick, and the flames are now crawling up my pants leg.” [The writer missed an opportunity here: which pant leg?] “That must hurt,” said his companion. “Yes,” he said, “I’m in considerable pain.” The bus stopped to let off an old man with a cane, a man with an old cane, and a woman who carried a bag of groceries. “It’s quite unusual for a person’s shoe to catch on fire. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before,” said his companion. “Neither have I,” said the man. “I wish I had a camera or someone who could draw well.” [Laughter.] “Do you mind If I light my cigarette off your leg?” “Not at all,” the man said. “I’d appreciate it though if you’d hurry since I’d like to put the fire out.” His companion lit his cigarette. The man began taking his coat off, which he would use to smother the flames. “Two Men on a Bus.” Yes? STUDENT: Two opportunities that were missed: the one person with the pants leg, and the second, I wanted the man very much to fumble for his cigarettes. [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Okay. STUDENT: For some reason I didn’t want the last sentence in there, I didn’t want him to talk about putting it out. I just wanted him to say, “Can I light your cigarette?” “Sure.” I don’t know why, but I— MUDRICK: Well, I think I know why. Think about it for a minute. Why don’t you want that realistic touch at the end? STUDENT: Because it’s not a realistic story. MUDRICK: That’s right, because it’s hardly a realistic story, so why the realistic ending? What you feel when you get something like that at the end of a story like this is that the writer has lost his nerve and simply won’t continue with the fantasy. Yes? STUDENT: It reminds me of The World According to Garp. MUDRICK: Yeah. I guess I’ll have to read that some time. I’ve tried reading it several times waiting at the checkout line at the supermarket—which is where I do everything [laughter]—but I’ve never read more than a few pages, and whatever I’ve read has always seemed to me so objectionable. STUDENT: You didn’t see the movie either? 169

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: No, didn’t. Sorry. [Laughter.] I like to keep up. STUDENT: In literature, right? MUDRICK: No, I like to keep up, I just like to keep up. Any other comments? STUDENT: Would the story have worked if it had gone on longer? What is it with the shortness? MUDRICK: Well, this is obviously a burlesque. The writer himself could not consider it a story, he would consider it, I believe, a jeu d’esprit, as we say in Southwest Philadelphia. STUDENT: What’s that mean? MUDRICK: I don’t know. [Laughter.] That’s just what we say in Southwest Philadelphia. STUDENT: The paper seems to be going after an effect, and when the writer feels he’s reached what he’s tried to accomplish, it ends. I still think it could have gone on. MUDRICK: Yeah. I don’t know how it could have gone on. Yes? STUDENT: Is that art? Would you say that this is art? MUDRICK: No. Would you? STUDENT: I don’t know, I haven’t the slightest idea. STUDENT: [Inaudible] by your definition. MUDRICK: By my definition it’s art? It doesn’t exhilarate me. It doesn’t very much amuse me either. And here too we get into the problem of what’s funny, and I’m sorry, I find most of this not very funny. I guess what comes closest to being funny to me is the first sentence: “The 32nd Street bus rolled along 32nd Street.” I find that mildly funny. But the rest of it: “‘I think my shoes are on fire,’ he said, glancing down at the smoke and flames licking at the tongue of his left shoe.” You’re going to force me, especially since I don’t have enough papers to finish the meeting with, to try to analyze—this is going to be a very laboriously analytic session. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: Well, what I want to know—I can’t— MUDRICK: You want to know why this isn’t art. Give me an hour and a half. STUDENT: —why the other one [“Shopping”] is better than things like that. MUDRICK: All right, sure, I feel that I have an obligation to try to tell you, we’ve got lots of time . . . [Laughter.] STUDENT: I think I can help maybe. MUDRICK: Good—please. STUDENT: In art you need a certain amount of truth that this one doesn’t have. Basically if the person’s shoe is on fire he wouldn’t be reacting that way. So the situation doesn’t have to be truthful, but the people have to be acting truthful in that situation. And with the guy in the supermarket, the situation is unreal but they act as if it were real. The guy’s reaction is believable, that he would react that way if someone— MUDRICK: Not only that, there are reverberations into real life. As I said, it’s perfectly clear that we can accept the possibility that two people even in the real world could be speaking that way to each other under certain circumstances. And we are reminded of the difficulties that men and women have talking together anyway, understanding each other, and carrying on a comparatively civil 170

Spring 1983 relationship and so on—there are all sorts of reverberations into the real world. The primary thing we know about somebody whose shoe is on fire is that it would hurt, and the image it seems to me is not particularly funny. It’s certainly extravagant and unusual and unrealistic, but it doesn’t move us. Yes? STUDENT: The situation could be unreal, even their actions—like watching your shoe on fire—could be unreal. The supermarket story says something about relationships that is very real—this says nothing. Does this say anything? STUDENT: But how does the supermarket story—I really don’t understand what the deal is— MUDRICK: Is it that you’re more concerned about the notion that the supermarket story is good, or about the notion that this story is bad? STUDENT: I’m trying to differentiate in my own mind. MUDRICK: All right, okay. Yes? STUDENT: There’s a Richard Pryor story about him running down the street on fire, and that’s really funny. MUDRICK: As I remember it, it was very funny. STUDENT: And also the story cops a joke from there, because there’s some drunk that runs alongside and he’s the only guy that’ll approach Richard Pryor and ask him for a light. MUDRICK: There is however one very important thing to remember about that Richard Pryor story, and that is that it was true—that is, we happen to know that it really did happen. So he starts with an advantage over the person telling this story, a considerable advantage. There is also of course the effect of somebody to whom that has happened telling this story in public before a large audience— somebody about whom we already have rather complicated feelings anyway, because we know that though (as I think anyway) he’s a genius, he’s obviously also a lunatic. And he’s also an extremely nervous guy—he’s both psychotic and neurotic, so he has the best of both worlds, and we can expect almost anything from him. So part of the comedy of Richard Pryor is waiting for him to say the next really outrageous, extravagant and unbelievable thing. It’s an entirely different situation, it really is. Yes? STUDENT: I wanted to get back to the discussions about—we were talking about what is art and not, and we got sort of moved over to what is entertainment or what is entertaining. MUDRICK: And I said that art is entertaining. STUDENT: Right. I’m not buying a bit the philosophy that there needs to be truth or believable things going on in the story, because I’ve heard and I’ve read stories where the events were outrageous and ridiculous and I know they could never occur. MUDRICK: I’ll let you go on, but I want to comment on that for a moment. You can have very very extravagant stories which depart almost indefinitely from any conceivable real situation. It seems to me then that they have to be extremely funny or extremely imaginative in their own way. I don’t see anything particularly funny about this and I don’t see anything particularly imaginative about 171

Mudrick Transcribed this. Once you start with a shoe on fire you go on from there—and the idea of a shoe on fire is not funny to me. I wish to hell I could come up with some sort of fantasy situation, I mean a sort of violent and destructive one like this which did seem to me funny, because I’m sure there are some and we might be able then to illustrate why this doesn’t strike me as funny. Yes? STUDENT: I think The Metamorphosis is a good example. MUDRICK: Oh yeah. Well (that is, the guy who wakes up one morning transformed into a gigantic bug) but if that’s funny, what’s funny about it is what Kafka makes of the situation of being turned overnight into a gigantic bug. See, it’s the pretext for what he then invents. Certainly, in the first or second sentence of that story when Kafka says very flatly that Gregor Samsa woke up discovering that he had been transformed into a gigantic insect, that is not funny. What is almost immediately funny, however, is the way in which he starts trying to rationalize his situation: Oh, well, he’d been working too hard at the job, he really mustn’t think about all that trouble he had at the job . . . Then we immediately recognize what we ourselves do in the middle of an intolerable situation or a difficult situation. We begin rationalizing, and out of the comer of our eye we hope that it will go away—something like that. We’ll open our eyes the next minute and we won’t see those little twiggling feelers [laughs] or legs. But he does! he keeps seeing them. Then he closes his eyes again and then he thinks: What am I going to do? I’m already a little late for work . . . So the idea of course of this gigantic insect worrying about this job that he’s not going to be able to make—so it’s not the invention, it’s what he makes of the human problems which are provoked and exacerbated by the invention. There’s nothing humanly interesting about the fact that this guy’s shoe is on fire—we know he’s going to suffer from it, that’s all. It’s a little bit as if Kafka’s story went on: He discovered that he had been transformed into a gigantic bug. He couldn’t move. He was stuck on his back. He wiggled a while and finally got forward—and just describing what it’s like to be a gigantic bug with no sense of its relation to his human life, with no sense of how other people are going to respond . . . I’m not giving a good example. Because I’m not Kafka! I mean Kafka is a genius who understands how to treat a situation as extravagant, as remote from ordinary life as that is. This person is simply outraging my sense of probability and is also making me feel bad for this guy. I don’t want to have to worry about this guy whose shoe has caught on fire, I don’t see anything funny in it. And I don’t see any pathos in it either. Unless somebody else can come up with something extremely bright, I’m just about done with anything I can say about it. I wish I could say more. See, tricks like this— “That must hurt,” to said his companion. “Yes,” the said, “I’m in considerable pain.” Is that supposed to be funny? 172

Spring 1983 STUDENT: I was thinking of a situation where someone was destroyed which was funny. It used to be on Saturday Night Live, it’s called The Mr. Bill Show. MUDRICK: I don’t know it. STUDENT: What happened in thirty seconds was that this little clay model, Mr. Bill, was stomped, squashed, and destroyed [inaudible]. STUDENT: That Mr. Bill thing, it’s sort of like a take-off on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood—there’s always these little kid shows that have these little puppets with somebody’s voice talking over and making the puppet do things, and then what always happens is, it just happens and nothing happens. But Mr. Bill, what happens is, he gets stepped on or somebody lights him on fire . . . MUDRICK: Yeah, so that what’s happening is that the audience is taking its revenge on the kid shows, which is not allowed—as a matter of fact, I can’t stand looking at the Muppets, they irritate me a great deal. [Laughter.] And the notion that Miss Piggy is cute or attractive . . . Miss Piggy is just a dog as far as I’m concerned, she’s an extremely homely woman! [Laughter.] And why I’m supposed to find her interesting or amusing or attractive I can’t imagine! That is, I’m aware of skill in the manipulation of those puppets, but I don’t know why I’m supposed to find them so cute, so adorable. I just don’t find them adorable. (It’s true I don’t much react to puppets anyway.) STUDENT: But if you’re going to destroy somebody you’re going to have to make them entertaining or amusing or anything—you’re going to have to have some sort of that same situation. You’re not going to have a guy looking at his leg saying, I’m in considerable pain. MUDRICK: I think that’s right (if I understood you), that what the comedians on Saturday Night Live apparently were taking advantage of was our own sentimentality in reacting to things that are supposed to amuse kids: So now we’re going to stomp them all. And what we’re going to do by stomping them is expose this margin of sentimentality in our reactions to them: Isn’t it cute. Don’t the kids like that. Anything that you think that kids will like, and therefore you like, almost certainly is some kind of phony. Kids will like anything! I mean, all kids want to do is to avoid going to bed [laughing]. I mean they’re not really interested in art at all, it’s of no interest to them. They have no taste, no judgment, and almost anything is likely to look interesting to them provided it keeps them from doing something like washing their hands or going to bed or eating carrots—almost anything like that. So I think that that’s what’s amusing about that kind of action. All right [looking through the stories]. You understand, I’m just killing time. [Laughter.] I just want to make clear what’s going on here.

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MUDRICK [referring to a story]: It really is wrong to say “semi-battered pick-up,” I mean it’s just wrong. And it’s wrong because it is insufficiently specific, but it’s specific enough to make you worry about how it’s battered. Whereas if you just want the reader to get an impression of something that’s been beat up (as many pick-ups are) you say, it’s a battered pick-up. You don’t even particularly say “white.” Who cares whether it’s white? I mean, later there might be some . . . it’s a battered pick-up! When a pick-up is battered . . . You see a lot of pick-ups riding around—kids in them, young guys—you don’t think about what color they are! For one thing the color is likely to be so sunbleached that you can’t even identify it. I mean, it once was green or it once was blue, so you say battered pick-up, that’s all. You see these wretched VW Wagons which were so popular among youth in the 1960’s—you can’t tell what color they were anymore! I mean they’ve been repaired two thousand times because everybody was persuaded that VW’s were great cars. Probably they were the worst cars ever constructed. And they had to be repaired at every gas station. And especially the vans—you couldn’t go up a hill of more than three degrees. [Laughter.] Yes? [calling on a student] But everybody drove them, especially the young. STUDENT: Going way back, all the way back to the story [laughter] . . . MUDRICK: The everlasting spirit of old-fashioned rock and roll. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Assuming that it’s a story about these two guys that are leaving Illinois and going to Florida to find something better, it clearly doesn’t work. If you wanted to write a story about that, what would you do? The only thing I can think of that would make it interesting is if you have some hope— MUDRICK: What do mean, the only thing? There are ten thousand ways— STUDENT: Well, the only thing I can think of— MUDRICK: All right. STUDENT: —that would make it interesting is if the author conveys some notion that there is hope that they’re going to find [inaudible] or something better—or, that it doesn’t matter, but these guys are interesting anyway. 174

Week Six MUDRICK: Yes! Or he certainly has to present them as being interesting enough so that we want to follow them that far. I mean, somebody said at the very beginning of this discussion that they’re not gonna find anything anywhere! I mean, on the moon! So it doesn’t matter—and by the way, you could even write a story about that, provided the author gave you the impression that he understood that—that’s all right. Okay [looking through the stories] . . . I’m still looking for names that I don’t recognize. Here’s one: “Growing Up.” “I can’t believe you’re still with Louis. I mean, seven and a half months with the same guy. It’s not like you at all, Lisa. We’ve always had new boyfriends by the summer. That’s part of our ritual. It’s more fun that way,” Michelle scolded Lisa as she stood in front of the mirror admiring herself. “I know that’s the way we usually do it, but Louis is different. I don’t want to give him up so fast,” Lisa remarked as she searched through her dresser drawer. “Fast? What do you mean, fast? You’ve been going out with the guy for seven and a half months already. Isn’t that long enough?” “No it’s not long enough. Besides, he’s not your boyfriend, so what do you care if I stay with him or not?” Lisa replied as she pulled a pair of flowered shorts from her dresser drawer. By the way, don’t do that. You see, I’m being forced to read those long statements at the end of a line. You understand what I’m getting at? “Lisa replied as she pulled a pair of flowered shorts from her dresser drawer,” and by that time I’ve already forgotten what she said. Just make it into another sentence. “You better get used to it, because I don’t detect a break-up in the near future, either.” “Fine, fine, whatever. Do what you want. I don’t give a shit. I just think it’s kind of strange. I mean, he’s not even your type. He’s so quiet and into being mellow and all that stuff. You belong with a more sociable, outgoing type, like Rod,” Michelle said, pulling her shorts down to her hips so that she could check her tan line. Isn’t that funny how that becomes a tic, and every time you give a line of dialogue you have to describe what the character is doing. “Oh, give me a break. I hate that jerk. Besides, Louis is sociable. He’s just not obnoxiously loud and flirtatious like the rest of the jerks.” “Yeah, well, you’re flirtatious too,” Michelle said as she slowly poured a handful of greasy white lotion onto her leg. [Laughter.] 175

Mudrick Transcribed Sounds like a joke now, doesn’t it. “She poured a handful of greasy white lotion onto her leg.” Is that what you people do? That’s not what you do with lotion. “She poured a handful of greasy white lotion . . .” Is that what you do? Don’t you rub it? STUDENT: Yeah. MUDRICK: Well, pouring it is different. That means usually [pretending to do so]. STUDENT: It seems like a lot of these things they do—pulling shorts out, and then all of a sudden she’s got them on—it just seems like they’re doing a little bit too many pieces of it but not the whole string of . . . MUDRICK: [Inaudible.] Yeah. Lisa didn’t answer. Instead she sat on the bed, thinking about the conversation that she and Louis had had about flirting. Louis seemed to understand that part of Lisa’s personality. Although he didn’t do it himself, he knew it was harmless. He called it a phase and said she would grow out of it when she was ready. “So what’s he going to do now that he’s graduated?” Michelle questioned Lisa, interrupting her thoughts. “He doesn’t know yet. He’s not into making plans. He has no idea what he’s going to do with his life and doesn’t much care,” Lisa said as she pulled off her flowered shorts in disgust and began searching for another pair in the drawer. [Laughter.] A smile eased on Lisa’s face. [Laughter.] I love the way she spells drawer by the way (she’s done it over and over again so it’s not a typo): d-r-o-o-r, to rhyme with door. It’s the droor by the door. [Laughter.] “Whoa, this guy’s really a trip! I hope you realize what you’re giving up,” Michelle continued pestering Lisa as they dressed for the beach. “I mean, you could have Brad in a minute, and he’s got his whole life planned out. What a hunk.” It’s always seemed to me a most unfortunate colloquial image. I understand, I know, I’m sorry. He’s a hunk. A hunk of what, however? STUDENT: It sounds like a piece of rock to me. MUDRICK: Not to me it doesn’t! [Laughter.] Sounds like something more agricultural to me. [Laughter.] If that’s the way you girls like it, that’s all right with me, I don’t care. “Well, I do have some idea of what he’ll be doing.” “What? Tell me about it,” Michelle asked as she turned away from the mirror and stared at Lisa. Lisa remembered the endless conversations they had had about travelling. “Let’s see, I figure he’ll be doing a lot of travelling.” “Travelling. That’s interesting. You mean he wants to be a travel agent or something?” 176

Week Six Lisa didn’t answer right away. Instead she walked over to the mirror and began brushing her hair. As she pulled her hair into a ponytail she remembered Louis’s words of wisdom: “Travel, and you will learn.” That was Louis’s famous statement. [Laughter.] Louis liked to spend time on his own, being out in the wilderness, walking amongst the trees, thinking and dreaming. Louis loved fantasizing about his future and his dreams. Most of the guys Lisa had gone out with only wanted to talk about sports and muscles and partying and girls. “Gets pretty dull after a while,” Lisa commented to herself. “Maybe that’s it, maybe that’s why I’m always flirting. It’s my favorite pastime when I’m bored with the conversation. I never get bored with Louis’s conversation.” “Someday I’m going to go to Tibet, and shave off all my hair, and climb the highest mountain I can find, and live in a monastery with the monks,” Louis once told her. You don’t have to shave off all your hair to become a Tibetan monk, only your head hair. [Laughter.] (You can go too far.) You won’t be wearing bikinis or anything like that, so you won’t be in danger of disclosing anything. STUDENT: I don’t know how it looks on paper but— MUDRICK: Worse. [Laughter.] STUDENT: But it sounds like that’s something Lisa’s saying. MUDRICK: It’s what Louis’s saying. I think this story is going to set feminism back about ten years [laughing], there’s a real problem here. All right, let’s see. Although Lisa thought this to be an utterly bizarre and antisocial thing to want to do, she was awed by the fact that Louis knew and thought about such things and actually planned on doing them some day. A big smile covered Lisa’s lips as she thought about Louis. [Laughter.] “He’s special to me like no one else has ever been.” “Well . . .” Michelle’s voice startled Lisa, breaking her smile. “Well, well what?” “Is that what you mean—he wants to be a travel guide or agent or something?” Thinking of Louis’s plans to live in the monastery, Lisa decided to refrain from commenting on it. [Wise decision. (Laughter.)] She didn’t want to continue the discussion any longer. “Yeah, yeah, that’s what I mean,” Lisa answered as she pulled her hair through the rubber band one more time, giving her ponytail that tight bouncy look. [Laughter.] In sixty years of reading I have never seen that kind of mannerism [laughing], that’s a terrific mannerism! I was going to say you could write a whole story like that—this person has! It’s terrific! Yes, she said, as she wiped her ass carefully. 177

Mudrick Transcribed [Laughter.] You can go on for the rest of your life [laughing]—that is, you have one remark for every action you perform in the world, and you have to say it! You are not permitted to perform a single action without making an accompanying remark—or at the very least an accompanying noise, I suppose. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: Sounds like a high school Jan and Christie on Three’s Company—in that little sit-com, you know. She’s sitting in there and staring in the mirror. MUDRICK: Yeah, and it probably could be done on TV. But let’s see if it goes on. .  .  . that tight bouncy look. [We all like that tight bouncy look. (Laughter.)] “Come on, we’d better hurry. Louis will be over soon, and as always we’re going to be late,” Lisa warned Michelle, hoping that she would drop the subject. [Laughter.] Lisa was always late, but Louis didn’t mind. He was used to it. He’d simply sit on the edge of her bed and watch her as she ran around the room throwing her tanning lotion and other necessary beach items into her big basket. [Everything begins to have dirty overtones (laughing).] Louis had brought his fishing gear. He planned to go out on the rocks and sit and fish, allowing Lisa plenty of time for gossiping and carrying on. [What would be carrying on?] Louis was totally disinterested in the gossip scene. Today they were going to a new beach. Everyone was tired of the old spot and decided it would be worth the extra hour-long drive for a change of scenery. A group of them were going: Michelle and her boyfriend Jack, Jenny and her fiancé, and a few other girls who were bringing a few other guys whom Lisa hoped she had never met before. She was always thrilled to meet new guys to flirt with. Louis would take the three of them, and the rest would follow behind. Louis would lead as usual. [That’s different from following in front, because if you follow in front then you have to keep looking back to make sure that they’re there. (Laughter.)] Louis always led in his shiny red sports car. Lisa never enjoyed travelling at high speeds. She would scream and holler and plead to be let out of the car, yet somehow when Louis was driving she felt safe. [Nice (pleasedly).] Louis was always in control. Lisa lay basking in the sun as Louis prepared his fishing pole and worms. [(Laughter.) I was a little worried about that fishing pole for a minute.] After hanging around with the others for about an hour, Louis went off to fish. “Damn, I’m never going to beat you. No matter how dark I get, you get darker. You haven’t been going to the tanning booth, have you?” 178

Week Six “Of course not, Lisa,” Michelle defended herself. “I would never do that. Besides, I don’t have to.” Lisa had already got a dark tan and was trying desperately to get a few shades darker. She was coming very close to matching Michelle’s tan and had decided that this year she was going to beat her. It was a frustrating contest for Lisa, because although she often looked tanner than Michelle at a distance, when they held their arms together for the official test Michelle always had the darker tan. Even so, the competition continued every year. It seemed to make the endless hours of sunbathing seem more important—they had a goal to reach. “Don’t you hate it when he leaves you alone here?” Michelle asked. “No, I don’t mind. I’m not exactly alone. You guys are all here and besides, he’ll be back, and when he gets back he’ll have all these neat things to tell me about his adventure,” Lisa replied reassuringly. “Yeah, I guess so, but don’t you miss him?” “Yeah, I do, but he has to do his thing, you know. He likes time to himself. I don’t mind giving it to him.” (Time, that is.) [Laughter.] I’m sure she doesn’t mind anything at all! [laughing] Oh, I love her, she’s wonderful. She’s really one of my favorite characters [laughing]. Lisa sat and talked for a while, and slept and read. [I don’t believe that.] A friend of Louis’s went out to find Louis [(laughing) who was trying to escape (laughter) in the direction of Japan!] and visit with him for a while, but got bored in an hour [they get bored very easily] and came back. “There’s no girls where Louis is, just fish and water,” was his reply. Lisa smiled. She knew that Louis was perfectly contented to be there all alone with his fish and his dreams. It began to get a bit chilly and everyone wanted to leave, but Louis had not returned yet. Lisa told them to give him a little longer [this is justifiable suicide, you understand (laughing)], so they waited for another hour until the sun was beginning to set. Still there was no Louis. Jack and Tim went out to get him and weren’t able to find him in the darkness. Joe, who had visited him earlier, went with them, figuring he would be able to find his way. Another hour had gone by by the time Joe, Jack and Tim returned for the second time, but still there was no Louis. They had found his worms [laughter] and his towel, but they were unable to spot his fishing pole, and they could not find Louis. I think this is my favorite story of the quarter so far [laughing]. And certainly my favorite fictional couple so far are Lisa and Louis—they are terrific. 179

Mudrick Transcribed Lisa was beginning to get nervous [I mean (laughing), and it’s dark, and nobody’s been able to find him, and they’ve found his worms and not him . . .], and was trying hard to conceal her feelings. She knew she must remain calm and rational [or at least calm anyway (laughing)]. After about twenty minutes of deliberating, Jack went to the phone to call the police. “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a little by calling the cops? I mean we don’t want to get the cops involved in this,” Joe protested nervously as he was always apprehensive when it came to the police. “We need them. We’ve got to get a flashlight and find him. It’s turning totally dark out,” Jack answered. [I don’t get that combination. I guess cops have flashlights.] “Yeah, and does anyone have a better idea?” Michelle stepped in. No one could stand the tension of waiting for Louis any longer. The police arrived with their bright flashlights . . . I’m getting nervous again. Can this be a joke? Can this whole thing be a joke? STUDENT: No. MUDRICK: and went out in search of Louis. Two policemen stayed behind and asked a lot of seemingly irrelevant questions, such as how old everyone was and why had they all stayed on the beach while Louis went fishing? The questions didn’t seem to be helping the situation. Instead they made everyone feel hopelessly guilty, as if they had done something terribly wrong. Lisa was extremely upset and wanted desperately to see Louis’s smiling face. Finally, after much waiting, a policeman came back carrying Louis’s fishing pole. He said that he had spotted it in the water. The two policemen sat every one down and explained that Louis had been fishing and had been swept into the water by a huge wave. The strong pull of the undertow . . . I love the way that’s spelled: u-n-d-e-r-t-o-e. [Laughter.] Sounds like some gigantic beast. BEWARE OF THE UNDERTOE! [Laughter.] You know, like the Abominable Snowman. made it impossible for him to escape the waters. Louis drowned in his struggle to reach the shore. Lisa became extremely angry by the explanation and yelled at them, accusing them of being lazy and giving up the search too soon. “You don’t know Louis! He would never drown. He knew the ocean too well! He was in touch with nature! You don’t know him! You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’ll see, he’ll be back, you’ll see!” Lisa 180

Week Six shouted at the top of her lungs. [Laughter.] The policeman told them to go home [(laughter) the only sensible suggestion the whole day] and that they would resume search in the morning when they could see better. “You have no proof. You have no body. Where is he if he drowned? He always goes off by himself,” Lisa began to cry as she shouted. Michelle told Lisa to come home with them but Lisa refused. “You go on without me. I’ll be all right in a minute. My parents are away for the weekend so they won’t worry about me. I’ll just stay here for a while and then drive Louis’s car home.” Michelle left with the others after much convincing on Lisa’s part. Lisa couldn’t leave. She didn’t want to just walk away and leave him there all night. Lisa was cold and she figured Louis would be cold too, and he would need her when he returned. He could have gone swimming and would need a towel to dry off with. After everyone had left, Lisa walked over to the rocks where Louis had been sitting and climbed up and sat down and stared into the water. She continued staring into the water until the sun came up the next morning. As the sun began to rise Lisa realized that she had spent the night there barely moving. She had been staring at the water and had become hypnotized by the movement of the waves. “He couldn’t be gone,” she thought to herself as she slowly became aware of her surroundings. Her trance was interrupted by the sound of slamming car doors. The reality of the new day was more than she could handle. She broke out into a sweat and felt very dizzy. Lisa woke up in her bed. Her mother was sitting next to her with a concerned look. Lisa flinched when she saw the look on her mother’s face. She pleaded with her to tell her that it had all been a bad dream. Lisa’s mother was silent as she wrapped her arms around her and began rocking her back and forth as she squeezed her. “Mom, he’s gone, isn’t he,” Lisa asked. Her mother could not speak. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her. Instead she shook her head in silence. Lisa spent the next five weeks at home helping around the house. She had no desire to get a tan, no desire to see the beach. She wanted to understand why it had happened, why they had picked Louis, but she knew she would never know the answer. What she did know was that Louis was gone, and the beach would never be the same happy place it had once been. Lisa went away to college as planned. It was a mediocre year. Nothing very exciting happened. She became studious, which was something that she had never done before. She was still a flirt, but there wasn’t a time when she ever took it further than that. She went to parties and socialized, but she never told anyone what had happened 181

Mudrick Transcribed during the summer. She never wanted to, never needed to. There was never a day that went by that Louis was excluded from. He was always in her thoughts. The following summer came faster than she expected it to. Lisa spent the summer going to the beach occasionally and lying in the sun. It was a boring summer. Nothing really happened. Her friends were all there and she dated a little, and then it was time to go back to school. It’s been six years since the day at the beach, and Louis is still in Lisa’s thoughts at times. She does not frequent the beach too often. She is getting older and pays more attention to skin care and wrinkle-prevention than tanning. [Laughter.] This is going to set feminism back twenty years [laughter]—not ten, twenty! They never did find Louis’s body. Lisa prefers it that way. It allows her to fantasize. Lisa has decided to travel this summer. She’s got a good friend, Paul, who loves to listen to her talk about her dreams and fantasies. When she gets back, she plans on giving him a call. Oy! Yes? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: It sounds like a take-off on Doonesbury from time to time—those tanning contests that they have. STUDENT: [Inaudible.] STUDENT: I would love to know [inaudible] the morning after [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Louis is still swimming [inaudible] in the direction of the Philippine Islands [laughing]. He’ll probably make it, too, with that kind of incentive. I mean Lisa is the best argument for celibacy I’ve ever heard of. STUDENT: Well, it seemed like they were really wrapped up with guys in high school, but it seemed like she was the only one that had any other, like, serious aspirations after the whole thing. I mean it was really silly the whole way through, but I mean once she got to college she seemed to have found out that there’s more than just going around batting eyelids. MUDRICK: I don’t really think so, but that’s all right. STUDENT: Well, just saying that she’s studying and she has dreams of her owo— MUDRICK: Oh, I don’t think we really need to consider Lisa’s intellectual development. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: I missed the last part of the story— MUDRICK: Oh, it was great. STUDENT: —but I thought something that was interesting at the very beginning and represented very well— MUDRICK: She stopped tanning for a while after Louis got drowned. [Inaudible.] She didn’t like to tan anymore. The beach reminded her of Louis.

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Week Six STUDENT: Something that happened in the beginning that I thought was represented really well was Michelle’s telling Lisa [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Do you feel that this is the everlasting spirit of old-fashioned rock and roll? [Laughter.] I must be missing something here. By the way, is this a failure of execution or a failure of conception or what? STUDENT: I left so I don’t know. [Laughter.] MUDRICK [laughing]: I mean, things like that destroy the community atmosphere of a class, when people run out. What is wrong here! [laughing] STUDENT: I was just asking— MUDRICK: No no, what I’m amused by is the bravery with which some of you explain how, well, when Lisa went to school she became more serious [laughing]. It seems to me absolutely hilarious that you should be bringing up things like that. Really, I’ll tell you, there’s a—oh no, I’m not going to—I’m reminded of something in Chaucer, not in Troilus and Criseyde but one of the Canterbury Tales, but it’s one of the Canterbury Tales which doesn’t bear discussing, at least with young and innocent people like you. Yes? STUDENT: I thought a serious part of the story was the development of that character— MUDRICK: I love the notion that you can use words like development and character on something like this, it just delights me [laughing]. That’s all right, that’s okay [to the student]. But really, how would you define what goes wrong here? And once again, there is no reason in the world why the person who wrote this story couldn’t write an absolutely first-class story. Now, I believe it. Not only do believe it, I have seen things like this happen, though before I began teaching the writing class I could never have believed it [laughs]—this is a person that I would avoid if I met him or her on the street if possible. Yes? STUDENT: What’s so amazing is the treatment of the subject matter. It seems like it was written from [inaudible], and the story could have been good but . . . MUDRICK: It’s written from the inside of an adolescent girl’s fantasies—it’s a very odd thing that happens here. That is, the person who is writing this is trapped completely inside adolescent female fantasies, has just disappeared there. STUDENT: Drowned. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Drowned, that’s right! absolutely drowned in them. And actually it’s a fascinating phenomenon once you begin to understand that people are never as stupid as they seem, never. And that, by the way, is true, that’s absolutely true. There is almost no such thing as a stupid person outside of a piece of bad fiction. People are astonishingly sensitive and aware of all sorts of things under the right circumstances, but they can also make themselves stupid and unresponsive and insensitive in various ways by conforming to certain images inside themselves; they can choose to be certain personalities. And the person writing that story has chosen to be the personality of Lisa. And I’m sure that most of you girls, or some of you anyway, when you were in high school had, at least to some extent, that kind of personality. You lived that kind of life, you had that kind of yearning. But this person writing this story

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Mudrick Transcribed has vanished completely inside that image. And it’s so odd that it’s so beautifully sustained, it’s sustained throughout. You know, one way in which you learn about things like this is to have children, I mean of your own. Because my own daughters could inhabit that kind of image for weeks at a time, and you began to think that that’s what they were. And of course when they were acting that way, they were that. But they weren’t really that. They were many other things, and they could be those other things under the shock of immediate crisis—that sort of thing—or wanting something different. They could be really exploded out of that image. It’s another reason why a class like this is absolutely fascinating to me. It’s like no other class. I swear, if I have any impulse to keep teaching indefinitely it’s because of what’s revealed by a story like that. In some sense I am more fascinated by what’s revealed by a story like that than by what’s revealed by a first-class story. Because there is nobody in the world like that, nobody in the world—most of all (or least of all) the person who wrote it. And that’s true. I am not trying to escape out from under the onus. I’ll bet that none of you could guess who wrote that story. I mean I don’t know either, because I don’t know the person by name. But I bet if you were talking with that person you wouldn’t know that she was the one who wrote that story. And by the way, I think that that’s a very good instance of a story that could not possibly be written by a person of the other sex—you have to be really inside that personality. This simply couldn’t be written by a man. Maybe a very, very skilled man could fake it, but I don’t think this is a fake. I think it’s real, and in that sense it’s really eerie, it’s weird. It has resonances. It means that anybody can transform himself into anything. [Five minutes later.] Before I lost my nerve in a sense and started explaining how this girl who wrote that story is the most intelligent girl in the world and I wish she would be my second wife [laughter], I didn’t zero in on the issue of what’s wrong with the story—yes I did, yes I did. (I got so nervous with—yeah, I realize now, I just recalled that what I was saying was that curious business .  .  .) Have we now established that there is a surprisingly wide range of reasons why stories don’t work, and that what you would think of, if you had never taught a writing class and had never seen amateurish stories or amateur stories, you would always think that the characteristic way of going wrong would be to write very clumsily, with insufficient technique—doesn’t that seem to you a reasonable way of approaching the notion of novice writing? You would say, Novice writing is always awkward and clumsy. And novice writing is often not awkward and clumsy, that’s not the way it goes wrong if it goes wrong—a lot of the time it goes right. And I repeat (having wiped it out of my mind momentarily in my nervousness) but I repeat that that’s a very interesting way of going wrong, and it’s a way, of course, that you have to guard against, particularly when you’re young, because it’s much 184

Week Six easier to recede into a fantasy when you’re very young than when you’re older. You’re much more aware of the judgments of the world when you’re older. [Twenty minutes later.] Here is a series of very short pieces which I’ll read [inaudible]. This is called “Happy Robert.” Robert Richardson spoke quietly to his friend Laurence. “And I swear to God, Laurence, she blushed!” “No.” “Yes.” You want me to read just a number of them? That’s one, “Sarah Maitland.” Sarah Maitland looked directly into her doctor’s eyes and then looked away. “I don’t have to tell you that, do I?” “If you wish to be cured.” “But I’m not even religious.” “Well, Miss Maitland, if God is dead then everything is permitted, now isn’t it?” I don’t think that’s like the other short pieces, because that sounds just like your ordinary rapist position. That’s a little too explanatory for me. The guy, it seems to me, is just using an argument. STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Or maybe what I think about that is that it’s a little too ingenious, because when she says “But I’m not even religious” so he comes up with that Dostoevskian statement “if God is dead then everything is permitted, now isn’t it?” that’s a joke that he makes at her expense. STUDENT: You wonder what the question is. MUDRICK: Yeah. Well, of course that’s part of the technique of this writer. He refuses to give you certain information that you customarily expect from a story. Well, let me go on. This is called “Lucky Lloyd.” Lloyd Barrington was in a hurry to get home when his car was broadsided and thrown over a cliff. A week earlier he had installed air bags in the car, and police say that that was why he survived. That’s the end of the short ones. There’s a longer one, so we’ll go back to the beginning. Here’s “Happy Robert.” [Rereads the story.] 185

Mudrick Transcribed What do you make of that? STUDENT: You read it well. MUDRICK: I did. [Laughter.] Thanks, that boosts my spirits. Anytime you can think of a compliment, please deliver it. I need all the help I can get. I need all the encouragement I can get, I should say. Anybody? You just don’t have any comment on it? That’s very much in the mode of other ones by the same writer, so why don’t you try to define it instead of saying whether you like it or not? What are some of the techniques being used? Yes? STUDENT: I don’t know about the ones previous to this, but the concept with those was a little more pure. I don’t really know why she blushed, what the relationship was with that person, why— MUDRICK: Many of them are obscure in much the same way. STUDENT: The ones in the past I don’t remember being so separated or unattached to the world. MUDRICK: Well, you may be right, and at the moment I can’t even think of an individual one, so I won’t argue with you. This, at least, seems to me in the same mode as the others. STUDENT: Well, there’s the one where they watch TV. MUDRICK: That’s a special one—you mean the one in which they’re trying to see that ad. I know it because that puzzled me, and the author talked to me about it later and, I think, pretty well convinced me that I had misunderstood it. But I think one of the reasons I had misunderstood it was that it didn’t seem to me to be working the way the others did, so I was fooled by it. I’m not fooled by this one. This, it seems to me, is exactly in the same mode, even if it uses a different technique. The mode is the mode of suppression. That is, what the author is doing, I think, is deliberately suppressing all kinds of information that you customarily think you deserve from the author. So the author is saying: I am going to give you some kind of essence, or maybe even (to use another word) some kind of quintessence, which, by the way, means the fifth squeezing. These are quintessences, and maybe that would be a good title for it, “Quint essences.” You ordinarily want to know why a person blushes. What the author, I think, writing something like this makes you think is, We know that there are many situations in which people blush . . . yes? STUDENT: What’s so odd is the reaction to it: No—she blushed? MUDRICK: Yes. So at least these two people are astonished that she would have blushed at this particular thing. So the author is double-crossing us in yet another way. He is saying, Not only am I suppressing this, but I am not suppressing the expectable kind of remark or situation which would cause her to blush. It’s a most unexpected, outlandish situation which has caused her to blush, and I’m not going to tell you what it is. We know, but I’m not going to tell you. Yes? STUDENT: This one in particular, and a lot of them, seem to have an aftermath effect to me, so that it seems like we’re looking at debris, and certain things are being taken out of this debris and set to the side. Like a whole period of life has been levelled, and then chunks or hunks—no, chunks [laughter] of rock . . . 186

Week Six MUDRICK: You know, I love that image that you are using. The image that you’re using, for me, calls up (I mean the debris and so on) calls up a kind of nuclear war, the aftermath of which is, just a few people have survived and they don’t know that anything has happened. They’re carrying on as if nothing has happened, but in fact they’re the only people left in the world. And they’re just talking, and of course they don’t feel the need to explain anything to anybody else. Yes? STUDENT: The reader will think in his or her mind, Now what would cause her to blush? And then you bring upon your own memory some completely embarrassing situation in which you blushed. [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Except, you see, I think what you are doing is rationalizing the situation in such a way as to destroy the effect and the mode and to misunderstand the mode. Because when you say that what it causes you to think of is the sort of situation that embarrasses you, that’s exactly what the story is not about. It’s about the sort of situation that does not embarrass you but embarrasses somebody else! And isn’t that astonishing! Not only doesn’t it embarrass you, it doesn’t embarrass your best friend to whom you are mentioning the situation. Moreover, you know in advance that it couldn’t possibly embarrass your best friend: My God, Laurence, you know what happened? She blushed!—No! So it’s amazing! it’s outlandish! you couldn’t imagine! I now realize one of the reasons why I find this form so impressive. You know the kind of thing that irritates me most when you talk about a story? (Some of you have seen me practically get into fistfights with students in the past about this.) They say, But you’re just forgetting that what the author probably meant was that they had just been talking about this before—and then construct this very plausible scaffolding for the story that the writer didn’t write from the few bits of misinformation that the writer has given. I guess I’m not making myself clear. You can’t do that here! You can’t do it. The writer doesn’t allow you to reconstruct his story. You’re stuck with what he gives you. And he doesn’t give you enough to exercise your fraudulent imagination. So what he’s doing is not simply suppressing the facts, he’s also suppressing your imagination for your own story, for the story that you insist on writing, because you like to complete what the author has written. It’s remarkable. I would like to read this doctor thing over again because it’s possible I may have misunderstood this too. Sarah Maitland looked directly into her doctor’s eyes and then looked away. “I don’t have to tell you that, do I?” “If you wish to be cured.” See, this is about something which is apparently embarrassing, at least for the moment. Moreover, the doctor himself is not surprised to discover that she is embarrassed by it. Yes? STUDENT: I think he might be a psychiatrist [inaudible]. 187

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: He might. Well, yes. (All psychiatrists by the way are MDs. You can be a psychoanalyst without being an MD, but you can’t be a psychiatrist without being an MD.) “I don’t have to tell you that, do I?” “If you wish to becured.” Oh yeah, it sounds very much like a psychiatrist. “But I’m not even religious.” “Well, Miss Maitland, if God is dead then everything is permitted, now isn’t it?” And I think what bothers me about that—I think, now, that I have a better argument for why this doesn’t seem to me quite in the same mode and why this mode is less interesting to me. Because for one thing the author has been trapped by the fact that he’s got a situation in which it’s possible for our imaginations to operate. The doctor has asked her an embarrassing sexual question because that’s most likely to be the kind of question that a woman will not feel as if she—aren’t we likely to assume that the issue here is sexual? Is that true or isn’t it? If it’s true then that’s much less interesting than “I swear to God, Laurence, she blushed!” Because there, we have no idea what she can possibly have blushed at; here, we reconstruct. No, I really think what I’ve been talking about for these last few pieces is very important. That if an author is able to prevent you from exercising that part of your imagination—it’s like that part of your imagination which completes sentences that other people begin. It’s that part of your imagination which doesn’t allow people to say what they have to say but is always reconstructing what they say before they’ve finished saying it. It’s that which turns you eventually into the ghouls that you will all become after the age of twenty-five in which you will never hear one thing that anybody else says. You will simply wait more or less politely until they’ve finished talking so that you can then start talking, and they will listen politely more or less until you have finished talking, and then they will say what they have to say. And the genius of this first piece is that it completely suppresses that part of your imagination, call it what you will. And it is imagination of course—it’s a function of imagination because you’re inventing what is not there. You’re inventing what that person should be in order to conform to your notion of what other people in the universe should be. Yes? STUDENT: What makes the second story less attractive to you? The first story, like he said, it’s like a piece of debris, but it’s very active. I mean it is so honest and so open-ended that it can entail anything. Yet the second one, if that is a psychiatrist he would never really say that. I mean it’s kind of a cute and ingenious thing to say— MUDRICK: Well, I agree that it’s a wise-crack, and I think it’s unfortunate because I think that—now, I should make myself clear. I don’t think that anything could 188

Week Six be true of the first story, because that’s not so. What we have is a very precisely defined situation in which two men are discussing a situation in which somebody was extremely embarrassed: you can’t be more precise than that. So I didn’t mean to suggest that the author loses any precision, I mean the author gains this precision by a remarkable series of acts of suppression. Let me read “Lucky Lloyd.” Lloyd Barrington was in a hurry to get home when his car was broadsided and thrown over a cliff. A week earlier he had installed air bags in the car, and police say that that was why he survived. Now I can’t at the moment say why—I think that this is as effective, as successful as the first one. It’s in the same mode, and yet at the same time it’s very different. Also, for reasons that I can’t discover for the moment, it seems to me much funnier. I don’t mean that means that I think that it’s better than the first one, it’s just more comic—it’s a comic cameo. And I could say, oh, various, to me unsatisfactory things like—this is all that can be said about Lloyd Barrington. This is one of the ways in which some of the other stories can work, so that the characters seem to be completely contained by their names. The character is a sack with a label on it, and that’s all there is. And you fling it over the precipice, attached to a car [laughing], and then it survives. I mean the character himself is a kind of air bag, and so the air bag being saved by the air bag is just kind of funny. Yes? STUDENT: I think it’s good because we always hear these things about air bags and safety belts and all that stuff, and we never really believe in them. And then when you hear about something like that—see, that’s what you ought to go and do—buy an air bag. MUDRICK: Yeah. And you understand when you’re thinking about Lucky Lloyd that in the last analysis it doesn’t really matter anyway [laughing]. There’s something exhilaratingly depressing about this [laughing]. I’m very impressed by the form, I really am. I think it’s entirely original, it’s quite remarkable. And it’s astonishingly variable. One of the mistakes I made when I was reading some of the earlier pieces was that I thought that it was more restrictive than it is. But in fact it isn’t restrictive, there’s a great deal of variability. Yes? STUDENT: Part of what’s funny for me is that the police seem disappointed. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: Yes. But I also like the idea of police as the guardians of civilization. You know, this is one of those moods in which we think: Isn’t it nice that there was a policeman on duty! And at that moment the police car drove up and we felt somehow that civilization had justified itself, and so on. We all know that cops are dirty dogs fundamentally and we don’t want them anywhere near us, but from time to time they are wrapped in the flag. [Laughs.] The story is finally patriotic [laughing], there’s something patriotic about it. You almost feel that Lloyd is waving the flag when he goes over the cliff [laughing]. I think it’s very funny. And this 189

Mudrick Transcribed is not nasty, it’s not nasty—there’s not that. There’s something very sad about it too. I like it. [Twenty minutes later. Mudrick is talking about a different story.] MUDRICK: The story as a story is just too neat. It comes together with a clank at the end like a big clumsy trap. So the guy gets what he deserves. So what. Stories that give you the impression of having a very strong moral point are not usually very interesting. The story is essentially a moral-gimmick story: Beware of imagining that your feelings are the only important ones. And this guy, first of all, gets betrayed by all these women who don’t fall in love with him, though he falls in love with them, and then eventually he gets betrayed by this woman who isn’t beautiful and whom he falls in love with, and so on. I don’t know why, for some reason I’m annoyed by it. I guess I’m annoyed by it because it has to do—it’s really associated with my feelings in the Troilus [and Criseyde] class. I think that so much nonsense is talked about beauty, especially female beauty; I mean it’s so stylish nowadays to pretend that it’s of no importance or that people who are hung up on it are silly or stupid. I just don’t believe any of that crap. I don’t like any stories which treat it as less than a blessing. I think female beauty is a blessing, and if you don’t think that beauty is a blessing there’s something wrong with you. I’m sorry, that’s what I believe. And I hope that all you women think that male beauty is a blessing, and I hope that if you’re extremely generous you will even think that female beauty is a blessing, and that it’s a delight, and it’s balm to the eyes and to the soul. And so I don’t like stories in which anything bad or negative or unfriendly is said about physical beauty. Physical beauty gives so many people so much pleasure that to knock it, it seems to me, is really to be a dog in the manger. If you think of all the pleasure that’s been given to all the people in the history of the human race by the contemplation of physical beauty—by thinking about it, by looking at it, by dreaming of it—then you shouldn’t even—and by the way, the older I get the more strongly I feel this way. [Begins reading another story, then stops.] I’m even irritated by the business: Now at last, when he has done the right thing. he has fallen in love from inside out . . . For me all that does is to produce these obscene images. I’m perfectly willing to believe that it’s possible to fall in love with ugly people—it’s a consolation among other things. But don’t count on it. [Laughs.] I mean, don’t count on people falling in love with you because you are ugly; it’s a mistake. You ought to hope to be beautiful, and you ought to be glad that there are beautiful people, and you ought to assume that it’s pretty hard for people to fall in love with you if you are ugly. And you oughtn’t to treat falling in love as just one of those things which result from people having discovered after two weeks’ acquaintance your beautiful soul. Most of us don’t have beautiful souls; if we’re lucky we have beautiful bodies. You don’t even know what I’m talking about, but that’s all right. 190

Week Nine 30 May 1985

MUDRICK: [after getting no response to what he just said]: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. . . . I am a motherless child, as a matter of fact [laughs]—my mom died many years ago. So be nice to me! Someday you’ll be a motherless child yourself, very likely. This is called “Grandma.” “Hello, Grandma?” “Katie?” “Yeah, it’s me. Guess what!” “What?” “I was asked to the prom.” “Oh, you were? How wonderful, Katie. Who’s the lucky fellow?” “His name’s Ken.” “Ken who? Do I know him?” “No, Grandma, he lives in Santa Cruz.” “Santa Cruz?” “Yeah, I met him last year at summer camp. Oh Grandma, he’s so cute.” “Well, honey, did you ask your mom?” “Yeah.” “And she says it’s all right?” “Of course.” “Well, why aren’t you going with someone from your own high school?” “Because no one asked me, and so this guy is my last chance.” “Well, how well do you know this boy?” “Grandma, we became really good friends over the summer and we’ve kept in touch by letters and phone calls. Remember the guy I told you about that sent me those roses for Valentine’s Day? Well, this is the same guy.” “Well then what’s wrong with him? If he’s such a nice guy then why can’t he find a date at his own school?” “I don’t know. I guess he likes me. I’m just glad that he did.”

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Mudrick Transcribed “It seems like an awful lot of trouble going all the way there and coming right back the same night for one dance.” “I won’t be doing that. I’m going to stay there for the weekend.” “You’re going to what?” “I’m going to stay there for the weekend. I thought that I’d make a mini vacation out of it because Santa Cruz is so beautiful.” “Katie?” “Yeah, Grandma.” “Put your mom on the phone.” “Okay,” said Katie. “Mom, Grandma wants to talk to you.” “Tell her I’ll be right there,” Katie’s mom yelled from the other room. “She’ll be right here,” said Katie. When Katie’s mother got to the phone Katie handed it to her. “Yeah, Mom?” “Katie says that she’s staying with a boy up in Santa Cruz for the weekend.” “Yeah, that’s right. She’s going to the prom with him.” “Well, I don’t see why you’re letting her go. She just turned eighteen. She’s just a baby.” “Mom, she’s not a baby. Besides, his parents will be there.” “Do you even know this boy?” “Yes, I met Ken over the summer when I picked Katie up from summer camp. He’s a very nice boy and Katie’s right—he is very cute.” “It’s just not right, her going so far away for a prom. She’s such a pretty girl, why can’t anyone from her own high school ask her?” “A couple of boys did.” “Katie said that no one did.” “She lied then.” “Now why did she go and do that for?” “So you wouldn’t tell her that she ought to go with one of them instead of with Ken.” “Well, why doesn’t she go with one of them?” “I don’t know, Mom. I guess she doesn’t like either of them. Besides, she really wants to go to Santa Cruz where she can go to the beach and goof off for the weekend. She’s really excited about it, Mom.” “Oh hell, put Katie back on the phone, will you?” said grandma. “Okay,” said Katie’s mom, handing the phone back to Katie. “Your grandma wants to talk to you again.” “Yeah, Grandma?” “Katie?” “Yeah.” “I want you to promise me one thing.” “What’s that, Grandma?” 192

Week Nine “I want you to promise me that you’ll let me help you pick out the dress.” “Sure, Grandma.” STUDENT: Is there any bit of prose that is not dialogue? MUDRICK: Practically none—everything is dialogue, that’s right. STUDENT: It seems to just sort of [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Does that bother you? You mean you feel you want more explanations— STUDENT: Well, it wouldn’t be necessary if there was more pace. MUDRICK: All right. So it doesn’t seem to you to move steadily. STUDENT: Well, it’s tricky when it’s all dialogue. MUDRICK: Oh yeah, it is tricky. True. STUDENT: Maybe they could have taken away all the description. MUDRICK: I was trying to remember what the description was. STUDENT: There’s something about handing the phone around. MUDRICK: Yeah, okay. Yeah, it could go out. Yes? STUDENT: Even though it’s all dialogue I can still follow it. MUDRICK: I certainly didn’t have any trouble following it. I don’t think that’s his complaint. Yes? STUDENT: It seems like you were an operator listening in on the line. I like that, but I think in the dialogue there should be more distinction between the three people. MUDRICK: Yeah. I don’t have any special trouble with that. I understand the objections you people are making. But I think there’s a wonderfully funny exchange when the grandmother makes absolutely certain that Katie is going to do this horrible thing. She says: “Katie?” “Yeah, Grandma.” “Put your mom on the phone.” “Okay,” said Katie. “Mom, Grandma wants to talk to you.” [Laughs.] It’s nicely done. I’m not sure it isn’t a little bit too situationcomedy stuff. I would rather Katie be playing dumb than be dumb, and at that moment she sounds a little dumb, she sounds as if she doesn’t understand why her grandma wants to talk to her mother, and I would rather that she did know so she doesn’t seem like a stooge. But I think the sudden change from the grandma being very friendly and then very questioning and then concerned and then finally deciding, Well, I can’t talk to her, I’m going to talk to her mother [laughs]— my daughter. And that’s funny, I think that’s funny. Obviously the story is about accommodation to new morals and manners, and the grandmother pulls herself together and heroically makes the decision at the end that at least her granddaughter will be well dressed when she gets fucked. [Laughter.] Which seems to me an admirable position, I mean I like the old woman [laughing]. 193

Mudrick Transcribed I love the ending, I think the ending is very funny—and good—but I would like Katie to be brighter than she is. I would like for it to be made clear when Katie turns the phone over to her mother that she knows exactly what’s going on. I don’t know that it would be exceptionally simple to do it, but I’m sure that it could be done. I mean they all seem like nice people. And I even like the fact that the mother clearly has given up years ago. [Laughs.] Also that the grandmother has somehow been left in the lurch about all this. The grandmother hasn’t caught up yet, and so this is one of those moments when people are finding out what the times are really like. Up until now they’ve been able to kid themselves or they’ve been kept out of it. I like the matter-of-fact way the grandmother talks, so for instance— “It’s just not right, her going so far away for a prom. She’s such a pretty girl, why can’t anyone from her own high school ask her?” “A couple of boys did.” “Katie said that no one did.” “She lied then.” [Laughter.] I just think that’s very nice. I keep being fascinated by varieties of reaction to writing classes and to writing in general. For instance I had a visit from a girl who is enrolled in this class. And first of all she was going to tell me—apparently she was going to tell me some kind of cock-and-bull story about not being able to attend today, but then she decided to tell me the truth, and she said, “I’m sorry, I’ve just decided I can’t attend for the rest of the quarter. I just don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand the discussion and I can’t follow it, and I don’t really understand what the objections are and why you like what you like,” and so on. I said, “Well obviously, if it hasn’t worked for you this far it’s not likely to work in the next couple of weeks, so I can understand how you feel.” I confess I am baffled by that kind of reaction. I’m simply baffled, I don’t understand it. But it happened. And I was going to say that I think that even those of you who react intelligently and sharply and eagerly to the stories, sometimes I think you have to make an effort to extend your range of interest. So that for instance in a story like this you’re all aware, I mean you’re right to be aware of the fact that this is a—call it a stunt; that is, the writer is trying to handle almost straight dialogue. And that’s a good exercise to try. I think I’ve suggested this to you (to some of you anyway): if you feel nervous or you can’t think of anything to write about, try just writing straight dialogue, see whether you can turn out a story with straight dialogue—for fun. But I think what happens is that you are likely to concentrate your attention on one or another thing at the expense of the others—for instance (well, I think really, this happened in the first story too) when you get a little too concerned about technique or maybe a little too concerned about the plot and 194

Week Nine you aren’t aware of what really is the most important aspect of a story, which is to give you the sense of lives being lived. If a writer can do that, he or she has done the most important thing to be done with the writing of fiction. So that in the first story, it seems to me, one did get a distinct sense of what it was like to be an older adolescent girl with an absolutely uncontrollable younger sister for whom she felt responsible, and also to have a friend who is trying not so much to console her as to get her to be resigned to the situation. Now that’s not an easy situation to present, and it seems to me that the writer did it with very considerable skill, a kind of skill which is a hell of a lot more important than the skill simply of putting words together, though obviously it’s done by putting words together—don’t ask me how, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what baffles this girl who isn’t going to show up anymore—that she understands that something is being said, but she doesn’t understand what it means or what reference it has to what’s been written. In a story like this I’m perfectly willing to grant that it’s a kind of stunt, it’s a kind of exercise. But what is really much more important (I think) about a story like this is that it’s a genuine dramatic situation—it’s a situation that adolescent girls could well be involved in. And it’s wonderfully interesting how these incredible changes have occurred in—we say, in a period of three generations, but in fact they’ve occurred in a period of about ten or fifteen years. So that this girl, the kid in the story, is obviously very modern and up-to-date. There are certain relics of the past involved, like proms. Big deal, proms. And yet it’s interesting that this ancient relic persists: girls must get invited to proms, otherwise they’re not considered attractive and so on—the grandmother is still worried about that. In this sense the grandmother and the girl span the generations; that is, the grandmother knows all about proms and how important it was to be invited to proms, and if you’re a pretty girl you should be invited to proms. But what the grandmother doesn’t know about is that you also like to go to Santa Cruz for a weekend and obviously you sleep over at the guy’s house. Maybe she’s heard about such things, but that doesn’t really happen to her granddaughter. And this sort of thing of course has come about very recently—I mean as history goes, in the last wink of an eye—and so this is a very important story as far as its subject is concerned. The subject is a very radical change in manners and morals in the last decade, practically, which of course makes all sorts of difficulty between the generations. And the story is particularly delightful to me in a way because of the fact that it’s clear that the mother has given in. Now obviously the mother didn’t live this kind of life, but the mother has daily relations with her daughter and so they’ve had to come to a modus vivendi and this is it: You do what you please, and try not to catch any diseases or get pregnant, and we’ll get along. I mean that’s apparently the mother’s position. I rather pride myself on having made this decision about twenty years ago with my own daughters—I was ahead of the times. But nowadays mothers have made it just as a matter of course. 195

Mudrick Transcribed But grandmothers, most of them at least, have not yet made it. And this is a story about a grandmother being forced to confront the issue and finally facing it very gracefully and with a sense of humor and very decently and probably in the best way possible, so that the generations are united. Now that’s all very nice. And that’s a hell of a lot more important, isn’t it? Isn’t it really a hell of a lot more important than whether the dialogue is extremely effective all the way through or whether three or four sentences could be dropped? I don’t mean that you can’t bring those things up; I mean you have to keep changing your focus. If you’re serious about stories—if you’re serious about this kind of class, and I’m sure by the way that most of you are . . . What puzzles me most of all is the bafflement that some of you feel, or maybe boredom because of bafflement. I think I’ve had more trouble with this class in that way than almost any class I can remember—I mean students who just don’t follow what’s going on or can’t get interested, in spite of the fact that they seem well intentioned. And moreover they even seem smart, some of them anyhow. Am I being more opaque than usual this quarter? Am I being less effective in discussion? Is anything I said, irrespective of whether you agree with it—have I said anything that’s hard to understand in the last five, ten minutes? STUDENT: No. MUDRICK: That’s good. I think I’m going on sabbatical at just the right time. (Even that’s not true, because I’m grimly determined to teach this class next fall even though I’m on sabbatical.) All right, this is called “It’s Just a Known Fact.” “Well, how old is he?” asked Veronica. “He just turned twenty,” said Felicia. “Did he say he’d call you?” “Yeah, he said he’d call me this week.” “When was that?” A couple of days ago.” “Then stop worrying, he’ll call.” “Well, I don’t know, Veronica. He was pretty drunk.” “What does that mean? He’ll still remember you.” “I know, but he might have forgotten my phone number.” “You mean you didn’t write it down?” “No.” “Well, that was stupid.” “Great, just what I needed to hear.” “Well, it was. You should have written it down.” “I know, but I’d feel sort of cheap doing that.” “You’re not, though, so what does it matter?” “It doesn’t, but it’s just that the music was so loud and everything. I mean everyone was dancing and I would have felt ridiculous running around the house looking for a pen and paper.” 196

Week Nine “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I would have felt dumb too. Maybe you should have asked for his phone number.” “Are you serious?” “Well, why not?” “Girls don’t ask for the guy’s phone number.” “Who made that rule?” “Nobody did. It’s just a known fact.” “Then it’s a stupid known fact.” “Oh shut up. You’re supposed to be comforting me.” “Why?” “Because I met the man of my dreams the other night and he may have forgotten my phone number.” “Well, whose house was the party at?” “Sarah’s.” “Did you call Sarah and ask her if she knows this guy’s phone number?’” “Yeah, I tried that, but she didn’t know who I was talking about.” “Well, there’s nothing you can do now so stop worrying. I bet he’ll call.” “But what if he doesn’t?” “Then you’ll just have to shave your head and become a nun.” “Oh shut up.” STUDENT: Is that the same writer? MUDRICK: Yeah, and obviously working at dialogue. Well, you see, I love the very subtle gradations of moral . . . Fiction is endlessly fascinating because it measures the heartbeat of the times—that’s really what it does. So you get to something like this [begins reading aloud a passage]—well, let me read it—it’s so short that I think I can demonstrate what’s going on, or criticize better by stopping. “Well, how old is he?” asked Veronica. “He just turned twenty,” said Felicia. “Did he say he’d call you?” “Yeah, he said he’d call me this week.” “When was that?” “A couple of days ago.” “Then stop worrying, he’ll call.” Now up until then we’re in an area where—we know exactly where we are. This goes back five thousand years—this could be Egypt 3000 BC. Any problems? Isn’t that so? Of course it is. I mean it’s in any situation in which courtship occurs. Then, there’s a wonderful statement which makes things change a little: “Well, I don’t know, Veronica. He was pretty drunk.” 197

Mudrick Transcribed Now in almost any previous culture the fact that the guy was drunk would make him less desirable—socially, sexually, as a person courting, and so on. And so we wait breathlessly to find out what’s going to be said, and what’s said is just right as far as updating is concerned. “What does that mean? He’ll still remember you.” In other words the only thing that matters about his having been drunk is that he may have forgotten the telephone number [laughs]: it has nothing to do with his ineligibility or eligibility. So we know we’re in modem times. We’re as a matter of fact in the present, because nowadays getting drunk or being high or snorting coke, at least in certain circles, doesn’t matter—it’s just what some people do. And the only indication that you get that it will make trouble is that it might cause a break in the connection—that is, it might turn off the telephone, something like that. “I know, but he might have forgotten my phone number.” “You mean you didn’t write it down?” “No.” So now we’re among girls who—because that too would never have been done in the past. You don’t write down your telephone number for a guy! You might give it to him, but to write it down would express a degree of anxiety, which is really out of the question. And here there’s a nice subtle distinction between the two girls. The interlocutor is saying, Well, that’s ridiculous! She’s very forthright, she’s really With It, whereas the girl who is regretting what hasn’t happened is still a little tiny bit more old-fashioned, isn’t she. She doesn’t really want to write her telephone number down. “Well, that was stupid.” “Great, just what I needed to hear.” “Well, it was. You should have written it down.” “I know, but I’d feel sort of cheap doing that.” —that is (to make my little joke), not cheap if she fucked him on the dance floor with the crowd there, but she’d feel a little cheap if she wrote down her telephone number. Which is another nice little indication of how there are individual variations in personal morality in any society. This girl still feels the way say her mother might have felt writing down her telephone number for a guy. There’s a cultural lag here [laughs] with this girl—and it does happen with some people. “You’re not, though, so what does it matter?” 198

Week Nine Hard-headed realism (the girl’s friend): You don’t have to feel cheap if you’re not cheap. It doesn’t matter what people think of you so long as you Are What You Are. Moreover, I think the story is convincing in the sense that you don’t believe that the girlfriend is just talking. You really do feel that these are two different moral universes. They bear similarities but they’re not simple mirror images of each other. The girlfriend is more up-to-date than the girl who’s the protagonist of the story. “It doesn’t, but it’s just that the music was so loud and everything. I mean everyone was dancing and I would have felt ridiculous running around the house looking for a pen and paper.” Now that’s a good solid reasonable argument and makes more sense than if she carries a pack of Kinko’s paper [laughter] with a ballpoint pen attached to write down her telephone number for any guy who happens to be in the vicinity. Wait a minute, I’ll see if I can find a piece of paper and a pen to write down my telephone number for you. Then, you see, the girls come together, and her friend says: “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I would have felt dumb too.” So there are circumstances when even the girlfriend wouldn’t have wanted to write her telephone number down. “Maybe you should have asked for his phone number.” —says the girlfriend, because she still wants to maintain her moral ascendancy. She’s grudgingly willing to admit: Yeah, running around for a pencil and paper, that’s too much. But in that case you could have said, What’s your phone number? “Are you serious?” —which separates them again. [Laughs.] I mean this is old-fashioned and modern. “Well, why not?” “Girls don’t ask for the guy’s phone number.” All of a sudden we’re getting rules. [Laughs.] Girls don’t ask for a guy’s telephone number! “Who made that rule?” “Nobody did. It’s just a known fact.” 199

Mudrick Transcribed I love that expression, “a known fact.” [Laughs.] That’s different from unknown facts. It also has great authority. When you say, Well, there’s no evidence for it but it’s just a known fact, what you mean is something like it’s axiomatic, like a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. And so it’s clear that she doesn’t understand very clearly that morals and manners do change with astonishing, even alarming speed. “Then it’s a stupid known fact.” “Oh shut up. You’re supposed to be comforting me.” “Why?” “Because I met the man of my dreams the other night and he may have forgotten my phone number.” “Well, whose house was the party at?” “Sarah’s.” “Did you call Sarah and ask her if she knows this guy’s phone number?’” “Yeah, I tried that, but she didn’t know who I was talking about.” “Well, there’s nothing you can do now so stop worrying. I bet he’ll call.” “But what if he doesn’t?” “Then you’ll just have to shave your head and become a nun.” “Oh shut up.” Lovely story, lovely story. Beautiful, very delicately managed, it seems to me absolutely convincing from beginning to end. Moreover, once again, I am convinced that these are friends, these are girlfriends, I believe them both. I don’t find any difficulty in understanding their disagreements: one is slightly more modern than the other. And I think the handling of contemporary situations is just beautifully done. And maybe what puzzles me most about the class, and about the problem of teaching a class like this, is that I don’t think you yourselves, you don’t give enough credit to each other (that’s part of it). My feeling is very strong that I like the stories a lot better than you people do (I mean the stories that I like) and I think it’s such a pity. Because obviously I think I’m right, but I think what is more important is that you don’t understand that you’re living in the present, and one of the great pleasures of living in the present is to have some sense of the past. If you think that everybody has always lived in the present then you have nothing to measure the present by. These wonderfully slight alterations, and sometimes volcanic and geological alterations, in the moral landscape are fascinating. And there is nothing that presents them more effectively than fiction; that’s what fiction does best of all. Yes? STUDENT: If you put the other girl, the one who gave all the advice, in the same situation, she might not have been as bold as she thought. 200

Week Nine MUDRICK: That’s true too. Yes, she might be a good talker. She might talk a good game rather than play a good game. And that’s part of the ambiguous feeling in the story, and why the story is really more important as a revelation of manners than it is really about types of personality, though it is nice that one person represents the absolutely up-to-the-minute present and the other person represents the day before yesterday, I mean the protagonist is the day before yesterday. What both of these stories represent, it seems to me—and that’s why I’m disappointed when a comment is made about . . . Both these stories move—they move. They move because there’s a situation . . . if you want to talk about conflict: Do all stories involve conflict? Well, if you want to use the word conflict in a highly extended way, you can say yes, that fiction involves conflict. But that doesn’t mean people fighting. It doesn’t even mean people in any strenuous disagreement. It simply means—I mean if you can imagine people in the height of bliss, in some sort of nirvana, then that’s probably not a fictional situation. But up until the moment at which they achieve nirvana—I mean, anything which is moving them in one direction or another is a fictional situation. And it seems to me that the writer of both these stories (and it’s the same writer, and I think also the writer of the first story that I read) is aware of what constitutes a fictional situation. And if you know what a—or if you feel what a fictional situation is, then it almost doesn’t matter what you do with it. I got strange visitors this morning. I mean this girl who was telling me that she doesn’t understand what I was talking about, then another girl came in and said, “I have a critical paper to write for a class, and I was wondering if you could help me because you’ve written criticism.” And it was clear that she had the notion that somehow there was some sort of magic word that I could deliver, that there was one easy five-minute lesson in which you could tell somebody how to write criticism. Well, one of the reasons that you can’t teach anybody to write criticism is that criticism is simply intelligent statement. I mean, what is going on in this class is criticism. I mean even you people deliver yourselves of criticism. If somebody asked me what criticism is, I don’t know what criticism is, because it’s what I do all the time. It’s like asking me what breathing is—you’ve been doing it all the time. It reminded me of that wonderful moment in Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in which this middle-class citizen, who’s made a lot of money and now wants to become cultured, gets an instructor in language who’s going to teach him how to speak well, and read, and so on. And one of the first things that the—he wants to know the difference between poetry and prose. And the teacher says, What you’re speaking right now is prose. And Monsieur Jourdain, who’s the [inaudible], is fascinated by the notion that he’s been speaking prose all his life. [Laughter.] It had never occurred to him. I’ve been speaking prose? [Laughs.] He goes around telling everybody that he’s been speaking prose. And you people speak criticism all the time. Essentially criticism is just talk. It’s talk about something, that’s all it is. If you want to ask me the difference between criticism and fiction, well, fiction tries to set up a kind of alternative 201

Mudrick Transcribed to life. Fiction dramatizes. The only difference between fiction and criticism is that fiction dramatizes and criticism doesn’t. Criticism talks, fiction dramatizes. Fiction pretends that there’s a world. And then, of course, within the fiction criticism is occurring because people talk, they express opinions. Talk is criticism, fiction is drama. And that’s really all there is to it, and I don’t know any better way to define either. (I mean you can get a little more explicit . . .) And not to be interested in fiction or what fiction has to say is, as far as I’m concerned, not to be interested in human life. But—and it may be that I’m doing something wrong. Well, next week is the last week (there is another meeting, is there not?) and you’ll all tell me what has gone wrong in this class. I’ll listen very patiently. Today I’ll try to get through the stories. This is very short, it’s just a five-line piece, and it’s called “Conversensation,” and it’s written by somebody whose name I don’t recognize. As far as I know this is the first thing I’ve read by this person (I just don’t want you to take it by mistake for something by the person who’s been writing all those short pieces). “Conversensation.” “Incredible.” “Marvelous!” “It’s good, I like it.” “Read it again.” “Okay! I think I will.” What do you make of that? STUDENT: I guess you’re supposed to read it again! [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Do you think there’s some—what do you think the intention was? STUDENT: I don’t know. MUDRICK: Well, I bet you do— STUDENT: It’s marvelous. MUDRICK: I think this is a jab at both me and the person who writes those short pieces. [Laughter.] You know—You think they’re great stuff, but they don’t make any sense to me at all. And so I’m going to write something which is both going to take a stab at those things and also look just the same as those other things. [Rereads “Conversensation.”] See, this is the conversation between the suckasses in the class and me. [Laughter.] Those who, having got the signal that I like it, are going along—I say “Incredible.” And somebody in class says “Marvelous!” And somebody else says “It’s good, I like it.” And then the number-one brown nose says “Read it again.” And I say “Okay! I think I will.” Yes? STUDENT: It’s almost like—I don’t know if you watch MTV, but there’s this one— MUDRICK: Never have. Should I? STUDENT: No, actually, but—yeah, there might be something interesting—but David Lee Roth is like Dave TV. I don’t know if any of you guys have seen how all those weirdos going around saying marvelous! marvelous! 202

Week Nine MUDRICK: Yeah. STUDENT: Never mind. No one here watches MTV. I do all the time. MUDRICK: Oh, I can’t believe that other people don’t watch it. There’s nobody else that watches it? [Several talk at once.] All right. But I literally have never watched it. STUDENT: That’s something that’s modern [laughs], I mean something that has never been around before in the history of mankind. MUDRICK: Yeah. But it’s on very late at night, though. STUDENT: No, it’s on twenty-four hours. MUDRICK: What station? STUDENT: Thirty-four. MUDRICK: Oh, it’s on one of those upper—does that come with cable? STUDENT: Yes, I think so. MUDRICK: All right, I’ll put it on 34 and watch diligently for about fifteen—well, seconds. [Laughter.] STUDENT: That seems like conversation in a drama. MUDRICK: Well, it’s a kind of parody. I think it’s cleverer than most such efforts to make fun of me. Most efforts to make fun of me of course I respond to very sourly—unlike the rest of you, who are just delighted [inaudible because of laughter], you just love it. STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: It’s just inventing a word, that is, conversensation. I suppose that the writer is trying to [inaudible], also a joke about “sensational,” and maybe a glancing reference to the fact that I like the discussions in class to be like conversations—I don’t know. I sense, however, from that conversensation that I am under attack by heavy artillery. I’ll retreat behind my, or even underneath my little rock from which I crawled at the beginning of the hour. [Ten minutes later.] I’m sure that some of you think (I’m getting very defensive these days for reasons I don’t quite understand. I’m going through my third male menopause—happens once a decade) I think some of you probably still believe that I praise the stories that are written by people I like and attack the stories by people I don’t like. And one of the reasons I’m feeling nervous now is that this story was written by the same person who wrote the parody that I just read before. So I am reasonably sure that in order to protect herself the person who wrote this story will say, The only reason he talked about that the way he did was that he was getting his revenge from my attack. There are many times—as a matter of fact the person whose fiction I admire more consistently than anybody else I’ve had as a student in the last four or five years as far as I can tell is now estranged from me because I attacked his last story so savagely in class—doesn’t even speak to me. I don’t play any favorites at all. It does happen that I like the person who wrote those stories about the 203

Mudrick Transcribed grandmother and so on, and it gives me special pleasure, I confess, to praise stories which are written by people I like personally. But it certainly doesn’t affect my reaction to them at all, as far as I can tell. If anything I think I apply somewhat higher standards to the stories which are written by people I like so that I won’t give the impression of favoring, and so I lean over backwards. But I’m delighted by a good story, I have no reason at all to want to attack something. I’d be delighted if all the stories were good. I don’t grade on a bell curve. And moreover . . . [End of first side of tape.] This is called “Summer Job.” Last summer I got a job working at a candy warehouse in Los Angeles. From the. warehouse you could make out the smog-drenched skyline of downtown L.A. It would have made a good picture and looked like a metropolis floating in the clouds, except from where I worked you had to see a lot of barbed-wire fences and train tracks in the dust. Sometimes I got to work at eight in the morning and the entire sky was grayish white. It would stay that way all day and I only knew it was lunch or quitting time when I heard the bell ring by the time clock. My job was to clean those cans which had been dirtied but not destroyed in the fire which burned down most of the warehouse in May. They figured it was cheaper to pay me to clean the cans out than to write them all off with the fire insurance. The name WAREHOUSE was still being painted and recarved, so I was usually left alone with the boxes and the choking smell of burning [inaudible]. The foreman of the warehouse was always worried that I spent too much time cleaning the cans instead of just wiping the ashes and dirt out of them. On occasion he would demonstrate the way in which he wanted it done, the whole time barking at me not to spend the company’s money on polishing cans. “One swipe with a wet rag would do,” he always said. Nothing would ever “do” since there were so many cans. But I like to think of myself as a can-cleaner extraordinaire who would overcome the mountain of boxes, though these were only brought to get me through the tedium. A few times they sent someone to help me out, usually Slow Joe. Slow Joe was an old Mexican man who could turn cleaning a fingernail into a tenminute project. He was always looking at his fingers and making sure they were immaculate. Supposedly he had been doing this for over twenty-five years and they couldn’t wait to get rid of him, but he had seniority and would not retire. Joe was crafty and did not tolerate my slacking off while he found ways to avoid working. “Don’t let the boss see you do that,” he said when I tossed the unusable cans into a box. More minutes went by, and if I stood up [inaudible]. 204

Week Nine Once Joe asked me if I wanted a 7-Up, ice cold, that he had brought in a cooler. The summer heat made Joe’s offer seem especially kind and I gladly accepted it. After I had taken two large gulps Joe said, “That’ll be fifty cents.” “What?” I said, dumbfounded. I thought he had given me the drink. “You owe me fifty cents for that ice cold 7-Up,” he said, laboriously reaching to his back pocket for a handkerchief to wipe his forehead. “What if I buy you one off the food truck tomorrow?” “No.” “Why not?” “It won’t be as cold as the one from the cooler. Let me get the fifty cents.” I had two quarters in my pocket but I needed them for the bus. “Are you sure?” He had a tendency to make things drag on. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay you tomorrow.” The next day I got to work late and started in on the boxes before anyone saw me. I worked until the break at ten. Break time was only fifteen minutes, time enough to put something in my stomach and get a drink from the food truck. The truck owners knew when all the workmen in the area had their breaks, and parked out front during our break. When I walked out to the truck some of the workers were already in line, including Slow Joe. I stood in the line and checked my wallet. Three measly dollars to get breakfast, lunch, and home on the bus. My head was beginning to hurt at the prospect of working all day without any food when Joe walked up to me. “Got the money you owe me?” he said, chewing on some barbecued potato chips. “Yeah, but I need it. What if I pay you tomorrow and give you interest?” I could taste the red barbecue potato chip he held in front of my face, and I wanted to bite it out of his hand savagely. “No deal. I want my money now.” “All right, just wait. I have to get change.” With Joe standing beside me I bought a single apple, hoping it would satisfy both my thirst and my hunger. I began to hand the dollar to Rosa, the woman who owned the truck, but she didn’t take it. “I can’t make change for your dollar,” she said, apparently annoyed. “We ran out of change.” Joe walked away furious and began swearing in Spanish while I asked if I could pay for the apple at lunch later. She waved her hands at me to take it and closed the small screen window. I merrily shined 205

Mudrick Transcribed the apple as if I were polishing a bronze trophy, careful not to let Joe see me smile. Yes? STUDENT: I don’t like the little thing they put in about Joe as Mexican. That kind of bothered me, and then— MUDRICK: You’re right. By the way, I want to make that clear. You can’t really present a member of an ethnic minority and give him one unpleasant trait and not describe—well, as a matter of fact, two unpleasant traits: one, he’s a lazy bum, and two, he’s some sort of shyster salesman. You just can’t do it. No doubt this is autobiographical and there is such a guy, but you can’t do it. If you have any questions about that I wish you would ask them, because I think that’s an interesting issue in fiction. Why can’t you do things like that? Is anybody at least puzzled by that? STUDENT: Because we’ve been told so many times that you can’t be prejudiced, you can’t really feel this way. And then when somebody does something like that we see that they are being prejudiced, even if there are people like that in the world. MUDRICK: Well, I don’t know that I would necessarily draw the conclusion that this writer is prejudiced—it’s not that, I don’t think that’s the problem. STUDENT: Not that he’s prejudiced, it’s just that people nowadays are so afraid to make any generalization or stereotype. It’s like people are— MUDRICK: Well, but you’re making it sound as if, if they were really brave they wouldn’t mind making these generalizations and stereotypes, and that Mexicans really are lazy and greedy. STUDENT: No. MUDRICK: No, you don’t mean that. Good. STUDENT: Now I forgot what I was going to say. MUDRICK: It’s all right. Yes? STUDENT: I’d say it’s from personal experience completely and it’s a very close-minded attitude, because not every Mexican we know is going to be that way, you know what I’m saying? MUDRICK: Yeah. And the problem is that if it’s in a story you not only have characters, but these characters are representative. Because you see, though there are—I don’t know how many million Mexicans there are, fifteen, twenty million— there is only one Mexican in this story, and this story is the world while you’re reading it. It’s like talking about it: I went into the pawn shop. This ugly big-nosed Jew eyed me. Really, something like that. No doubt all of us have encountered such people at certain times, but you can’t write that! You just can’t do it. And you can’t do it because in the story this man then comes to represent the whole ethnic group. And this is, as a matter of fact, one of the moral advances in our time. It’s all very well to say how wonderful it was to have those old ethnic jokes about blacks and Scotchmen and Jews and so on, but there is also a considerable improvement in the moral [inaudible] of society that such things can’t generally 206

Week Nine be talked about anymore. Moreover, they resemble the kind of talk that used to be made—and people still at their peril make it—about women, I mean the sort of prejudice about women: women are silly, they’re hysterical, they’re this, they’re that, and you present them that way in a story. And now, of course, the women get after you, and it’s right that they should. Okay? All right, go on, I interrupted you. STUDENT: Oh, and also I’m kind of confused—I don’t understand—why doesn’t he bring his lunch? I don’t get that part. MUDRICK: It is rather peculiar—all of a sudden he sounds as if— STUDENT: He’s starving! MUDRICK: Yeah! What does he keep in his refrigerator at home? You know what a story like this reminds me of? I see you guys come to school and you’re always complaining about the books being so expensive—and then you go and buy yourself a two-and-a-half-dollar sandwich at the—I don’t know how you people afford to live! I have never bought myself lunch as long as I have lived! [Laughter.] The idea of buying lunch when I have such marvelous food at home that I can make for my lunch—at a nickel a sandwich!—while you’re buying two-and-ahalf-dollar ham sandwiches that are worth about one quarter of a cent if you bought the material in grocery stores. So what is this guy doing? What am I supposed to think about him—that he as a matter of fact has slept in a doorway at night? Moreover, you can go to the Lucky (I’ll give you a tip, by the way [laughter], if you don’t mind my telling you) you know the big garbage bins behind Lucky’s? They throw away all sorts of stuff! STUDENT: Produce. MUDRICK: Oh, not just produce! They throw away yogurt! they throw away milk! they throw away cottage cheese! brand new! That is, it’s just that the date has expired. We get lettuce trimmings for our ducks and swans at home, and I go there once a week on Saturday afternoon and pick up these four boxes of lettuce. YOU COULD LIVE FOR A YEAR ON WHAT THEY . . . On one occasion they had TWENTY Cryovac-wrapped Polish sausages—Hillshire Farm Polish sausage. That stuff sells for about two-seventy-five a pound—they had twenty packages! Cryovac lasts—they could leave that stuff in that—what do they call those great big garbage bins? STUDENT: Dumpsters. MUDRICK: Dumpsters! They could leave that in the Dumpster for three weeks, it would still be perfectly edible, in the Cryovac. You put it in the refrigerator and you can keep it for ten years. You put it in the freezer and it’ll still be there after the next nuclear war. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Why was it in the dumpster? MUDRICK: Because the date had expired! It had come to the date when it was no longer to be sold. And of course those guys in the store, they’ve collected so much stuff already to take home, I mean they’ve stolen so much before the date expires— 207

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: There’s no reason for them to take things that have expired— MUDRICK: They can take anything anyway, of course. So when you people, when you write a story like this, I don’t think you live in the real world. I don’t know where you live. You certainly don’t live in the United States. Maybe these are stories that are coming out of El Salvador or something. [Laughter.] STUDENT: My main reaction to that bit about the money was, why didn’t he just—I mean he doesn’t have to even stand up to this guy. He can just say, All right, I’ll pay you tomorrow, and then tell the foreman or something like that. It’s such an obvious and stupid trick that this guy pulls, there’s no reason that he has to submit. MUDRICK: No, not at all! STUDENT: He doesn’t even have to stand up to him. MUDRICK: No—he’s an old man . . . STUDENT: He could say, Hey listen, no thanks. I mean if you’re going to charge me I’ll pass. MUDRICK: Of course! And that, as a matter of fact, would have made a much better story. The story is so strange! The guy is a kind of wimp, a disagreeable wimp. And then we have this disagreeable Mexican, and then we have this—moreover, what’s particularly offensive about the story, and this is what bothers me about this class more than anything else. This story could be said to be more skillfully written than any other story I’ve read today. Word by word, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase it’s professionally written. But it is not humanly convincing! and that is what is most important about fiction. And if I can’t make that clear to you, that that’s the first issue, then I haven’t done my most basic job. I haven’t done anything for you, as a matter of fact. You don’t want to read about this guy, you don’t want to read about that Mexican, you don’t want to hear about this, even though it’s all done with great skill. And I assume that it’s impossible for me to make this clear to you. “One swipe with a wet rag would do,” he always said. Nothing would ever “do” since there were so many cans. But I like to think of myself as a can-cleaner extraordinaire who would overcome the mountain of boxes, though these were only brought to get me through the tedium. Very well written, nothing wrong with that at all, fine. And all the intermediate material is well done. But that which is intended to make it a story is completely unconvincing, humanly speaking, has nothing whatever to do with human life as we live it. STUDENT: But then he said that he gets like enough time off just to—I’ve got just enough time to eat my lunch—there was a line in there somewhere—so why is he, if he has enough time— MUDRICK: I don’t know. I don’t get it, that’s all. But then I don’t get—and maybe one of the reasons I keep teaching a class like this is that I will never come to the 208

Week Nine end of my astonishment about how it works out-and how it doesn’t work out. It may be even more fascinating in how it doesn’t work out than in how it works out. I don’t know what that girl was talking about at noon, for instance. I talk English, goddammit. And I’m talking about human life all the time. What the hell are we talking about in here? What have I said that’s incomprehensible? You understand, we’re not talking about whether you agree or disagree, we’re just talking about comprehensibility. STUDENT: I think it has to do with, it didn’t live up to expectations of what she considered was to go on in class. I don’t think anything you say is incomprehensible but— MUDRICK: But that’s what she said. You mean you just think she was letting me down easy. STUDENT: No, I think she feels maybe that what you say is unlike what she would expect to hear. MUDRICK: Maybe.

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MUDRICK [having just reread a sentence from a story]: Now that’s a piece of shit, you see. [Laughter.] It’s nothing that anybody would be interested in who really liked music. So the writer immediately discredits the character by presenting “a beautiful piece of music that exploded in all its brilliance.” It’s a little bit like that expensive perfume business. If you say, expensive perfume, what that means is that you don’t know what expensive perfume is. If you say, an excellent bottle of wine, that means that you don’t know what an excellent bottle of wine is. So that whenever you are writing a story which depends on your being able to convince the reader that you know something from the inside, well you better be damn sure that you do know something about what it might be like to be a great musician or a great composer, or what great music is. And you can always play it safe and say something like, I mean if you want to give something that everybody knows and that you’re reasonably sure has a good reputation you say, I was playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Okay, that’s a safe name and it’s a safe piece and so on. Even that probably wouldn’t work because it would still irritate the reader. It would fall as flat as what the guy does. Moreover, what is the writer trying to tell us? Is he trying to tell us that this guy did have the talent of a potential Mozart, and except for that terrible scene in the auditorium everything would’ve come right and we would all be happy about the great music? I don’t think there’s any way of telling from the story whether the character is supposed to have had any talent or not. I mean after all, most people who take piano lessons from a neighbor lady are never going to become concert pianists; it’s very very unusual. How talented is he? We don’t know, the writer doesn’t give us any impression of how talented you’re supposed to believe the character is. And that’s of some importance.f I’m sure his first recital will be quite a success. Now that’s not overwhelmingly enthusiastic, but nevertheless it’s very favorable. And certainly it’s the sort of thing that might have been said by, say, Van Here the tape recorder was for a short time turned off.

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Week Ten Cliburn’s first teacher in the little town where he studied music, where he studied the piano, and so on. You can’t keep the reader uncertain as to your intentions of scale. There’s something about scale here. If it’s just about the power of ear, then the author should give some indication of who is to be trusted and how much. And we don’t get that in the story, and the Country Gardens thing makes everything go smash from the beginning anyhow. I mean the guy, after all, could be playing a little piece, say a gigue by Mozart. It would be nice. It would be unpretentious—it wouldn’t be like the pretentiousness of the Moonlight Sonata business. He could say, I was playing this little gigue by Mozart. And there’s a wonderful little gigue by Mozart which takes about a minute and a half to play, and it’s not terribly hard. And he could say that, and he could give some indication of how much talent he had. There’s nothing in the story to indicate that. So how bad does he feel now, or how bad did he feel then? Does he feel bad because there was a real talent or because this is simply a little kid being mistreated by adults, who don’t know anything about music and who are inclined to exaggerate on behalf of their children? and so on. I got into this problem last week, and I’ll get into it again because I’m in a kind of state of despair about the problem of teaching [inaudible]. You shouldn’t get into the habit of doing what I think you consider explaining things but which really is excusing things. That is, you’re saying: So he doesn’t do this, so he doesn’t do that, so he doesn’t do the other thing, so he doesn’t do the other thing—so what. The fact is that we can work out more or less approximately what it is that he wanted to do. You can’t react that way to works of art! And if you say, Why not? I choose to, that’s because what you do is to spoil your capacity for responding to high art. If you want to spoil that capacity, fine. In high art you don’t have to make those excuses! The writer spells it all out for you. I don’t mean that he spells it out by making it so obvious that you’d have to be stupid not to get it; I mean that it’s all there, and if you read attentively you will get it. It is not all here. And if you start explaining: It’s easy enough to figure out what the writer means by thinking this and thinking that, and the teacher has the authority, and the fact that a cheap piece of music is mentioned doesn’t really mean anything because kids are likely to play that kind of music when they’re young—all that is beside the point, has nothing whatever to do with writing or with responding to—I mean surely you could argue about the previous story: If you say, He sniffed her expensive perfume, well we all know what expensive perfume is, and we can supply our Chanel No. 5, or Opium, or whatever it is. But we can’t! we can’t! In fact I like what I said, I don’t think I’ve ever said that before: Author means authority. If the author isn’t an authority then you cannot read the story with any satisfaction—unless you are writing the story yourself while reading it. And that has nothing to do with—you might as well talk about thinking about another woman while you’re screwing somebody. I mean that’s your problem. If you get kicks out of that there’s something—you’re just not having the experience, that’s all; you’re having another kind of experience. You had your hand up. 211

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: Well, I was just going to say something, but— MUDRICK: No no, say it! I especially like— STUDENT: Well okay, I think that it’s obvious that the person in the story is not very talented because I think that if the person were a genius he would be compelled to play regardless of a bad experience, and also that anybody can be talented with study and with practice and with a little bit of knowledge. I mean you can get an A on an exam in math and it doesn’t mean you’re going to be a mathematician. I think if you’re compelled to do something you [inaudible] absolute genius. MUDRICK: Well, let’s not talk about genius, let’s just talk about talent. In other words you’re saying that anybody [inaudible]. STUDENT: If he’s gifted then I think he would be compelled to play, not that he would just be turned off by one bad experience. MUDRICK: Fine, that may be true, but what inference does that cause you to draw about the story? STUDENT: Well, you were talking about whether or not this person is really talented, and to me, from what has been said in the story, the person wasn’t that— MUDRICK: But you used the word genius, and I was talking about talent— STUDENT: No, you didn’t use the word [inaudible]— MUDRICK: All right, that’s fine, I’m willing to stick with it, but that’s not really what I’m concerned about. I’m concerned with whether or not the guy . . .g MUDRICK: No, that’s not what I’m saying at all, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that that’s symptomatic of what’s wrong with the story—that is, the author is not an authority on the material that he’s writing about. The author doesn’t know enough about music, doesn’t know enough about talent to present a convincing representation of the problem of talent and whether or not it can get cut off. That is exactly what I’m saying; in fact I said it very beautifully and [inaudible because of laughter]. And I am an authority, unlike the author of that piece. And if you don’t understand what authority is, there’s not a fucking thing that I can do for you. If you don’t understand the difference between somebody who’s just gabbing about something he knows nothing about, and somebody who talks with the authority of knowledge and experience, then there’s not a goddamn thing I can do for you, or anybody else in the world. You will just go along bumbling from misapprehension to misapprehension. Okay? Is that clear? Terrific! [Laughter.] Who else wants to [inaudible because of laughter]? Oh, I hate explanations, I really hate explanations. This is called “Because the Sails Were Blue.” Nobody, not even Jackson, would talk to Cookie Wilson anymore. Cookie had messed up, just like Murphy always said he would. He’s stupid, Murphy said. He can’t even fix his shoes. That’s what he said. Cookie had been indiscreet. He’d dropped the right word in the wrong Here the tape recorder was turned off for a minute or two.

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Week Ten ear and Murphy had gone under. That had been last Tuesday. On Wednesday he’d got elbowed in the soup line. Found graffiti in the bathroom. It said. “DIE COOKIE! DIE!” On Thursday his blanket had been stolen from the Mission locker room. And all this, Cookie thought, under the roof of Jesus. Now that’s the first paragraph, and let me tell you (because I was so irritated by what I just had to say) I didn’t make any sense out of it, but it was lovely to read. And this is authority, kiddos, and if you don’t understand the difference between this kind of writing and what I’ve just been reading, then you will never get anywhere. You will not make a fortune, you will not meet that woman while you’re driving a taxicab who will take you to this beautiful house and fuck you on the big bed in the master bedroom—you will never have any experience like that at all. But if you react to something like this and understand the authority in it, then all this may happen to you. [Laughter.] And you will deserve it (even more important). I’m going to read it over again because I didn’t understand it. Nobody, not even Jackson. WQuid talk (0 Cookie Wilson anymore. Cookie had messed up, just like Murphy always said he would. He’s stupid, Murphy said. He can’t even fix his shoes. That’s what he said. Cookie had been indiserect. He’d dropped the right word in thc wrong car and Murphy had gone under. That had bccn last Tuesday. On Wednesday hc’d got elbowed in the soup line. Found gmffiti in the bathroom. It said, “DIE COOKIE! DIE!” On Thursday his blanket had been stolen from the Mission locker room. And all this, Cookie thought, under the roof of Jesus. That’s a lovely image: “under the roof of Jesus.” By the way, just a minor detail (it bothers me because apparently it’s fixed in the language): “graffiti” is plural, it is not singular; the singular of “graffiti” is “graffito,” okay? So when you say that there are graffiti in the bathroom you don’t say “it said.” And in fact if there’s only one you can say “graffito”—you can be very high class. (Of course you can’t really say that anymore.) Everybody says “criteria” now as the singular, or “data.” It had gone silent on Friday and it had been silent ever since. Today it was Tuesday again. A week gone by [sic]. He’d seen Jackson on the street that morning. Jackson had been his friend these past four weeks. Shared his soap and razor blades. Even fixed his splitting shoes. Cookie had said hello, waved his hand in greeting. “Back off,” Jackson hissed. “I don’t want to talk with you.” And unluckily, Jackson hissing this doesn’t say a single s or sh, and you can’t hiss anything that doesn’t have an s or slz sound. You can’t hiss “Back off! I don’t want to talk with you.” 213

Mudrick Transcribed Cookie had been hurt. Even Jackson, he thought. Even Jackson is out to hurt me. He wondered if it would ever blow right over. Anybody able to follow this any better than I am? [Laughs.] I’m fond of it, but I’m having trouble. STUDENT: He’s in some trouble, someone’s out to get him. MUDRICK: Yes. STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: All right. I guess. STUDENT: I thought they were kids. MUDRICK: No—it says, “the Mission locker room. And all this, Cookie thought, under the roof of Jesus.”h The boy sat on the harbor wall, picking at the crusts of bird shit with his nails. He saw the old man coming a long way off. He watched him come. Thought he looked interesting. He thought that maybe he would like a face like that when he was older. A lined and beaten face. Like a sea captain. Or the red-nosed old shoemaker in the book of fairy tales he had at home. The old man walked funny. He had paper stuffed in his shoes. It crackled when he walked. Don’t you love these sentences? Aren’t you excited by the way they move? Doesn’t it please you that they are so exact, that they give these images which are immediately available to you? Doesn’t it give you any pleasure that you don’t have to explain to me what it means? STUDENT: But you did have to explain [inaudible]. MUDRICK: What was that? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] STUDENT: What I like about it is that it doesn’t say more than it needs to say. MUDRICK: Absolutely, and it even keeps a little mystery. You don’t have to be told everything. You don’t have to be blackfootedly approached by this shambling character who wants to slobber all over you [laughter] with uninteresting information. STUDENT: The thing is, I find that you really don’t know what level [inaudible]. There’s not any kind of value-judgment [inaudible], like the fact that he has paper stuffed in his shoes. MUDRICK: No— The old man walked funny. He had paper stuffed in his shoes. It crackled when he walked. Maybe, the boy thought, the shoes are much As Mudrick will later indicate, there is a space between the following and previous paragraphs in the text of the story. h 

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Week Ten too big for him, or the soles are wearing through. Maybe, the boy thought, he just likes the noise they make every time he moves. The old man sat on a bench behind him, stared out blankly at the sea. Now he was up close he didn’t look so old, just kind of beaten down. The boy watched him, discreetly, from the corner of his eye. Wished the man might talk to him. Like some old men do. Cookie sat and stared out at the sea. He hadn’t been down this far before. Hadn’t seen the boat and yachts and things. They looked pretty good in the sun, bobbing up and down on the swell. He listened to the ropes jangle on the masts as if the boats were talking to themselves. He liked the sound. It made him feel like sleeping. Down here he could forget about them all. About Murphy and Jackson and the Mission. Down here, sat out in the sun, his bones warming in the heat, they were way behind him. They couldn’t touch him now. He should have come down here before. Suddenly he felt like crying. Just giving it up and crying, out there in the sun. He had come from a cold place. It was warm here. He wanted to stay. They had boats and things here. More boats than he had ever seen. If Jackson kept it up, if Murphy got parole, he would have to leave, find someplace else to live. And before he knew it the tears were coming. The young boy saw them first and looked away. Cookie had no idea was he was crying, right there in the open, right there in front of some stupid little kid. But somehow it had nothing to do with leaving the place. It had nothing to do with Murphy or Jackson at all. Somehow it had something to do with the sails. Because they were blue. Because they were blue on nearly every boat in the harbor. He wondered how they managed to get them all the same color. A deep ocean blue. It was all too perfect. The white and the chrome and the blue. And now, I’m going to test your mettle. Now, you’re going to—this is a question of being right or wrong. Are you going to be right or wrong? And you’ll be on the outside forever if you are wrong, you will be absolutely irreclaimable. Yes? STUDENT: Never mind [laughing]. MUDRICK: Say the right thing. [Laughter.] STUDENT: No, I was going to say that when you have a situation with all these people, it doesn’t seem like anything is lost. I mean everybody has their personalities, and this guy is kind of bummed out but he can still see the beauty in the world, he can appreciate it. MUDRICK: Yeah, that’s what the story is about, to some extent. Yeah, you’re right. . . . Leave the room. [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: I thought it was great. I liked the fact that the little kid wanted the guy to talk to him [inaudible] and I liked the fact that the guy never did talk with the little kid. And I liked the fact that the sails made him cry. 215

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Yeah. STUDENT: There isn’t any kind of a string that this person is pulling you through the story with, but you just kept going along with it. Then, it didn’t resolve itself but it didn’t really have to because that was the resolution itself. MUDRICK: All right. Yes? STUDENT: I got a little confused with it, because it went from the boy’s point of view— MUDRICK: Yeah, that’s partly the problem of having to listen to it, because there are separations between the paragraphs—bigger space, the indication that the point of view changes before the boy begins watching him. STUDENT: Yeah, for a minute I thought—when it said “Cookie” I thought that was before— MUDRICK: No—I’m sorry, I think I could have made that clearer by telling you that there were spaces. The point I want to make (you’ll recognize [inaudible] as soon as I make it) is that for me this story collapses on the last page, and it collapses because it becomes only a story, and it’s full of symbolism. And I don’t know of a better illustration than this story [inaudible] about what happens if you allow yourself to fall into a certain kind of gimmicky way of writing which is practiced by almost all but the very greatest writers of fiction. That is, you don’t trust the material. I don’t want to hear how blue sails are symbolic of something or other—of freedom and so on. And there’s nothing like that in the opening of the story. The opening of the story is about people’s feelings and about people’s relationships. My heart began to sink when Suddenly he felt like crying. —and even the rhythm, it seems to me, of the sentences begins to get a little cloudy— Just giving it up and crying, out there in the sun. He had come from a cold place. It was warm here. So you get these oppositions like cold-there, warm-here. He wanted to stay. They had boats and things here. Even the “boats and things” is a trick. The writer is trying to say, Everything is beautiful, and the only thing I can distinguish now is boats. He’s been able to distinguish everything up until now: “The old man walked funny. He had paper stuffed in his shoes that crackled when he walked.” That’s as detailed as you can be, that’s the whole business. But now all of a sudden it’s “boats and things.” So it’s sentimental, it’s beginning to fuzz up. More boats than he had ever seen. [Boats are symbols of freedom obviously.] If Jackson kept it up, if Murphy got parole, he would have to 216

Week Ten leave, find someplace else to live. And before he knew it the tears were coming. The young boy saw them first and looked away. And that’s good, that’s the one sentence in that last section that’s still good. The young boy is terrific, by the way, the boy in the story is terrific. And the fact that he sees him first and looks away—wonderful, perfect. Cookie had no idea why he was crying. . . Well, baloney he doesn’t. I mean he knows that he’s in a sentimental story and that’s why he’s crying [laughter] and the author knows that he’s writing a sentimental story. And if you’re in a sentimental story what you do is cry at just the right time, maybe five lines before the end of the story. right there in the open, right there in front of some stupid little kid. And you see how the sentimentality in that [inaudible] the sentiment. Well in fact we know that this is not a stupid little kid, this is a bright kid. It’s one of those gestures which are intended to indicate that [in a mimicking voice] this is a rough fellow who doesn’t ordinarily cry—something like that. But somehow it had nothing to do with leaving the place. It had nothing to do with Murphy or Jackson at all. You notice how we’re getting into these difficult rhythms: It had nothing to do, it had nothing to do . . . Somehow it had something to do with the sails. Because they were blue. Because they were blue on nearly every boat in the harbor. He wondered how they managed to get them all the same color. A deep ocean blue. It was all too perfect. The white and the chrome and the blue. And once again, if you could understand the difference between this story up until the point when Cookie at the harbor begins to look at these boats, then you would know a great deal about how fiction works, I think. I don’t want to—really, I don’t want to be unpleasant, and I certainly don’t want to fight with you. And if you can think of something to say that keeps this issue going but isn’t too nasty I’d be glad to discuss it. I mean I don’t expect you to be an authority in the sense in which I’ve been using the word this period. And you have a perfect right to disagree, I’m not . . . What I wonder is, what does stick? I’m thinking of what one does to . . . Is there anybody who even understands what my distress is being caused by? STUDENT: Well, I understand, but I’m asking you how do we end the story without the mushy stuff at the end but still trying to get the point across, that it meant something to us—you know what I’m saying? 217

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: No, I know very well what you’re saying, and that’s of course what drives writers into ending like that, I know that. STUDENT: Right. Oh, that’s an easy end, so how do we end it in any other way? MUDRICK: Well, that’s a very serious practical question and it’s an important question, and of course the simplest answer that I can give is the worst, which is that if I knew I would do it myself. I’m not joking, I’m not joking. I’m saying once again that I’m in the position of the guy who sits on the chair and it collapses under him, but I’m not a carpenter. I know that the chair has collapsed under me, I can give certain suggestions . . . I am saying that you’ve got to avoid symbolism like poison. I mean, when all of a sudden the color blue seems to stand for freedom, or you ask those rhetorical questions: How did they get all the sails blue? Well, one night they had three people come around with paintbrushes and buckets of blue paint and they painted all of the sails blue—that’s what they did, that’s how they did it. Don’t ask questions which can’t be answered, or which imply some powerful mystery in the universe. Only God could answer these questions. Don’t ask questions like that. So don’t do that. Stay away from symbols—avoid symbols. Avoid neat little tidyings-up of stories. One can give you a pretty good idea of what you’re supposed to avoid, but what you’re supposed to do is quite a different problem. Because for instance if somebody asked me how to write a story about people like the people in the first part of the story, I couldn’t tell them. But as soon as I see this I say, This is how to do it. Do it this way. This is, perfect. This gives me a very good sense of what their life is like. And it is being presented by an authority on the subject. This guy knows what it’s like, the author knows what it’s like. Anything that appeals or tries to appeal directly to feeling is something that you avoid. Feeling is a bonus. Feeling is not something that you get for asking for. It’s like a person who falls in love and discovers that the person he’s in love with is not in love with him and is OUTRAGED. Nobody is bound to fall in love with you simply because you’ve fallen in love. The fact that you want to appeal to a reader doesn’t mean that you can appeal to him directly. You are charming not because—you are genuinely charming not because you set out to charm but because you demonstrate your existence in a particularly vivid way to somebody else—something like that. You demonstrate as vividly as possible the existence of the people in the story. You don’t try to overpower the reader with feelings that you ascribe to the characters, or for that matter to the narrator. You present him with a quality of life the contemplation of which makes your reader have some kind of feeling, different kinds of feeling. But you don’t say, Here’s the feeling, have it. . . . Get excited. Do you get excited by somebody telling you to get excited? You get excited by some sense of the existence of the person who is exciting you. [Here the tape recorder was turned off for about ten minutes, during which time Mudrick read another story to the class.] 218

Week Ten And I come back to what I have tried to say over and over again, what apparently doesn’t convince most of you, which is that when you do things right you do them very well indeed. When they get well done they get as well done as they can be done. Oh, absolutely. She pulled over and got out, letting Louis slide across to the driver’s seat. She liked to drive his car because it was sporty and these were fun roads. She drove no faster than he did but it still made him nervous. And that, by the way, is very much a kind of marriage feeling—that is, there are certain things that you do that you don’t want your wife to do or your husband to do. [Inaudible.] But also the feeling of familiarity is itself nice: you know what she’s going to do, and for a change it doesn’t seem simply boring to know. It seems as if you’ve gotten over a lot of preliminaries and so you can start at a more—you’re not in square one, you’re in square sixty-four. Yes? STUDENT: What happens in marriage after that? MUDRICK [after a pause]: Sometimes it’s very nice.  .  .  . Sorry. [Laughter.] Sorry I couldn’t give you the answer that you wanted [laughing]. STUDENT: No, I was just curious. MUDRICK: Well, it depends. If there’s any real feeling in the relationship, sometimes there’s a real renascence. I have to . . . well no, I better not. STUDENT: Come on. MUDRICK: No! You’ve all broken my heart this quarter and I’m not gonna tell you anything. So there! [laughing] You don’t attend my classes, you just hand in papers and expect me to give you grades .  .  . I’m very irritated. Well, you’re all helping me to confront the prospect of retirement. [Twenty-five minutes later.] MUDRICK: This is called “Chicken Little and the Number 11 Bus.” He got on the bus in a fake satin jacket and polyester pants. He had a heavyduty construction helmet rammed tight on his head. I wondered why he was wearing the helmet, sat there at the bus stop [sic], but a story I’d heard a long time ago sidetracked me. It was a story about a chicken. A chicken who believed the sky was about to fall right in on its head. I watched the man pay his fare and sit at the front behind the driver. He put his Indiana Jones lunchbox on the seat beside him, pulled at his crotch and settled down to stare maniacally at the girl opposite. The girl shifted uncomfortably in her seat. I looked outside at the sun going down, pretended not to see what was going on. The bus was the number 11. It took less than an hour to get to the depot. But the man still leaned forward in his seat and said, “What time do we get in, driver?” 219

Mudrick Transcribed “Six-fifteen.” “Daytime or nighttime?” “Six-fifteen,” said the driver incredulously. “In about twenty minutes.” “Is that in the daytime or the nighttime?” “In the evening,” said the driver, deciding to play it safe. The man sat back, apparently satisfied. He touched his helmet, checking it was still in place. “I don’t know if you’ll appreciate this,” he said confidentially to the girl opposite, “but I’m drunker than shit.” [Laughter.] The girl stared right through him, obviously not appreciating anything. “When I’m drunk,” he said, talking much too loudly, “I can eat like a thunderstorm.” The girl ignored him. She shook her hair, looked unperturbed, but seemed to find the road ahead infinitely interesting. “I eat like a goddamn thunderstorm,” he said [laughter], yelling at the top of his voice to no one in particular. “But I shit worse than a buffalo. Happens every time. You’d think I’d have learnt by now.” This may be the most amusing drunk in literature, you know? Most drunks are so dull and boring—this is not a dull boring drunk. The girl got up to move down the bus. She tried hard to make it look as if she was just changing seats, that the man hadn’t embarrassed her at all. But he yelled out desperately as if he were determined to get her, “I bet you didn’t know 60 percent of all country boys have sexual relations with a sheep! I bet you didn’t know that!” “I didn’t know,” she said, confirming his worst suspicion. “You see,” he said, “you better watch it. You college girls don’t know everything. And I want you all to know,” he said, getting to his feet, waving his arms wildly, “that the bitch better watch it. She don’t know what sort of diseases she might pick up.” “Shut up! Sit down!” said various voices from the back. “And I tell you something else. You all better watch it ’cos the sky is about to fall right in on your heads.” Someone at the back laughed hysterically. “You think it’s gonna end in tidal waves and earthquakes and floods. You think it’s gonna end with the Second Coming. But I’m telling you, it’s coming now, and the world is about to end because the sky will fall right in on your stupid little heads.” “That’s an abuse,” said an old woman next to me. “That’s nothing more than pagan idolatry.” “Sit down asshole!” someone shouted from the back. 220

Week Ten The old woman let him have it with her stick. “Devil worshipper!” she screamed. “SODOMITE!” It was getting much too much for me. I got off at the next stop, watched the bus pull away. Just as it did there was a sharp crack like china breaking, and the sky fell in right on the bus, killing everyone but the drunk. “You see,” he screamed, standing up amongst the rubble, “I always tell you but you never listen. I told them on the 35 this morning but they wouldn’t listen. Where do you people get off not listening to a guy like me?” I do love his first remark: “I don’t know if you’ll appreciate this, but I’m drunker than shit.” [Laughs.] There’s something very touching about that. [Laughter.] He seems to be asking for some kind of help. Yes? STUDENT: The ending really ruins it for me. MUDRICK: It does for me too, and it’s a shame. Because it’s so much funnier in the real world—I mean you can see these fights breaking out among the passengers [laughing]–the woman shouting “Devil worshipper!” and “SODOMITE!” You know, there are so many crackpots wandering around who don’t express themselves usually, and you feel that this is the trigger that would set them off—this guy who shouts. Will you agree, by the way, that my authority on women—that the girl on the bus is terrific? Isn’t she wonderful the way she manages herself? I mean, she maintains her dignity [laughing], and these are very difficult circumstances. She’s terrific, I’m very fond of her. Oh, I think there’s wonderful stuff here, marvelous stuff. STUDBNT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: And the Number 11, too. But that great busdriver—“‘Is that in the daytime or the nighttime?’ ‘In the evening,’ said the busdriver’ [laughing], deciding to play it safe.” What’s going on in this story is real wit. The person who wrote this has a marvelous sense of the absurd, and the absurd as it exists in real life, as it happens all the time. I should say by the way that I think at least two-thirds of the stories that I’ve even been reading today (just so you don’t think that I’m being amused by something I read before or by something that’s written by somebody that I know) these stories are written by people whose names I don’t even recognize—I don’t know who they are, I don’t know who this person is. I think that’s wonderful. I suppose if I were asked (I mean I’m trying now to distinguish different kinds of superlatives) if I were asked which stories had the largest number of absolutely right statements in it, maybe I would say that this did. Because I think that the intensity of the rightness of some of these things is so wonderful. And of course it’s taking all kinds of risks, that is, risks of dirty language . . . And the drunk is sympathetic. And he’s not sympathetic because he knows that the world is going to come to an end, he’s sympathetic because he’s drunk, 221

Mudrick Transcribed and he knows that being drunk [laughing] is not socially acceptable, and he’s trying somehow to make himself socially acceptable. But he’s drunk and so he’s got this problem. STUDENT: Why do you think he’s trying to make himself—it seems like he’s aware— MUDRICK: Well, he says, “I don’t know if you’ll appreciate this, but I’m drunker than shit.” You may have noticed, and I acknowledge that this probably makes me look different from the rest of you, and I may say and do things that are not socially acceptable. I hope I won’t. But he already has. Yes? STUDENT: I didn’t like him—not him, but I didn’t like the author’s intentions when he was first described, because it’s such obvious condescension when a full-grown man has a lunch pail like that and polyester pants— MUDRICK: Maybe, yeah. Those are unfortunate, and I could do without the Indiana Jones lunchbox. STUDENT: But that kind of character is maybe the only kind of character that could get away with being that way and still be acceptable, because he is interesting despite himself. MUDRICK: Yes. And he’s not unsympathetic at all—at least he isn’t for me. I may have been a little carried away. I think the two really great things are the exchange with the busdriver—and it is the whole exchange: But the man still leaned forward in his seat and said, “What time do we get in, driver?” “Six-fifteen.” “Daytime or nighttime?” “Six-fifteen,” said the driver incredulously. “In about twenty minutes.” “Is that in the daytime or the nighttime?” Very good. And busdrivers do indeed have to deal with all kinds of people. STUDENT: I was sitting behind a busdriver once—I was by myself on a bus in L.A. There was one other person maybe in the back, and I was just trying to make casual conversation because he was just sitting there driving. And I remember saying a couple things and he didn’t respond. And I was saying, What about the weather? or something like that, and he just reached up and pulled down his shade! [Laughter.] Directly behind him [inaudible because of laughter]—he didn’t say a thing!

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Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It 12 November 1983

A talk given at a meeting at U. C. Santa Barbara of the American Philological Association MUDRICK: I was getting a little nervous during that discussion about the bylaws, because I thought that my invitation was going to be withdrawn [laughter]—and things like that have happened to me. I should say, by the way, I don’t know how unusual this procedure is going to be, but I can tell you that I have some misgivings about it. I agreed to appear on the condition that essentially what I would be doing was delivering an extemporaneous statement about my own career as a literary critic. That may sound very solipsistic, but as a matter of fact I proposed it because I expected it to be turned down, but it wasn’t. I said I don’t make speeches and I don’t deliver lectures. I have a few things here, partly because I want to start with some quotes. I would also be grateful, as a matter of fact, if there would be some participation from the audience—I hope, frankly, participation. I feel a little bit, at least as things are going in the profession of English studies, like a blacksmith appearing before a convention of automechanics, because the sort of thing that I do and am interested in doing is apparently no longer of any great interest to people in the profession. But still I do it, and I would enjoy talking about it, a little bit anyhow. I was reminded of how things have changed—when I was an undergraduate student at Temple University in the ’thirties, the idea of literary criticism as a serious discipline had not yet occurred to any English professors. There were a few people who did it, but it wasn’t highly regarded. The sort of thing that you did as a member of the profession was editing texts—you hunted sources. And the people who did occasionally write literary criticism didn’t regard that as significant to their professional advancement. It certainly wasn’t regarded as such by the people in authority. Then little by little it came to have some status. I remember what I believe is called a watershed. In 1947 I undertook graduate studies for the PhD at Berkeley, and I proposed a prospectus on the novels of Jane Austen, which was essentially a critical study. I was very innocent in those days, but I was told by the committee that no prospectus for a critical book had ever been approved by the English Department at Berkeley, and I got the 223

Mudrick Transcribed impression they weren’t going to approve this one, but finally they did. And so I was at the beginning, and now I’m at the end, because I heard last year from a graduate student who had taken courses with me that she had been turned down on a prospectus that she had offered to a committee—of this department—a prospectus which sounded very reasonable to me and which was going to be a critical study, but it was turned down as of not sufficient seriousness. So the wheel has come full circle. And it’s one of the pleasures of being old, that you don’t have to do things over again, and that you can continue to do what you’ve been doing all those years. In any case, what I’d like to do is start with a few quotations to give you an idea of the sort of thing in criticism that interests me (not quotations from me, by the way) and then to discuss how things have developed in my career, and maybe some of the people I’ve met. And as I say, I very much hope there will be participation from the audience. If you have any interest I’ll be very glad to interrupt at any moment to answer any questions. I should say that for me the three great critics of the twentieth century are Sir Donald Frances Tovey, B. H. Haggin, and Harold Rosenberg. And some of you will be interested to note that none of them is a literary critic. The only one who’s even part-time literary critic was Harold Rosenberg. And this is not because I didn’t read a great many literary critics. I of course read Trilling, and I read Edmund Wilson, and I waited anxiously for every issue of Scrutiny to read F. R. Leavis and the others on that magazine. But, for reasons I think I’ll be able to make clear sooner or later, they all faded for me, except Haggin, Tovey, and Rosenberg. And one of the reasons they’re very interesting to me is that they represent three very different ways of doing criticism. Tovey, who was an extraordinarily learned musician, a great musicologist, and who simply knew all of Western music—I mean he knew it like the back of his hand—wrote a kind of criticism which interested me because it suggested something that I myself eventually tried to do. That is, he believed in documenting every statement he made about a piece of music with a quotation from the piece of music. Now some of you know how expensive, at least in pre-photo days, it was to publish musical notation, so this became very difficult. But in any case Tovey did it, and so you could always verify from the music itself whether it seemed to you that he was telling the truth. One of the things that bother me most of all about literary criticism (as it has been practiced, at least) is that very often the writer is afraid of appearing to quote too much. He won’t use long quotes, he won’t use frequent quotes, and he often uses what seems to me a particular abomination of literary criticism, which is paraphrase; and that just seems to me unjust to the work and to the writer. And certainly I’ve made it a point in my own criticism to use a great deal of quotation. In fact people have expressed themselves in various sour ways about this to me directly. They’ve insinuated for instance that the reason I use so many quotes and such long ones, or that I used to, is that if I get paid by the 224

Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It page I get more money that way. But those of you in the profession know how ridiculous that is, because you get paid so little that it hardly matters. In any case they’ve regarded it as a kind of evasion of the issue, which is that you’ve got to write your own piece. But that doesn’t seem to me what criticism does. You may incidentally write you own piece, and that’s just fine. You may be a great writer incidentally. But that, it doesn’t seem to me, is what criticism sets out to do; it’s a sort of bonus that might develop from it. In any case, Tovey is the great quoter, and what you get from Tovey is an opportunity to remind yourself of what the text is like. In this instance I am pleased by, I mean I like the fact that there’s a word texture. One of the things that Harold Rosenberg used to say about paintings was that he was never interested in seeing a slide or a photograph of a painting because he said you can’t see a painting in that way. The only way you can see a painting is to see the original, because that’s the only object which has the texture—the painting is the texture. And Tovey gives you an opportunity to check on the texture, and that’s one of my interests in quotation. Rosenberg himself . . . I suppose if I were forced to depend exclusively on reading matter, quite apart from what it is that’s being talked about, of these three critics I would pick Rosenberg. Because I think what’s going on here is the adventures of a mind not only among masterpieces but among all sorts of intellectual operations. I mean he’s very interesting on social issues, he can write about books . . . He wrote particularly in the last twelve or fifteen years of his life primarily about paintings. Haggin, who’s still alive and still doing his job (last I heard, anyway),a is I suppose I think the most remarkable critic who ever lived, in one respect. Because the pretense of all critical activity, or the implications behind most critical activity have to do with some . . . There’s a vague notion that there are absolute standards, and that there are lists of great works—there’s Great Work One, Two, Three, Four, and so on—and the interesting thing about this notion is that almost nobody who works seriously in the arts believes it. He knows perfectly well how relative opinions are likely to be, and how almost anybody he knows will have strong differences of opinion with him about many many works. And certainly, for instance, when I myself read Tovey, and he’s talking about one piece of music or another, many many times I have no special interest in the judgments that he makes. Or rather I’m interested, but sometimes I’m simply astounded that he can arrive at these judgments, because he seems to me to have a first-class mind, and I begin to get very depressed about the notion that taste is entirely idiosyncratic. a  Haggin died on May 29, 1987, at the age of eighty-six. For over sixty years he wrote on music and records for The Nation, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Yale Review, and other magazines. His books include Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet, The Toscanini Musicians Knew, The New Listener’s Companion and Record Guide, and Music and Ballet: 1973-1983. The article “The Listener and Mr. Haggin” appears in Mudrick’s On Culture and Literature.

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Mudrick Transcribed Well, what a writer like Haggin did for me, or what a critic like Haggin did for me was to demonstrate that it’s possible to make statements about the relative quality of works of music, which I verified for myself over and over again in the works. That is, he’s what I call, for lack of a better term, a judicial critic. He really does make lists. He makes them shamelessly, as a matter of fact—that he should have the nerve to do it. And the oddest thing about these lists is that they’re correct. Now obviously what I mean is, they’re correct for me. He’s the only critic I have ever read—in any of the arts—who makes judgments of individual works with most of which I agree. Generally speaking, I disagree with virtually all critics as far as their judgments of individual works are concerned, but not Haggin. So he’s very interesting to me in that way. With people like Edmund Wilson or Leavis—for me, I very much admired Wilson when I was an undergraduate and for years thereafter, but little by little he began to pall on me. And I finally came to think that Wilson was trying to do the sort of thing that Rosenberg does very well—that is, the adventures of a first-rate mind among all the phenomena of the universe. He just doesn’t do it nearly as well, nearly as interestingly—he doesn’t have a good enough mind, finally. And somebody like Leavis is obviously trying to do in literature the sort of thing that Haggin does in music—that is, to tell you that these novelists represent the great tradition, this book is better than that, Sterne is silly, Thackeray is ridiculous, and if you read early Leavis you discover that Dickens is only a trivial entertainer but later he’s a successor to Shakespeare—and everything is said with great force and conviction. And finally none of it is of much interest to me, partly because I think his interest is not so much judicial as moralistic. And he palled for me too. As far as Trilling is concerned—this is where I’ll give you my first quote. This is a statement from Rosenberg: When T.S. Eliot recited his poetry in the radical ’thirties his “clerical cut” was part of his comedy of anachronism: It also went well with his reading of Lear’s nonsense verses. In those days Eliot’s wit was a knife that cut both ways; he advocated The Family Reunion while exposing the paranoia of its relationships. Eliot’s pose, like his poetry, contained a good dose of dada. Later literary men who copied Eliot’s representative-of-culture act missed its two edges and thought the point was to be dull. [Laughter.] When I first encountered the gravity of Lionel Trilling I did not get the joke; it took some time to realize that there wasn’t any. [Laughter.] Pretty soon, people who could not understand Eliot began to look like Trilling.b [Laughter.] Now, I think one of the saddest facts about people in the arts is that they automatically assume that something that’s funny can’t be true. And because that is Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Thames and Hudson, 1962), 241-42.

b 

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Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It very funny you tend to assume that it’s just a kind of blast, and it evaporates and that’s that. I happen to think that that’s the most accurate and exact criticism of Trilling that has ever been written, and that finally it demonstrates why Trilling is not going to survive as a critic—that he’s essentially a stuffed shirt, and that he’s putting on an act. Well, that’s my feeling, and Rosenberg manages to catch it in one paragraph. I should go a little further as an illustration of the fact that I never agree with anybody: I also happen to think that Eliot is a stuffed shirt [laughs], though I think he’s much smarter than Trilling. And the elaborate apparatus that Rosenberg sets up to knock Trilling down, for me it isn’t as strong as he would it like to be. And Eliot isn’t quite the person he thinks, though it’s perfectly true that Trilling essentially is imitating Eliot as best he can—that’s what’s happening. My own comment by the way on Rosenberg’s—I didn’t mean to quote myself, but I say something which is relevant here: Or, to take a longer historical perspective, Trilling’s suit is a hand-medown from Arnold and Eliot. But Arnold used that prissy superiority to enrage the Philistines; under cover of it the early Eliot infiltrated the Times-Lit-Sup with opinions subversive to those of all the subscribers. Trilling wears it as a skin merely, and is naked to Rosenberg’s hoots of derision.c Okay. The next thing I want to read is a quotation from Tovey. And for those of you who have no interest in music, and even for some of you who do, this is going to sound terribly technical—and I assure you it sounds terribly technical to me at the beginning—but bear with it because he does finally move into a statement which seems to me to have nothing whatever to do with technicalities, and there’s no way to read the quotation without giving you that. Here he’s talking about a passage in the first movement of Mozart’s C Major Piano Concerto, K. 503: Mozart contrives one of his most subtle and brilliant strokes. We saw that [and then he quotes an early phrase in the movement] originally led to G and closed emphatically in that key, but yet under circumstances that made us feel that we were all the time only on the dominant of C. But now, of course, it begins in G, and Mozart so contrives that it remains there, instead of going on to the present dominant, D, as it would if transposed exactly; and it ends with the very same notes for no less than ten bars, as in its original occurrence, but now, of course, with the strongest possible feeling of being in G, not merely on

Mudrick, “Podhoretz and Mrs. Trilling: The Holy Family.” from On Culture and Literature (Horizon Press, 1970), 170-71. c 

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Mudrick Transcribed the dominant. Thus Mozart cannot even do a mere repetition without shedding a new light that could not possibly be given by any variation.d And all that is important for you to know about that, if music is a dark secret for you, is that he’s talking about an effect which, in order to be described exactly, requires extremely technical musical terminology. And that’s the first interesting thing about this passage. But what is much more interesting to me is what follows: There is no describing the peculiar and subtle pleasure this device gives. It depends on a delicate sense of key, but has nothing to do with the technical knowledge which enables us to name it; indeed, it is certain to be keenly enjoyed by any attentive listener whose knowledge of music is the result of relish for classical works, stimulated by frequent opportunities for hearing them under good conditions. On the other hand, it is quite possible that many persons skilled in the mechanics of what passes for counterpoint, and having at least a concert-goer’s retrospective view of musical history, simply do not hear these effects at all. And for me the important inference to be drawn from that quotation is that critics are amateurs, and if they’re not amateurs they’re nothing. That is because of course the word amateur means lover, and it means an experience of a particular medium, which is sufficient to allow the individual to respond to extraordinarily subtle effects which can only be described technically but which also can only be experienced with affection, with love, with an understanding—which has nothing to do with technical knowledge and which in fact technical knowledge may preclude the experience of. And I think that’s a really brilliant observation about the nature of the arts. Because all of us know how easy it is to lapse into the professional’s fundamental indifference toward the art that he deals with. All of us no doubt fall into it from time to time (some of us have never been out of, it of course). I wish by the way that Tovey didn’t have this elaborate technical explanation at the beginning, because I’m sure that most people who start reading that stop reading, and they say, He can’t be saying anything that is going to be of any interest or use to me. But he does. The next quote I want to read—this is from a long interview with Harold Rosenberg which was conducted just before his death in 1978, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the best interview that I have ever seen with respect to the arts. I also think it’s the best thing he ever wrote, though he didn’t write it, he just spoke it. And he’s being interviewed by a particularly dense and persistent interviewer,

D. F. Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, Vol. III (Oxford University Press, 1972), 21-2. The italics are Tovey’s. d 

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Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It which usually makes for the best kind of interview, if the interviewee is really smart and fast on his feet. .

Interviewer: Would you never as a critic comment about the appositeness or inappositeness of the medium for the problem or the idea?e (That’s the way this guy talks all the time, by the way.) [Laughter.] Rosenberg: I wouldn’t say, this doesn’t really belong in painting, maybe it belongs in a nineteenth century novel. Interviewer: You would not say that. [Laughter.] Rosenberg: No. Interviewer: What, then, of a third criterion: how imaginatively and knowledgeably does the artist realize the possibilities and powers of the media? All of you recognize this incredible classroom jargon, don’t you, I mean something which has the effect of three or four sleeping pills. Rosenberg: I don’t think in those terms. I’m a synthetic thinker, that is, I talk about concrete situations. Interviewer: If I go through your writing, I can show you you’re much more than concrete. There is always implicit, almost explicit, though not usually [laughter] [These fine distinctions!], a set of operative criteria by which you’re making judgments. Rosenberg: That’s right, I don’t just say I think this painting is good or bad. And the interesting thing for me about this so far is that Rosenberg is speaking English [laughter], and the other guy isn’t. And apparently the other guy doesn’t know that he’s speaking a foreign language; he just hasn’t the remotest notion that he’s speaking a foreign language. (Rosenberg’s good nature in this is wonderful to me, he’s so good-natured.) Interviewer: That’s right, and you say why. Rosenberg: I say why. Interviewer: And you say conceptually why, not just concretely why. Rosenberg: That’s right, but if you want to generalize those generalizations, you have to do it. I don’t generalize my generalizations. [Laughter.] And I think that’s one of the smartest things I have ever seen about intellectual activity. Because one thing you have to understand, if you engage in any kind of Melvin M. Tumin, “What is Art? An Interview with Harold Rosenberg,” Partisan Review 45, no. 4 (1978): 523-60. In the published text the interviewer is identified as Tumin and not as Interviewer. e 

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Mudrick Transcribed intellectual activity, is how to use generalizations. The way to use generalizations is to understand that they have no application to anything except the present moment. If you allow yourself to get trapped by a generalization which you happened to have made because it seems to you to work well with what you’re talking about at the moment, then what you become is a fanatic, or a bore, or maybe the inventor of a new kind of literary criticism. [Laughter.] You don’t generalize your generalizations, and Rosenberg knows that. Interviewer: But one is permitted to ask whether this is a fair statement of your generalizations. Rosenberg: I don’t know. I haven’t analyzed which generalization you’re referring to. I’ve been doing this for about twenty-five years, at least, and I can’t put the sum total into a few formulas. Let me quote something else Baudelaire said. [He’d been quoting Baudelaire on art.] He used to be an art reviewer, which I’m not. I don’t run around as much as he did. He used to review the salons and gallery shows, and he said it often occurred to him that his life would be much easier if he had a set of ideas which he could apply to paintings and he would be able to go into a show and apply his system and come up with judgments of the paintings. He tried to work out such a system and he said it was a disaster because either the system he developed didn’t apply to the paintings he saw, or he got so bored with the system he didn’t care whether it applied or not. [Laughter.] He didn’t want to use it. So he said he had to start all over again with each painting he looked at, with each show he looked at. And then the interviewer, God bless him, asked the question which sparked Rosenberg to make the real statement: Interviewer: But that’s pretended innocence and naiveté. He’s got a whole history of sophistication. He obviously doesn’t start all over. Rosenberg: He starts all over with the totality of his temperament and his sensibilites. He cannot in advance say, I’m going to look at this painting from this point of view in order to arrive at this value. Now, that’s what you’re asking me to do, and I agree completely with Baudelaire. I have no capacity to do that. I cannot make a set of rules or criteria which will be useful to me when I go to a show. I can’t go there with a set of ideas in mind. I don’t have those ideas. When I look at the paintings a great many ideas may appear or manifest themselves as of some importance in regard to this particular work. But I have no set of ideas that would be applicable to any kind of work. That is to say, the ideas are present only insofar as the experiece of the work wants to make them present. 230

Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It And I can’t think of a better statement about what a critic is; I don’t know of a better way of putting it. And this, of course, would give you some idea of what I think about any modes of intellectual activity, in literary criticism or elsewhere, which start with critertia. I myself think that they have nothing to do with literary works or the judgment of literary works. I can’t get any kind of comment or objection or question? Yes? QUESTION: What about works that are about literature? MUDRICK: About literature. You mean like criticism? [Laughs.] You mean how do you react to works that are just about literature? QUESTION: I mean, that themselves establish their own criteria—what about theirs? Do you ignore those? MUDRICK: I’m not sure that I understand what you mean, but I think that Rosenberg would say that every work establishes its own criteria. QUESTION: No, I mean something that calls itself something—I’m getting really tangled up now . . . MUDRICK: Can you give an example? QUESTION: Okay, like a literary history that’s written according to certain criteria, and is supposed to have achieved them, or a book that establishes literary— MUDRICK: You mean, say, like The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye. QUESTION: Something like that, yeah. MUDRICK: What about it? QUESTION: That’s a work of literature too. MUDRICK: Well, sure, I mean, but then you’re just playing with words, because everything that’s in words is literature—that’s one way of looking at it. QUESTION: I guess what I’m saying is that, taking the no-advance-criteria approach— MUDRICK: How do you read a book like that when it’s about the establishment of criteria? You say that a book which is about the establishment of criteria is probably a lot less interesting than other books [laughter]—that’s what I say. QUESTION: But how do you teach literature? MUDRICK: How do I teach? QUESTION: How do you teach what you do? How do you teach someone to read [inaudible]? MUDRICK: I don’t teach what I do; what I do is my method of teaching. I teach exactly as I am conducting this lecture, or this meeting. You have a text, of course, or you have several texts that have been assigned, and you hope the students have read them with some degree of attention, and you begin a discussion and you hope that the students will say something which will provoke you in one direction or another and provoke other students, and so things will come up—if that’s what you mean. QUESTION: Therefore the criterion is your sensibility—you’re the guru for that student, because you can’t say that just as an amateur he can take any text, read it, and that amateur knowledge is sufficient for him to get to the root of the book. MUDRICK: Which is why Rosenberg’s statement is so marvelous, because it meets what I take is your implied objection. The interviewer says (and he’s essentially 231

Mudrick Transcribed saying what you say): “But that’s pretended innocence and naiveté. He’s got a whole history of sophistication. He obviously doesn’t start all over.” And Rosenberg says: “He starts all over with the totality of his temperament and his sensibilities.” Yes, that’s what I start over with. QUESTION: That is, he jettisons his previous training and he— MUDRICK: No no no, that’s not a jettisoning—how is that? if he “starts with the totality of his temperament and his sensibilities”? That’s what I’ve earned over all those years, that’s one of the few advantages of age. [Laughter.] QUESTION: But I’m afraid that what most people think of criterion—and when they say criterion they don’t think of a set of dogmas or rules; they’re precisely thinking of the trained and experienced sensibility and temperament that you bring to a work. They regard that as the informal, instilled, semi-instinctive, assimilated criteria—if you will allow that, or does that sound— MUDRICK: Well, I think the objection to that would be as much a matter of usage as anything else. When we talk about criteria, I think we usually mean lists. We don’t say that a sensibility is a key criterion; that’s a rhetorical device. If you’re already talking about criteria, you mean one, two, three, four, five—something like that—and in that sense there are no criteria. Yes? QUESTION: Yes, I was wondering if I’ve understood you correctly that—if the statement I’m going to make is roughly parallel to what you’re saying. To the extent that criteria are abstractions to get away from the work, they are abstract and not close to the work, and therefore not of interest to you. MUDRICK: I think I agree with you [laughing]. You remind me of something of— Tovey is always quoting people, and he quotes a famous, in that time, but now completely faded romantic novelist named Jean Paul, who (as Tovey quotes him) said, Isn’t it too bad that everything that you think of reminds you of something else? [Laughter.] He was a kind of extreme romantic and so he lived in a kind of bath of associationism [laughter], and it got very troublesome after a while. So it’s possible that somebody would live in that kind of bath of associationism and never get very far from the work, or at least he wouldn’t think it was very far. I think that these things tend to be self-corrective. I think that if you’re discussing anything at all with a group which is supposed to have some sort of interest in what it is that you’re discussing, and a group which has been assembled for that purpose, and you cannot interest that group at all in the way in which you conduct your discussion, then there is something wrong with your notions of what it is that you’re discussing. I don’t know whether I made myself clear about that. In a sense, the unsuccessful class is always an indication that something is wrong with what the teacher is saying. I don’t mean to make it sound as if I’m going for a sort of pat definition—well, for one thing, I don’t know of any different levels of teaching. I’ve always been appalled by the notion that there’s an elementary way of teaching literature, an intermediate way, and an advanced way. And in this little college which I’m in charge of, the students who come in as freshmen—it’s a kind of Little Red Schoolhouse approach: freshmen and seniors and graduate students take the same classes in literature. I’m willing 232

Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It to believe that there’s something cumulative about math and the sciences, but I don’t believe that there’s anything cumulative about the arts. I think you come to them with interest, and I think you do always begin over again, and I think that any serious discussion of the arts is interesting to people at any level of sophistication in the arts. And that’s certainly the “basis” on which I would want to conduct any class in literary studies. I certainly wouldn’t want to teach anything (if there is such a thing) that I would feel was beyond any students who were interested in literature. But I think that would be a contradiction in terms: I don’t believe there is such a thing. I’m grateful for this. Yes? QUESTION: But isn’t one of the most important questions when you’re—that is, the question Why? And if you ask why, you must have criteria. MUDRICK: Could you give an instance? QUESTION: Yeah—for example you say This is interesting or This is not interesting. The next question is Why? And in the moment when you try to answer this, you have a criterion. Even the question Is it interesting or not?—this is a first criterion to pass judgment. You admire judicial statements, and you say you don’t like criteria. I think there is a contradiction— MUDRICK: Well, if you mean why do I admire, lets say, a critic like B. H. Haggin, this judicial critic, I admire him because every time I check his judgment of a musical work against my own, every time I take the opportunity to listen to a work which he has recommended, and which I haven’t listenened to too closely before or haven’t heard at all, I listen to it and I say: I understand why he likes that. Even if I myself don’t like it at the moment, I know that if I listen long enough something’s going to happen. I think one of the reasons I like to shy away from the notion of criteria is that it implies that there’s something mechanical about the arts—I mean something mechanical about learning to admire, to love, to respond to the arts—and on this issue I happen to be a terrible pessimist. I think that the experience of the arts depends on a love of the arts which is prior to any reasoned explanation of anything going on in the arts. Essentially, if you’re trying to give a sense of the experience of music to a group of tone-deaf people, then you just have to give up, and all the reasons and all the criteria that you try to establish are hopeless. If you’re teaching a class in literature you make the assumption that the students are at least curious about the printed word. They’ve read books with some interest, they’ve decided to take this class—at least if it’s an advanced class, or if they’re majors—and that means they have the beginning of a response to literature, and that’s what you depend on. And I’m really more interested—for instance, you raised the question: Suppose I say that something is interesting and the student asks why. My heart sinks immediately, because if in the way in which I’ve discussed it I can’t make him feel that there is some interest in it, then no explanation that I give him is going to help much. Now I can approach it in different ways. I still do object to the word criterion and its plural. Yes? 233

Mudrick Transcribed QUESTION: I think there’s a very valuable thing that you’ve let slip by. You said Haggin recommends something, and when you listen to it, after his recommendation or he’s spoken well about it, you don’t quite see what he means, you don’t understand him, but you know that after you listen to it three or four more times with attention, and so on, you will come to like it. I think you said something— MUDRICK: Well, I said that, I’m afraid I did [laughter] and I would like to modify it to some extent. I mean if it’s absolutely made no impression on me at all, then that would be that. I think almost everybody has had the experience of learning—it’s not just a question of liking, or beginning to respond to. For instance I can mention my own experience of the composer Mozart—okay. When I started listening to music, Mozart was attractive to me, I loved to listen to him, I read Haggin on Mozart, Haggin would say things like: The Marriage of Figaro is the greatest of all operas, there’s a moment of sublimity toward the end of The Marriage of Figaro which is more remarkable than anything else in music, and so on. And I heard all that and I listened to these passages and they seemed to me very fine—they did not seem to me as fine as some of the things that I heard in Beethoven, in Bach, in certain other composers, and so on. And so for many years I would listen, and little by little things would come into focus perhaps. And finally I would know—yes! he was right all the time, he was right all the time. That is sublime, this is the greatest opera ever. It has nothing to do with being persuaded by him. It has to do with the stages through which one passes in one’s life, it has to do with the development of sensibility. It doesn’t have anything whatever to do with criteria! Nothing whatever. QUESTION: It has something to do with the hold of his authority on you— MUDRICK: Oh, not a bit of it. Only in the sense that his authority leads me to believe that there is something in it, but if I didn’t like it to begin with, I wouldn’t continue. And it’s my liking, it’s my feeling that something is here that keeps me going. Yes? QUESTION: Are you saying that there’s an essential social component in his work, that one of the criteria—if I can use that word—is the ability of the critic to make articulate his or her judgments about things in such a way that a particular audience will understand why the critic made that judgment? MUDRICK: And I come back to my pessimistic statement, which is, the audience will understand nothing whatever unless it already responds to the art that the critic is discussing and has some feeling about the authors or composers or painters that the critic is talking about. That is, it’s a no-win situation. [Laughs.] You don’t start, you’re already there. QUESTION: But that’s not pessimistic, that’s a priori. MUDRICK [having misheard what was said]: No, I don’t think it’s mystical. Yes? QUESTION: What about the difference between making your audience understand why you personally find something interesting, and awakening their interest in it themselves? I mean they could say, Yes, I understand why you find it interesting. I personally don’t, but I can appreciate your perceptions. 234

Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It MUDRICK: I don’t think they would understand why I found it interesting, because my interest would be a form of love, and love is not subject to criteria. QUESTION: Oh, I think it is. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Well, I think admiration is but I don’t think love is. Yes? QUESTION: I would like to ask you about the role of knowledge, to get away from the other authority we have [inaudible]. For example, when I go into a class I know that the tragedy I’m dealing with is written in 1598. I can assume the students do not know that. MUDRICK: Very safely. [Laughter.] QUESTION: When I teach Tonio Kröger I know that the last sentence of Tonio Kröger reduplicates the opening of Faust, Part I. I know that the students don’t know that, and won’t ask about that. MUDRICK: Well, how could they possibly ask? [Laughs.] QUESTION: And therefore won’t ask—it won’t come up that way unless I sort of force the issue. So what do I do? I’ve got my head stuffed full of what I take to be knowledge of the text, or knowledge that might be applied to the text, but should I forget about that? I mean, does that mean I should just forget what I know for a while or— MUDRICK: Bill, you are playing the faux-naïf. Nobody throws away his knowledge, everybody uses his knowledge as he can, everybody occasionally likes to make a good impression on a class by demonstrating that he knows when this was written. [Laughter.] Everybody knows that it’s a good idea from time to time to remind students, even illegitimately, that you’re an authority, because they’re likely to confuse information with the truer basis of authority. All of that works. And a lot of it does eventually work in the elucidation and the clarification of the work. I don’t mean works can’t ever be explained; of course they can be explained. Of course it’s possible to paraphrase, of course it’s possible to give a sense of literary history, of course it’s useful in the last analysis to know that Voltaire is a contemporary, at least in his early years, of Pope, and so on. All these are interesting and necessary—for the teacher, absolutely. I think the teacher needs as much knowledge as he can possibly get. Rosenberg obviously had this knowledge; Haggin has this knowledge; Tovey probably knew more about music than anybody else who ever lived. So surely I’m not advancing .  .  . I am always interested by the fact that people (if you don’t mind my saying something personal) I’m interested by the fact that people introduce me as a specialist in Jane Austen. I wrote my book on Jane Austen approximately thirty-five years ago, and it was published almost thirty-two years ago now, and I have written from time to time, just for kicks, about Jane Austen since. I have written about virtually every author in Western literature, since 1953 (I don’t mean, by the way, that I put these off into my desk drawers [laughs], I mean they’ve been published! and they’re available) and so I’m the last person to say that it’s not a good idea to be in touch with as much literature as possible. Like Jean Paul, I delight in the fact that everything I read reminds me of everything else in the world, practically, and everything 235

Mudrick Transcribed else I’ve read. I can’t find a very satisfactory way of explaining how that is related to critical judgment, because you and I know perfectly well that for every ten million people who have lived who have that kind of knowledge, there is one B. H. Haggin, one Tovey, one Rosenberg. You can substitute your own names; what I’m saying is that a capacity or a talent—a genius—for using that kind of knowledge in the most effective way, in the service of a love of the art, is very very rare. It can be done, it can be done. If Rosenberg didn’t know as much as he does, he couldn’t possibly fail to be intimidated by that interviewer. Because there’s a certain kind of imbecile informedness which is very distressing, very hard to contend with. You really have to know everything to be able to compete with that kind of learned imbecile. The guy obviously has read all of art history and he knows all the terms, and he can do it all. A lot of you know what I’m essentially contending against. I’m contending against criteria criticism, I’m contending against structuralism, and its deterioration even further (if that’s possible) into deconstructionism [laughter], which are essentially criteria criticisms. They’re attempts to make criticism appear to be the kind of activity which cannot be satisfactorily performed by amateurs (that’s the intention, whether conscious or not, of such activities)—and the pretense that literary criticism is just another science, that essentially it’s like particle physics. And my own feeling is that the arts in regard to that issue alone have no connection whatever to the sciences. They’re totally unrelated; they represent an entirely different kind of human activity. They represent a naïve human activity. Anybody who himself has ever tried to write a short story or a novel knows how different that kind of activity is from scholarly or learned or research activity. He knows that it’s a desperate matter of pillaging the sensibility, of putting things together with Scotch tape, matchsticks, and so on. He knows how catch-ascatch-can it is. The artist is the last person who can be trapped in a world view in which everything is scientific. And it seems to me that the critic is in the same boat, finally. So that’s all I’m trying to say. Of course I don’t have anything against knowledge. I think knowledge is great, it’s great fun. Reading is wonderful. It’s, I think, the most astonishing, the most permanently useful of all human activities. I can’t think of anything better, so why in the world would I argue against knowledge? I think there was a hand up. Yes? QUESTION: With old age your sensibility is more acute. Does that mean— MUDRICK: Not necessarily. QUESTION: Well, okay. In Rosenberg’s case— MUDRICK: It was with him certainly, that’s true. QUESTION: Does that mean that his response to the piece of art will be different, or that his awareness of the response to the piece of art will be different? MUDRICK: I hope both. And moreover I think they are mutually interdependent. I think one of the remarkable activities of language is to stimulate further activity in the same direction. That is, if you find a way of saying something, you are

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Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It also finding out something else. It’s a kind of epiphenomenal activity—it’s one discovery piled up on top of another. I think another reason, by the way, why all criteria criticism is disastrous is that it ignores the fact that criticism is literature, indeed it is. And nobody would dream of applying criteria, say, to a lyric poem—I mean criteria of a sort which are applied according to certain critical doctrines—I mean to criticism. In any case, I don’t think you can have too much knowledge, and I do think that a piece of literary criticism is a piece of literature. And if it is restricted . . . If the writer has the impression that he is doing a kind of scientific experiment, then he cannot be writing a piece of literature. That sounds to me like an awful anticlimax and I give it up, but there’s something in it. [Laughter.] I think I said it before, what I was trying to say. I think that there are certain kinds of activities which are interesting to watch, simply because they’ve been going on for a long time. To go from small to very great indeed: For me the most astonishing career in the twentieth century in the arts was the career of George Balanchine, the great choreographer. And that was a career which almost literally spanned the entire century. Balanchine himself went to school at the Maryinsky Theater in what was then St. Petersburg, now Leningrad and the Kirov Ballet and so on. And what he did was to learn classical ballet at that time, and he continued with the tradition of the classical ballet as he had learned it, essentially from nineteenth-century Russia, and carried it all the way through the ’seventies in the United States, and created an almost incredible number of masterpieces in that tradition. I think that the tradition of literary criticism—which of course is not primarily academic, certainly in the past wasn’t academic at all—has produced extremely interesting literature, and probably will continue to produce extremely interesting literature. But even if it doesn’t, it will at least have had this tradition. I think most criteria criticism dies sooner or later—it’s a fad. The kind of literary criticism that I’m talking about has a long history and many distinguished practitioners, most of them, certainly before the twentieth century, not professional teachers, not professionally involved with universities. I don’t know how clear that is. I think that the tendency in universities is to try to invent things which aren’t generally accessible. I think there is a tendency to try to create a language which is impenetrable to the public—something like that—and this is on the basis, I think, of a false analogy to the sciences. I’m perfectly willing to believe that the sciences need the language that they invent to discuss the smallest possible particles, but I don’t believe that this language is necessary for the discussion of literary works, and I don’t think it’s helpful. And by the way, I don’t even think it’s analogous to Tovey’s description of what is happening in K. 503. Yes? QUESTION: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Yes. Well, I’ve said all that I feel I ought to say. I would be glad to entertain any other questions. Yes? QUESTION: Would you say a few more words about deconstructionism?

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Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: I said about all I could say in a piece that I wrote about six years ago—I mean, that was while it was still being called structuralism. I was essentially dealing with people like Barthes, and the early manifestations of Derrida, Lacan, and so on, and it seems to me like a very bad joke. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be provocative or anything—that’s what it seems to me to be. QUESTION: What literary critics have you admired? You’ve given us three people from other— MUDRICK: Well, you’re embarrassing me, because I already told you that the only ones I could name are outside literary criticism. I hope I don’t understand why that is so—I don’t think I understand it. I think that when you’re writing about music you may have a certain kind of freedom. One of the problems with literary criticism is that you’re likely to be self-conscious, because you’re using the same medium as the art that you’re discussing. The music critic has the advantage of working in a different medium from the medium that he’s discussing—so does the art critic—so he has a kind of freedom. In a sense the literary critic is competing with the geniuses that he’s writing about, and this may make himself self-conscious in the way in which, for instance, that I think Trilling is self-conscious. But I can’t really go farther than that. Rosenberg writes a lot of literary criticism, and I find it brilliant, absolutely brilliant (he wasn’t primarily a literary critic). So I think great literary criticism can be written. And obviously a lot of it was being written in the nineteenth century by all the famous people that you and I teach. So I don’t mean that it can’t be written; I think it has gotten rarer and rarer. And I think that to a large extent it’s the result of the professionalization of literary criticism in the university. Harold Rosenberg laments the fact that painting is going more and more into departments on campuses and he thinks this is going to be the death of painting: art can’t be created under those circumstances. That may be a rather draconic view. I suspect that literary criticism is very hard to write under academic circumstances. There are the two problems—one is, you want to impress your colleagues, and the other is, you develop almost inevitably a kind of condescension toward the people you’re talking to, that is, the students. I don’t think either of these developments is necessary, but I think they’re both likely to happen. QUESTION: They’re also condescending toward the poet. MUDRICK: You may well do that, because the poet has a much easier job than you do, he doesn’t have to worry about tenure [laughter], he doesn’t have to worry about teaching a class, and so on. Yes? QUESTION: I was wondering if you could explain your title. MUDRICK: That was intended as a joke against what I regard as the current tendencies in literary criticism in the universities—that is, that I regard myself as a kind of dinosaur, and very different things are happening nowadays. QUESTION: But the title does not cut both ways? MUDRICK: It might well; titles usually do. [Laughs.] Oh! I do want to say one little thing, just about my own feeling: I love puns, I love punning—rhymes, of 238

Litcrit: If You Haven’t Tried It Don’t Knock It course, are a form of punning. I myself think that one of the resources of language which are much less used than they ought to be is the pun. I’d like to regard my own writing as intended primarily to be comic—not informative, not instructive, not learned, but comic. And so I like the pun, and I’m using pun in the widest possible meaning of that word. Thank you very much.

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“Teaching Is My Hobby” 26 September 1984

This talk was given at a symposium on literature at the College of Creative Studies. MUDRICK: She had nobody for Wednesday so I said, “Well. I have nothing to do.” So here I am with nothing to do. Robyn has even given me “Things to sympose about.” It says: “Writing the biography of Boswell—is that different from writing the Hudson pieces?” Yes. [Laughter.] “You said once that a genuine response to any of the arts is rare. Do you still think so?” Yes. “This probably is not a subject for an hour” [laughter]—as you have just seen [laughing]—“but I thought about it a lot.” Johnson, as a matter of fact, has a very interesting essay on that. One of the Rambler essays is about the enjoyment that people take in public spectacles. You know, there’s an aphorism somewhere that nobody is a hypocrite in his pleasures. And wouldn’t it be nice if that were so. But it isn’t so, unfortunately [laughing]: people are hypocrites even in their pleasures. Or rather, the word hypocrite doesn’t really apply—that is, people are very often influenced in the direction of imagining that they’re enjoying things which in fact they don’t enjoy. And all you have to do is look around any audience in an auditorium in which for instance music is being played or a play is being performed, and you realize that many of these people are here because they’ve been persuaded that they like this stuff. But in fact they don’t, because nobody in his right mind could [laughing]—a lot of the time. And part of the time it’s just that they don’t like it but they’re here because there’s some sort of social pressure. And as I said, Johnson has a very good essay on that. He makes some of the obvious points for instance about women going to theaters to show off their clothes and their jewels and so on. But of course it’s much more serious than that. [Reading from the list of questions] “What are the differences between eighteenth- and twentieth-century fiction?” That’s almost impossible, I would think, to answer. Actually the differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction are very interesting. I don’t think it’s possible to talk about twentieth-century fiction because it’s become so dissolved. [Inaudible.] It’s moved in so many different directions. And it’s no longer read for pleasure, which I think is very important. I think perhaps the most important 240

“Teaching Is My Hobby” thing to say about fiction up until the twentieth century is that it was read for pleasure, and it’s no longer read for pleasure. I’m talking about what we call serious fiction, I’m talking about the fact, say, that somebody like Richardson or Fielding would have been read by very large numbers of people for pleasure, who would look forward with great excitement to the next volume coming out. Tristam Shandy was a sensation in the 1760s in London. When Boswell came to London in 1762, Tristam Shandy was the only thing talked about, practically. And then, of course, if you think about the nineteenth century and Dickens and Trollope publishing installments of their novels, once again eagerly awaited . . . But there’s nothing like that in the twentieth century. I suppose what I really believe is that what was recognizable as the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no longer exists, at least in any significant quantity—just as I suspect for the most part poetry no longer exists, that what’s written would not be recognizable as poetry by people writing poetry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Well, that sounds pretty subtle to me. I haven’t any idea what it means [laughs], and I hadn’t thought about it five minutes ago. But if you want to ask questions about that, it’s perfectly all right. Or you wanna disagree? Some poor girl phoned me today in my office—she had come to my class yesterday— and she said, “I don’t know whether to take your class.” And I said, “Why is that?” And she said, “Well, you know, there are things you say that I don’t agree with.” [Laughter.] And I said, as long as she kept her mouth shut it was all right. [Laughter.] The ideas that people have about classes are terrible, really terrible. Don’t you have any reactions to any of these comments? Any feeling about any of them? He’s full of shit, but I better keep my mouth shut. Yes? STUDENT: What about the bestseller list? MUDRICK: Oh, well, the bestseller list is a very different thing—popular entertainment is a special subspecies. And it’s very hard to describe, and of course it has a lot to do with the enormous increase in the quantity of leisure. I mean that’s the explanation of—it’s not the technological explanation but it’s the explanation of effect, of things like television and movies. I don’t mean that they can’t also be art, I mean obviously they function primarily as time-killers. And there’s a lot more time to kill in the middle and late twentieth century than there ever was before in the history of the human race (I mean in the Western countries obviously). STUDENT: What about Faulkner? Isn’t he both twentieth century and— MUDRICK: Sure, oh yeah, there are exceptions. I don’t mean that there aren’t people who would be recognized as novelists. But of course, Faulkner essentially stopped writing serious stuff about fifty years ago, so it’s quite a while. Yes? STUDENT: Wasn’t the aristocracy the leisure classes that were reading in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? MUDRICK: Oh no, not in the eighteenth and nineteenth. By then there was a very solid big middle class which constituted the bulk of the audience. I mean Dickens was writing for well-to-do merchants and their wives, and so was Trollope. 241

Mudrick Transcribed Another astonishing thing of course about literacy in general—sometimes I would like to have access to the little bits of facts—there are a couple of facts that immediately occur to me which unfortunately I don’t remember numerically, but for instance the number of literate people (I mean people who could read and write!) in Dr. Johnson’s time: astonishingly small, an astonishingly small number. (The other number that I wish I could remember is the number of prostitutes in London when Tolstoy visited: an incredible number. I can’t remember [laughs] whether it was thirty thousand or three hundred thousand. It probably was thirty thousand.) You know, Tolstoy went to a lecture delivered by Dickens—he saw and heard Dickens when he visited London. (It’s just an interesting fact.) He also read English easily and fluently, and so he read writers like Dickens and Trollope in English. He was a great admirer of Trollope—who never heard of him [laughing]. All right. [Reading] “Why do you teach? Okay, for money, and because you like it.” True [laughing]. “Did you ever want to have an exclusive career as a reviewer?” Oh, my God no. I can’t imagine anybody who would want to have a—who would want to set out to be a reviewer? When you start out to be a writer you’re interested in being a writer—I think you almost invariably want to be either a poet or a novelist. I mean you’re not interested in being a reviewer. You’re not even interested in being a critic, really. Anybody who starts out with the ambition to be a critic probably winds up as an English professor—and deserves to, and is torturing you in all your classes. I think unless you become a critic more or less by accident you are terrible. And of course the history of English literature is a very good illustration of that. All the good critics in English were novelists and poets, certainly through the nineteenth century. Dr. Johnson himself is—well, Johnson’s a poet, and a novelist of a kind—he’s a very special figure anyway. I mean if you think of the great critics of the nineteenth century, you’re thinking primarily of people like Coleridge. A reviewer is a person who doesn’t read the books that he writes about, essentially. In the ’twenties, when everybody was very poor, a reviewer was a person who did the job so he could get the book free, which he could then sell for a cheap meal. “I’m wondering how you do both teaching and writing?” Well, I think one of the things you discover very early, if you’re interested in doing anything at all, is how much time there is. It’s astonishing how much time there is. As a matter of fact this came up in my class yesterday. I was just talking about reading and what a pleasure reading is and how long it stays a pleasure, I mean through life; that it’s a very good obsession or addiction to develop. And I said one of the reasons young people don’t do it is they stand waiting on street corners for something to happen. And you can wait an awfully long time standing on street—the only thing that’s likely to happen is that you’ll be struck by lightening, I mean literally [laughing]. At least that’s more likely than anything else. 242

“Teaching Is My Hobby” But there is an awful lot of time, it is astonishing how much time there is to do things. If you think of the really prolific writers, for instance, if you think of a writer like Trollope, Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, in addition to dozens and dozens of other books, uncounted articles—he literally didn’t know what he had written. I like to keep coming back to Trollope because he is such a phenomenon. But I don’t think he’s an unrepresentative phenomenon, I just think he’s a kind of exaggerated typical case [laughing]. And you know how much time he devoted to writing? It was very simple. He got up at—let me see . . . (The figures are in one of the pieces I did on Trollope, and I may be slightly off about it, so you’ll excuse me.) If I remember, he got up at five. He wrote for two and a half hours every morning. He looked over what he had written the day before for the first half hour, and then he wrote for two and a half hours. And he wrote 500 words an hour, and every time he had written 250 words he made a mark, and then he wrote another 250 words, and when he had written 2500 words he stopped. And this was almost always in time for breakfast which he had at eight-thirty. He then went to his job—he was a very important functionary in the British Postal Service. He’s the man who invented mailboxes—Trollope, yeah. And he travelled all over the place, making postal treaties—he made a couple of trips to the United States to make postal treaties with the Americans. And he also loved to foxhunt, almost every afternoon. And he also belonged to all the clubs in London, practically, and was treasurer, and secretary .  .  . [Laughs.] And of course he was married, had children, and so on. And he wrote. He wrote the equivalent of about a hundred and—no. His novels, forty-seven novels, something like forty are Victorian triple-deckers, which means that they’re about four times as long as what we call a novel, I mean nowadays in the twentieth century. So work it out. He also wrote enough other books so that probably he wrote three or four hundred volumes, something like that. All of it by the way is wonderful. I have never seen a bad piece of writing by Trollope. All very elegant, and often brilliant. Where’d he find the time? Well, he told you, you see, because it tells you in his autobiography—two and a half hours a day! You spend two and a half hours a day writing, you’ll eventually produce four hundred volumes [laughing]. He didn’t even live very long—he died at sixty-seven. Eighteen . . . it sounds right to me, I can’t remember. I think it was 1815 to 1883. One day he had a stroke and he stopped writing. [Laughs.] It was almost the only thing that could have stopped him. On trips or anything he was—oh by the way I forgot something! One of the most inveterate travellers who ever lived. Went everywhere—Australia, South Africa, the West Indies— writing all the time, both directions. On the way over there he would be writing a novel, on the way back he would be writing a book about the place he had just visited. They’re wonderful, they’re wonderful. His book on the West Indies is wonderful. The book on Australia is terrific. So don’t give me any shit about not having any time. That’s ridiculous. Yes? STUDENT: Did you read all forty-seven novels? 243

Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Yes, I have. At one time I read about thirty-five in a row. I don’t know of any novelist who wrote more than say ten or twelve novels about whom I could recommend that you could read with pleasure every one of his novels. I make that careful—I think all of Jane Austen’s novels are marvelous, but my God, all of Jane Austen’s novels together make up about one and a half of Trollope’s novels in bulk. Not in quality . . . yes? STUDENT: This is a question I know you can’t answer [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Not even by yes or no. STUDENT: No, you can’t. From the little that I know about Trollope’s childhood, it was terrible. MUDRICK: Yes. STUDENT: In the twentieth century if somebody had that kind of childhood he’d be automatically traumatized for life. Why did— MUDRICK: That’s because they would have read books on psychoanalysis and so on. I just read a twenty-one-hundred-page biography of Swift, in addition to all the works of Swift, and wrote a paper on Swift. And this guy knows all about Swift. He knows for instance that His Mother Didn’t Love Him, and this accounted for the fact that Swift Didn’t Really Like Women, and on and on—you read that everywhere now. The funniest thing I saw, which enabled me to kill two birds with one stone—there’s a very well-known reviewer and writer named Denis Donoghue, whom certainly graduate students here have read something by, and very elegant, and another one of the innumerable graduates of Trinity College, Dublin, who infest the halls of academe [laughing]. And he writes everywhere, in TLS and so on, and he published a small book on Swift a couple of years ago, and he’s an expert on it. Of course he’s also Anglo-Irish—no, I guess he’s just Irish. But in any case he reviews Ehrenpreis’s book, and says it’s good here and good—but I don’t understand why Ehrenpreis says that he has used a great deal of Freudian argument in discussing Swift’s sex life. So what I did was simply to quote about seven or eight of the most childishly flagrant passages from Ehrenpreis to demonstrate that Donoghue doesn’t even know what he’s reading. In fact that leads up to something else that you asked which I can get into: When you’re writing a piece and you say something true but unflattering about a would-be writer, do you ever worry about it in terms of repercussions? I’m thinking of the Ellmann piece. When I first read it I hadn’t read Ellmann, and enjoyed it but thought it was harsh. Later I not only enjoyed it but understood it. Later I heard Ellmann give a lecture on Rip Van Winkle. Later I tried his book on Yeats but no could finish. I read the Joyce book a few times and liked portions. But I think my original misunderstanding really—that it could have been risky to write the piece—came from some dim awareness that Ellmann was a bigwig on the literary scene, and so it might be impolitic to question him his attitudes. But you don’t write to curry favor or something, but because you’re interested in literature—that’s what your allegiance is to. 244

“Teaching Is My Hobby” (I love these fawning compliments. [Laughter.] That’s why I’m reading them verbatim [laughing].) It’s pretty obvious and yet, as far as I can tell, very unusual too. [Oh, I think so. (Laughter.)] This boils down to, what do you think about when you’re reviewing something you’ve disliked? I do have something very personal to say about myself which I think is very interesting (unlike many of the things I say about myself ). I don’t know that I ever said this to more than just a few people, which is, that I think for a person with talent, I have less ambition than anybody else I’ve ever known. I really have no ambition. I’ve tried to figure it out sometimes. I mean I like to make a living, and I like to write and I like to publish, but I really don’t care what other people think of me, and I don’t care what kind of reputation I have. And I don’t know whether this is just some deficiency I have or what. It doesn’t matter to me in the least. I have never felt—and here you’ll just have to take my word for it, and there are some people who’ve known me long enough (even one or two in the room) who I think could vouch for this. It just doesn’t matter to me. I mean I want to make a living, and I like to get published—I like to see things in print, and I probably wouldn’t have written if I didn’t see the things in print. But it doesn’t matter to me in the least what Ellmann thinks of me or what Ehrenpreis does or Donoghue—in fact I’m always astounded to think that they would even think of me. I mean it doesn’t even occur to me that they would—I’m always astounded when I discover that somebody has read something I’ve written. STUDENT: Who was the female author that had written you in response to— MUDRICK: Joyce Carol Oates. Yeah, I was astounded to get that letter. Yeah, there are apparently some writers who are very—so did Jerzy Kosinski. They both wrote me extremely petulant letters because I had written unfavorable reviews of novels by them—in fact not so—well, they should have understood. I took a great deal of time—I read every word they wrote up until that point. For instance when I did the piece, which was a big fiction review which involved, among other things, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, but I also read every single novel she had written. And you know, she’s the most prolific writer since unfortunately Trollope [laughter], and she ain’t as good a writer as Trollope either. So I read all that stuff and I reviewed it all, I talked about all of it. And I was finding little passages which I liked because [inaudible because of laughter]. And so I get this stupid letter from her in which she’s complaining, in fact complaining about something exceptionally stupid. A lot of her novels (at least in those days—I haven’t read any since) they began with an elaborate statement about what it felt like to grow up in the Depression in the United States. And among other things it seemed to me as phony as anything I’d ever read, because for one thing I had grown up in the Depression and she hadn’t, since she’s about thirty years younger than I am or twenty-five, something like that. And her notion of growing up in the Depression was that everybody went around very 245

Mudrick Transcribed glum because they knew they were growing up in the Depression. [Laughs.] Well, that’s just ridiculous of course. If you’re growing up in the Depression, as long as you have enough to eat and you talk to somebody in the street, you don’t know there’s a depression. Occasionally you read something in the paper, you see a headline or something. But she has this notion that life is exceptionally glum and bad things happen, like you’re walking down the street and somebody shoots you, I mean that’s a typical event in a Joyce Carol Oates novel. So I point out some of these things. In fact there was a wonderful touch in one of her novels which I’m very fond of. I don’t remember what novel it’s in, but it’s I think almost the only novel in which she tries to be funny—and she is! So she’s apparently a lost comic talent. [Laughter.] She was writing about a little boy who has a favorite dog, and it’s told from the little boy’s point of view. And the dog is very wild, runs out into the street and plays in the street. Every once in a while he disappears for a couple of days, and then there he is again [laughs], that dog again. And little by little she makes clear very cleverly that the last dog has been run over, and that it’s just been replaced by the closest imitation that they can find [laughing] so the child will not grieve. And it’s done very well, it’s done very very well—she should have stuck to that sort of thing. But instead she wants to tell us how miserable life is and how everybody’s badly treated, and it’s just not terribly interesting. STUDENT: Wasn’t she very kind to you in the letter? MUDRICK: Very kind, yes—as to a sort of mental paraplegic. [Laughter.] I think, mostly, people like Ellmann—obviously you have to develop a tough hide if you publish at all. I remember how astounded I was when my stuff started getting published in Harper’s. These crazy letters that came from lunatics out there [laughing]—I MEAN WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY TALKING ABOUT! You know what they reminded me of? One of the reasons I disapprove of lectures (college lectures are something special, I mean lectures out on . . .) have you ever been to these public lectures in which somebody talks, I mean on something or other—I don’t know, Circumstances of the English Poor During the Nineteenth Century or something? And everybody’s sitting, and the lecture ends, and then there’s questions, and somebody stands up and he starts talking—and it’s clear that he’s delivering his own lecture, which has absolutely nothing to do with what has been said. He goes around to lectures all around the country probably and he delivers this lecture, because nobody will ever pay him to deliver it. That’s what I’m reminded of, I mean by these people who write to magazines about these things that they don’t like. And it’s clear they’re just taking this opportunity—something sets them off. It’s not really the piece, it’s probably something they ate on the day they read the piece, and so they write something. Doesn’t make any sense—you try to make sense out of it and there’s OUTRAGE and FURY . . . And moreover, sometimes they were sent personally to me. And sometimes they were shocking. I mean I was delighted that the person didn’t live in the same city. 246

“Teaching Is My Hobby” It’s better to be obscure. I’m all in favor of being unknown. That’s one of the nice things about publishing for Hudson: nobody reads it; nobody ever gets in touch with me about any of the material. Nobody even knows what I do. STUDENT: Did you always write exactly what you thought? MUDRICK: Yes! what else is there to do? [Laughs.] I mean everybody thinks he writes what he thinks; I think I’m one of the exceptions—I think I do [laughing]. I think I think, and I think I write what I think. And these are rather uncommon, especially in combination. I really don’t feel that I deserve any praise for it, because I’ve never wanted the things that I might have got if I hadn’t done it. Partly it’s because I’m Jewish and very practical. That is, the only thing I’m interested in is making a good living and having a good life—especially a good domestic life—and spending my time pleasantly. And I’ve done the best I could, I mean within the limits of my experience. And I enjoy writing, and I very much enjoy teaching—which has been a kind of bonus, because teaching for me is a lark. I mean I enjoy it very much, it’s my hobby. And to get paid a satisfactory amount for performing your hobby is terrific—I mean what could be better?—especially since I had no idea that it would develop that way. I mean I got a big mouth, I like to talk . . . If you really have a big mouth, you see, the circumstances of teaching are wonderful. But I’m not talking now about the average teacher. The average teacher doesn’t have a big mouth. All he has are these reference books that he refers to, that he writes these pathetic lectures out of, and so on. But I love to talk to people. I love to argue with people, and I love to say things that will shock them, and so on. And that’s ideal if you teach literature. It couldn’t be better, especially if you’re interested in literature, and I am. So teaching turned out to be my ideal profession. I could never have picked one out. And I did it as a kind of (this may have some relevance to the question you asked) originally what I wanted to be—what I hoped to be, even after doing my master’s degree—was to work for a magazine and eventually publish a lot of fiction—become a novelist, that sort of thing. And I tried very hard to do that, and between October ’46 and January ’47—that’s not a long time to try, I’m sorry, but the reason for that was that somebody offered me a job teaching beginning February of ’47. So I took it, and then I discovered I liked it. But I tried very hard in New York to get a job with a magazine and I had no luck, and I was very gloomy. I certainly hated graduate school, I thought it was ridiculous. Luckily I had the kind of mind that could fake its way through what is required in graduate—at least in those days in graduate school (it gets worse and worse)—in those days I could get through with no particular trouble. So I just found my niche. But I’ve never cared what—you’ve heard me say this in a class. I mean if you want a piece of wisdom, I don’t have many but this is one, it really works. I had a friend who had a very complicated attitude toward me—love-hate attitude— and one of the things he delighted in doing was going to other people and asking them what they thought of me and then coming back to me and telling me. 247

Mudrick Transcribed [Laughter.] Of course this was invariably unfavorable, very unfavorable. And I couldn’t understand why I was quite as bothered as I was, but finally I figured it out. I had a good argument; I said, “Listen. If you want to keep knowing me, we’re gonna have to arrive at an agreement. You will never, never tell me what other people think of me. I’m not interested. That’s privileged material. Anything anybody says about me when I’m not there I don’t care to hear. I’m not interested. If they have something to say to me, they can come to me and say it.” And I discovered that that has saved me more trouble than anything else in the world. I do what the Jews call makh zikh nit visndik: I am not interested in knowing what is not immediately pertinent to my circumstances. If I have a whole class full of students who hate me, it doesn’t matter to me at all (unless they take action). [Laughter.] If I find out about it, I am bothered. I’m Very Sensitive. But the way to cope with sensitivity is not to know what’s going to provoke the sensitivity. And since for the most part nobody ever gets in touch with me about the stuff that I write, I don’t even know that I’m offending anybody, or that anybody has even heard of it. I mean occasionally I get a letter from somebody like Oates or Kosinski, but by that time it’s diffused enough. If you’ve written enough, then there’s so much material that what the hell, it doesn’t really matter. My next-door neighbor is very (I mean, on one side—not the one who’s here) greets me always by saying, “Whom have you been attacking lately?” [Laughter.] I think he’s being jolly, I think he thinks he’s being jolly. I know what my mother would wish him, and I know the words that she would use. I mean the nerve! [laughs] that that could even be regarded as a joke. I don’t regard it as a joke. That’s part of the old boy business in the academy. You see, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. You invite me to your group at the MLA and I’ll invite you to mine. And next year I’m going to Hawaii and I’ll see to it that you get on the program, and so on. And I’m not in any of the old boy groups. But the old boys themselves are astounded that there are non-old-boys, and this guy can’t get over the fact that there is somebody who is not in an old boy group. That’s another thing that makes me feel that an association with any twenty-year-old is preferable to an association with a forty- or fifty-year-old. Because by the time you’re forty or fifty you have three spontaneous things to say. . . . Two. [Laughter.] Where are the rest rooms? (It’s especially important after about fifty.) But I don’t care [laughter], I don’t like it when people talk to me about my work. I’m not interested, generally. STUDENT: Why not? MUDRICK: Well, because generally they don’t have anything interesting to say. I mean I’ve been writing long enough so that I have a pretty good idea of what’s happening. And there are a couple of people to whom I show my work. Actually in one instance it’s rather funny. This is a guy I try to get my work past (p-a-s-t) [laughing].a Because our temperaments are so different that I figure if I can sneak it past him, it probably will get past other people too. He’s also very smart. Alan Stephens.

a 

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“Teaching Is My Hobby” I try to write outrageously, and as far as I’m concerned I’m a comic writer. You know the one thing that I didn’t say that I wanted to say at the last symposium? And I think this was the most precious compliment that I have ever received, and I love it, and I cherish it, and whenever I think of it I go into a glow. I write primarily, as some of you know, for Hudson Review. And when one of my books was published and I happened to be in New York I brought some copies to the Hudson Review office. And there was a new managing editor—young girl, just graduated from Smith. Very nice, and very quiet. And so I handed her the book, and I thought she wasn’t going to say anything except thanks, and she looked at me and then she said, “You know, there’s something I’ve always been wanting to say to you.” And I said, “What’s that?” (You understand, I’d never met her before.) And she said, “You’re the funniest writer I have ever read.” I could live the rest of my life on that compliment. [Laughs.] I don’t care whether it’s true; I love it. That’s what I want to be. If I had the choice, that’s what I would be: the funniest writer you have ever read. STUDENT: Is your fiction comic? MUDRICK: Some of it—some of it. Not in the same way, though. For one thing my fiction was written much earlier, much of it, and the criticism, especially in recent years I have had a sense of total irresponsibility except for the material I’m working on. And I love to play around with the language, and so I play around with it all the time, and it’s great fun for me. I’m playing with the medium. (I just talked to a painter, that’s why I thought of it.) And the medium is great fun, I love the language, it’s just marvelous. You know, you said something, Robyn, which wasn’t simply fawning praise once. [Laughs.] I was very grateful. You said you didn’t—unfortunately I don’t remember exactly how you said it. It had something to do with the fact that I’m not writing a standard kind of prose, and you said that it’s more like poetry in a way. And I (without using those terms invidiously or complimentarily) I think you’re quite right. My organization is not prose organization, my use of style is not ordinary prose style. I’m working with things like alliteration, internal rhyme and assonance, consonance all the time, very very deliberately, and I love it. And when something falls into place like that, I mean I (as the Jews say) kvell. It’s the greatest pleasure for me. I can’t stand the idea of formal prose construction or development. It has no interest to me, and that’s one of the reasons I think that the teaching of composition is poisonous. And one of the reasons why I think—I think that composition probably can’t be taught because I don’t think it can be taught as poetry or as fiction. So I think that the next best thing is not to teach composition at all but to teach the writing of narrative prose. Because what anybody writing narrative prose knows is that he doesn’t have to write logically. He knows that he can be effective by the medium, he knows that he can free-associate, he knows that he can do all kinds of things. Even a novice writer knows that. But I mean when you start talking about things like topic sentences and paragraphs . . . I don’t know what a paragraph is, so do you mean to tell me that some wretched 249

Mudrick Transcribed remedial English teacher knows what a paragraph is? IF YOU KNOW WHAT A PARAGRAPH IS, THEN WHAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN IS NOT WORTH WRITING. Because no piece of writing that flows has paragraphs in any sense that I understand. Sometimes I make a paragraph simply because it looks nice on the page, I mean I happen to like it because it looks nice. Why else would you want to make a paragraph? I don’t know from paragraphs. STUDENT: What about when you taught composition? You did at one point, right? MUDRICK: Yes. I didn’t teach it that way, no. It is terrible how you are intimidated by authority in teaching. You know what offends me most about English teaching? (Since I don’t teach freshman English anymore, I . . .) I remember going to gatherings with my . . . my noble colleagues, and of course we all made so many jokes about the illiterate freshmen. They couldn’t punctuate, and they couldn’t spell, and they couldn’t write topic sentences—until one day I realized that the only thing the people with whom I was talking could do was to spell, punctuate, and write topic sentences. THEY COULDN’T DO ANYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD! ANYTHING! And then it occurred to me that these things might not be worth doing. It struck me all of a heap. It took me about twenty years to figure that out, and I felt so ashamed. I mean it appalls me (the idea of growing old, for instance) it appalls me to think that almost any student I have ever had is more interesting, and his language is more interesting, than almost any colleague I have ever had as long as I have taught. Isn’t that an awful thing to say? And that is the absolute God’s truth. I hear, I mean, originalities of phrase, spontaneities. And then I hear, “Whom have you been attacking lately?” and so on. You know, bright sayings like that. You understand, sometimes twice a day! STUDENT: How long has he been your neighbor? MUDRICK: Oh, about a thousand years. [Laughter.] STUDENT: Have you ever thought to say anything to him, like— MUDRICK: No! I mean, if you get trapped in the same room with a mad dog you simply try to escape—you don’t argue with him. No, I don’t want to get into an argument with anybody—I’m not interested. I just want to preserve my life and my sanity and so on. I don’t deliberately go around insulting other people. Certainly I don’t deliberately go around insulting my colleagues, unless they write books [laughter]—in which case they’re fair game! because that’s public, that’s public. If you go public with a book, then you have to put up with that. I get reviewed, very nastily. Yes? STUDENT: If students are more interesting than teachers, does that mean that education— MUDRICK: Is a failure, yes. But all education is essentially an effort at socialization— very few people escape it. I mean, the only interest that society has is in keeping you quiet. And the people who eventually take over are those who have been most successful at being kept quiet and at trying to keep other people quiet. I mean it’s like any bureaucracy—any system which is organized in such a way as to depend on your getting along with a relatively large number of people who’ve 250

“Teaching Is My Hobby” been ensconced in jobs for a long time, especially jobs that don’t involve particular skills. I mean you really have to say, most English teachers don’t have the most elementary skills. There are no elementary skills; I mean, what is required is a live intelligence. So that an advanced English professor is likely to be a lot less interesting than a good automechanic—who knows something, who really knows something—which is different from having piles of information. And then young people are always interesting, not because they know anything but because they haven’t been shut off yet. I mean they’re still responsive, and they’re still speaking their own language. They haven’t taken over some external form of language. I bring this up so often and I bring it up again because it appalls me. I see this thing which was handed around to all faculty members the other day—the Television Institute on campus, or whatever the hell they call it, is informing teachers that they can all get videotaped. I mean if you have to go out of town for a few days, just get your lecture videotaped. And forty-five minutes costs sixty-five dollars, and seventy-five minutes costs eighty-five dollars, and if you want a copy to play for yourself over and over again in your bathroom [laughter], that’s an extra forty-five dollars. I volunteered to provide a laugh track. Two hundred and twenty years ago Dr. Johnson said to Boswell: What is all this fuss about lectures nowadays? Lectures are ridiculous, he said. He said, What can you learn from a lecture that you can’t learn from the books that the lectures are taken from? There’s absolutely no excuse for lectures, no excuse at all—except for that guy who goes around the country making speeches. You know—the guy who comes to the lectures, and when the lecture’s over makes a speech in favor of motherhood, communism, and so on—that’s what lectures are for. What else are they for? And they’re also for the Learning Resources Department, because what else would they do if they couldn’t videotape lectures? STUDENT: You know what else they do—they have, like, some classes that are kind of like in Ventura that are like broadcast from UCSB on videotape so the people can go to class there— MUDRICK: That wasn’t what this was. STUDENT: No, but they have that also. The whole quarter is on videotape. MUDRICK: Information can be given by television, knowledge cannot. Because knowledge involves exchange, information doesn’t involve exchange. You can learn how to tear down an internal combustion engine probably pretty well with television instruction. Even that’s not a good illustration because an automobile engine is three-dimensional and it’s very hard to (unless you have a remarkable imagination) to see something three-dimensional which is being presented two-dimensionally. Yes? STUDENT: You said young people have more interesting things to say. But don’t you think a lot of the work gets better as you mature? MUDRICK: If you stay alive, oh yeah, absolutely, sure. That’s one of the reasons it’s worth taking the chance of staying alive for a long time. You may get a little better [inaudible], sure. It is possible for intelligence to improve. 251

Mudrick Transcribed You know what I’m going to do? [Looks at his watch.] (Gee, it’s getting already very late.) I’m going to read a little bit of a section of autobiography that I wrote several years ago, which I probably will never do anything more of. It has nothing to do with what we’ve been talking about. Since these things customarily are readings, I think I’ll do it. It will give you a little idea of what my childhood was like. But it’s not that simple, because I call it “Music,” and my original intention was to write an autobiography which would be divided by topics rather than chronologically. So the first topic was music, and I would try to write about that aspect of my life as it went along chronologically which dealt exclusively with music. And then I would deal with, say, something I would call “Reading and Writing” which would involve my writing—another, “Love and Friendship,” which would involve my domestic life, and so on. So it may seem a little peculiar. The house we lived in during the last half of the ’twenties had a parlor off the entry hall, used for visitors or parties mostly, a dark square room with overstuffed dark furniture and heavy drapes that I remember wandering into once when my mother was sitting on the sofa beside a woman I didn’t know. There was a dazzle of light on the window behind them (the drapes had been opened to a sunny morning) and I could just make out their faces. “How old is your little boy?” the woman asked my mother, as if I weren’t in the room or as if I weren’t old enough to talk. My mother looked at me and gave me a prompting smile. “I’m three years old,” I said. I can still hear myself taking the time to enunciate the words carefully, it’s my earliest auditory memory. Back toward a far corner of the room was a black upright player piano whose innards saw to it that music recorded in the punched-out holes of a roll of paper could be relayed to the keys by means of a pair of large rectangular pedals which had to be kept going up and down and which lying on my stomach on the floor underneath the keyboard I sometimes worked with my hands; but what I much preferred—not because I despised mechanical music but because I worshipped my brother Dave—was listening to my brother Dave banging away directly at the keys playing and singing with his invariable complete confidence any songs at all that came into his head, popular dance and Broadway-show tunes of the day, patriotic songs, college songs, songs form Yiddish musicals, operetta songs (“GIVE me some MEN who are STOUT-hearted MEN”), Italian organ-grinder tunes like “Santa Lucia” and “O Sole Mio” which he sang in Italian (so I thought, because it certainly wasn’t English or Yiddish) and must have learned from Caruso singing them on records we had. He couldn’t read music, his left hand bounced steadily between thump-here and thump-there, he probably never missed a chance to avoid sharps and flats, his voice penetrated like a siren (he didn’t bother to soften it even 252

“Teaching Is My Hobby” on private phone calls, when it could be heard all over the house), but to me he was Caruso crossed with Paderewski. (The ’twenties had one living legend for each major activity: Caruso for singing, Paderewski for piano, Kreisler for violin, Babe Ruth for baseball, Red Grange for football, Jack Dempsey for boxing . . .) A couple of years ago I heard on the radio a melancholy little waltz which I recognized as an old favorite of mine but couldn’t name or place. Nothing ever made plainer to me the power of music than that I knew at once, as soon as the announcer identified it, that I had last heard it fifty years earlier listening to my sister Nettie practicing it on the piano: “Danube Waves,” by Ivanovici (his only claim to fame, and fading fast): had nobody played it for fifty years except elementary piano students of whom the last I had heard was my sister? because since then I had listened to all the music in the world and had never heard it again till now (or at least was sure I hadn’t), yet when I first heard it—and for the next few weeks whenever Nettie practiced she could count on an audience—I knew at once that it was the most beautiful music there was. Songs were something, music was something else. When I listened to Dave or now and then (bliss beyond bliss) sang along with him, what I thrilled to wasn’t music, it was personal energy and animal high spirits like running and jumping, not mere talking (or walking) but singing as thought on such occasions and especially for such a kingof-the-hill brother talking were too ordinary to be trusted to express even ordinary feelings, or as though feelings didn’t weigh at all in the balance with personal energy. Anyhow for many years singing, no matter who did it, was for me an exhilarating kind of showing off, whereas “absolute music”—a term that the moment I came across it in a book seemed just right—was mysterious and reserved, a source and an end, unrelated to anything outside itself and full of feelings. Of course a piece titled “Danube Waves” oughtn’t to qualify as absolute music, but I was entranced by it before I knew it had a title, it didn’t in any case sound to me like Danube waves (and still doesn’t), it sounded like— well, music: began with a graceful tune in a minor key (therefore sad or at least nostalgic; also Jewish, because the continuous chanting of prayers in Orthodox Jewish ritual always hovered around or settled into a minor key, and most Yiddish songs whether gloomy or glad were in the minor) which was followed (as many graceful tunes even of the great masters are not) by an equally graceful contrasting bouquet of middle tunes which in good time bowed out for the sensational final appearance (cheers and grateful applause from the audience) of the opening tune: all of it easy to remember, without tricky intervals, neither too fast nor too slow, couldn’t be better for humming or whistling. But why it induced tears in the eyes of an eight-year-old a pleasing 253

Mudrick Transcribed desolation in his heart is a question I’d make an effort to postpone as long as possible trying to answer if I hadn’t already resolved not to try to answer it at all. The ’twenties closed with the crash that brought the Depression, and in the spring of 1931 we moved from the South Philadelphia house that had a parlor to a much smaller house in West Philadelphia that didn’t. On the morning of the move my mother gave me a trolleycar token and a dime for something to eat, told me to take the Walnut Street trolley to the end of the line which was half a block from our new home, and said she and my father and the others would probably be there already or I could wait on the porch. I don’t remember asking how they were going—I think Dave came in his car to drive them—or why at the age of nine I was old enough to go off my own (I assume they weren’t intending to get rid of me for good so maybe they wanted me out from under foot and besides thought of it as an adventure I’d enjoy): it didn’t seem strange to me, I wasn’t afraid or anxious: nobody then or after raised an eyebrow at it. Life’s lesser mysteries. A few years earlier—I was six or seven—Willie Tipowitz and I decided to have an adventure, a trek to the drugstore run by my brother Harry (Dave’s twin). We didn’t tell anybody; I sneaked a buttered Kaiser roll out in a paper bag; and on a steaming equatorial summer day for what seemed and might have been hours we dripped and dawdled fourteen city blocks to the drugstore, where Harry was duly surprised, phoned our mothers, mixed chocolate milkshakes for us at the soda fountain, and gave us each a token to ride the trolley back home. Everybody was tolerant about it, but obviously if we’d asked permission to do it we’d have been refused. Here I was, though, a solid citizen being sent off alone to make a sixty-block journey all the way across the city to a neighborhood and a house I’d never seen. I trudged up to Walnut Street and took the first trolley that came along. I found a seat; soon the trolley was crowded, there were passengers standing hanging on to ceiling straps; soon a woman my mother’s age boarded carrying parcels; I stood up and offered her my seat, she thanked me and took it, I was proudly aware of smiles and general approval which warmed me during the long trip which gradually became longer and longer as the trolley became emptier and emptier screeching and swaying on its tracks through neighborhoods that were more and more countrylike till the conductor and the motorman and I were the only ones left and I was beginning to worry. At last the conductor asked me where I was going. When I told him he laughed and shook his head and said I had taken the wrong trolley: my mother had neglected to tell me there were two different lines on Walnut Street and it was my bad luck that a trolley with the wrong number (13!) . . .

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“Teaching Is My Hobby” (That’s true, too. There were two trollies that ran on that street, 42 and 13.) had been the first to come along. The conductor gave me instructions and a free transfer for a nearby line that went in the right direction. By the time I arrived it was late afternoon and I was feeling very down in the mouth. “Where’ve you been?” demanded my sister; but everybody else was too busy unpacking and moving in. I’ll read on awhile if you—yeah, there’s nothing else you can say. [Laughter.] All right, I’ll just read on for a while. It’s interesting to me—I haven’t looked at it in quite a while. (This is me! [laughing]) Among five brothers and two sisters Dave was (with Harry) the oldest—sixteen years older than I, the youngest. By now except for infrequent and even then usually just overnight visits he was gone forever and sometimes married (“Are you married?” a tourist in Conrad asks a sailor, who replies, “Sometimes”); Nettie quit the piano, which nobody played now and furthermore the player mechanism stopped functioning and wasn’t repaired because player pianos had gone out of style; soon, without any talent or persevering inclination but because my mother heard about a teacher who charged fifty cents a lesson, I myself was elected family musician, taking lessons first on the banjo and later, as a sign of progress, on the “Hawaiian” guitar—six deadly steel strings—with Maynard E. Dillaber (stress “Dill” as in a pickle, which was where I found myself ). At his studio his pretty wife was receptionist and he had up on the walls testimonially autographed photos of such former colleagues as Eddie Peabody and Rudy Vallee; he was a tall, handsome, and good-natured courtly Southerner whom I saw flustered only once, when he was leading a “guitar orchestra” of fifteen of his pupils on a Sunday-morning children’s radio program and during a fast passage we muffed it and panicked—he stood there redfaced fixing each of us one after another with a furious glance flailing his arms and stamping his feet trying to get us back together while his every-hair-in-place reddish-blond pompadour came uncombed and flew round his head like Medusa’s locks or a turned-up mop. Mostly the pieces we played at such performances or solo at our weekly lessons were Mr. Dillaber’s arrangements of current popular songs, the sort played by the big bands and sung by Vallee, Russ Columbo, Bing Crosby. Some of it was fun, but I never doubted that books and words came to me far more naturally. I hated practicing, which each day loomed like a lifetime and didn’t ever seem to accomplish anything substantial: musicians have to be crazy; everybody to his own obsession, but pressing with painful collodion-patched split fingers on taut

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Mudrick Transcribed steel strings to produce the same sequence of notes and chords as many times over as it took to do it well enough to satisfy a musician wasn’t mine. Among our dozens of relatives in and around Philadelphia, the one who came by oftenest and was the most welcome when he came was Sidney Presser. He was my mother’s second cousin, older than Dave and Harry, already in his middle thirties, unmarried and living alone, and every other week or so in the evening after dinner he would take a trolley from his one-room apartment in a downtown hotel and show up as if on schedule, smiling like a gentle heart and an honored guest, to drink tea and pass the time with my mother and father, whom as a child he had known in the old country. The three of them grew up in prerevolutionary Russia, in the city of Kishinev, where the great pogrom of 1903 convinced my parents to get the hell out of there and make tracks for America to have their children born in a likelier country; but Sidney was six at the time, his family stayed, and it wasn’t till after the Great Revolution that he decided enough was enough and joined the exodus. He had been a rabbinical student in Russia but lost his religion and these days baited my father, who was unshakably devout and got a kick out of the cross-talk, with the customary agnostic jokes about God and man braced by impudent allusions to the sacred texts; in America he had become a skilled worker, a cutter, in the ladies’ garment industry and a member of the ILGWU. In his hot youth he had been a buddy of Dave’s, they double-dated together and sometimes even took off with their girls on long automobile trips; he was a demon pinochle player and a colorful one, shouting Yiddish or American maledictions whenever his partner laid down a card he objected to. He started making a homier and less magnified impression on me when my brothers and sisters had thinned out a bit—Dave was gone; Harry was married and gone, so was Rose, both had children of their own— and by the time we moved to West Philadelphia Sidney had settled into the role of old bachelor available for evening conversations with congenial relatives. He was a mild, considerate, sociable man, and except during pinochle games I never heard him say anything unobliging about anybody. Only Harry disliked him, mocked and mimicked his Russian-Yiddish accent (when he wasn’t there), mainly I think because Harry, who already had a pharmacist’s diploma and his own drugstore when he was scarcely out of his teens, was a hard-working hard-line businessman from the word go and associated unions and foreigners with freeloading and radicalism. Sidney’s chief eccentricity, though, was that he went to concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra; he had a speaking acquaintance with several of the musicians, and he was happy to share his gossip and inside stories about the orchestra with whoever showed signs of interest; he had a collection of classical records. 256

“Teaching Is My Hobby” Classical music was what you switched off or away from presto and sforzando whenever it turned up (very seldom) on the radio. (And not only in the U.S. of the ’thirties. Radio is the democratic medium, meant to be heard but not listened to. In his autobiography Peter Quennell mentions being drafted as a part-time fireman in wartime London in 1943, too late for the Blitz and so passing the time by playing blackjack with his co-conscripts. “A radio shrieked incessantly; but the card-players rarely followed a programme or commented on what they heard, unless, as sometimes happened, it was a piece of classical music, to which they immediately responded with shouts of ‘Turn the fucking thing off!’”) Once, killing time while waiting to go to a movie, I didn’t switch off or away, I had instead an idle thought that if Sidney liked it there might be something to it, having tuned in accidentally on an announcer’s introduction of a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony I sat and listened through the first movement and rejoiced in what I heard—melody that had as plausible (and, various people and books would tell me later though I still disagree, as banal) a shape as the popular songs I played on the guitar but besides had all the time in the world to spin itself out: expansiveness, elbow room, untrammeled luxury: taking time as if time were space and could be fully occupied into every corner; getting the better of time, putting time in its place, what Schumann must have meant on a level of sensibility sixty-four octaves higher than mine when, having read through and marveled at Schubert’s newly-rediscovered C-major Symphony, he rejoiced in its “heavenly length.” But joy is as democratic as the radio, and Schumann didn’t rejoice any more genuinely than I did. During Sidney’s next visit I told him I’d heard and liked the opening movement of the Tchaikovsky Symphony and now I wondered whether there were other classical pieces as tuneful. He was delighted—anticipating a convert!—and after rattling off a list of his pet symphonies he recommended that I listen the coming Sunday to a broadcast of the Franck Symphony. So I did, and was overwhelmed— because now, no longer a skeptic, indeed eager to believe, I sat with almost unbearable nervous excitement through the whole symphony and with ripples of gooseflesh realized that I was at the beginning of something entirely new in my life. This time what I was most aware of was the mystery of repetition: the unique quality of a musical phrase or theme or episode which allows it to repeat itself note for note or only slightly modified without an effect of inanity or tedium, with— quite the reverse—an effect of development and intensification and summation and maybe apotheosis: a quality which words or pictures (for example Andy Warhol’s cloned replicas of the Mona Lisa or soup cans or that soulful portrait-photo of Marilyn Monroe) don’t have, for me anyway. Years later the big themes of the Franck Symphony began 257

Mudrick Transcribed to seem somewhat yearning and dowdy to me, or at least not smart or stylish enough to survive their numerous reappearances; but then I’ve also learned, also with regret, that through the years certain much more universally admired themes have begun to make a similar impression on me—for example the big theme of the last movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata, or the lovely but too often and too straightforwardly repeated theme of Haydn’s F-minor Variations. (Not to disregard a recent piece for four organs and maracas by Steve Reich in which a two-note phrase is played over and over with infinitesimally evolving tiny modifications for as long as the performers can stand it, having the effect—intended, I suppose—of an empty room in which the stylus of an abandoned phonograph keeps slipping back forever into the same groove of a record of a consequently unidentifiable piece of music.) Still the point for me is that, listening to music, I’m taken by surprise when repetition does not work. By the way, you know, I think that’s the most important thing about music: repetition. It’s the great mystery of music that repetition can occur, and that it can have the effect that it does. There’s no other art in which, it seems to me, that possibility exists in the same way in which it exists in music. So that by the time for instance that you come to the end of a great symphonic movement, when the composer brings out for the last time the theme with which he has opened, I mean your heart would stop, if you were really experiencing it. And why it should have that effect I have no idea, and the effect of refrains in poetry—nothing like it at all. In fact, very often when I’m reading poetry with a refrain, I think it’s a mad poem—you know, it’s one of those poems which is written in a madhouse in which this guy is just repeating the refrain every time at the end because he repeats things, that’s all. But that’s not the effect of music at all. Yes? STUDENT: Do you think that music is supposed to be more physical than— MUDRICK: It certainly is for me, yes—much more physical. STUDENT: —responding physically or something. MUDRICK: Yes, yes. No, I think that’s true, I think it’s—yes? STUDENT: How is it physical? MUDRICK: Well, it’s literally physical. One of the interesting things about rock and roll is that people are trying to make it physical, that is, that it’s as loud as it is. I think, myself, that that’s misguided. I think that the content of the music is simply not serious enough. But the physical impingement on the body is very serious. If you just think of the difference between Muzak and, say, the way rock and roll ordinarily is played, Muzak is obviously intended not to be heard. Muzak is a kind of—it’s like what I was saying about radio: it’s supposed to be on but you’re not supposed to hear it. And—what was that? STUDENT: Like an air-freshener. MUDRICK: Something like that, yeah. Yes? 258

“Teaching Is My Hobby” STUDENT: Maybe the reason that rock and roll is turned up so loud is because they want to feel it, but they can’t feel it because the content— MUDRICK: Well, I’m sure some people do feel it and feel it strongly, and moreover even feel its content. All I’m saying is, it hasn’t got that effect on me. Yeah, I think it’s too loud, and another thing of course about the difference between the way I have heard rock and roll played and the way classical music is played is that there’s much more dynamic variety in classical music—that is, you will get many, many soft passages, and the climaxes of classical music tend to be rather infrequent. When they occur, I mean the huge climaxes, they’re very very impressive, and this is partly by contrast. I’m going to read more, just for my own—I understand people have to leave; just take off whenever you want. And by the way, ask questions if you would like. Yes? STUDENT: You know that George Herbert poem where he has this constant refrain? That doesn’t bother you or— MUDRICK: He what? STUDENT: That George Herbert poem where he has a constant refrain, and he repeats some kind of religious expression. MUDRICK: Well, I’ll tell ya, I’m never overwhelmed—I don’t recall any poem in which there are refrains that seems to me a very great poem. There may be some but I can’t think of any offhand. There are some very short poems in which refrains work fairly well for me, maybe some ballads and so on, but that’s about it. I’ll just read a little longer. This is interesting to me actually, because this is the only time I ever made an effort to describe the effect of music on me. And it may not do the—it certainly doesn’t do the job, but it’s the only time I even try. During the middle ’thirties anybody fond of classical music, if he weren’t a record critic (receiving by mail from the record companies all their latest pressings free for review) or a Rockefeller, spent a significant part of his life in the ill-ventilated and not-very-soundproof pygmy-size listening booths of neighborhood radio-and-record shops. A twelve-inch shellac record, brittle enough to break in two if you breathed heavily on it, each side of which contained no more than four minutes of music, cost two dollars: . . . (That’s another thing. You know, the economic aspect of this is overpowering— listen to this. I mean I was fascinated when I wrote this down—it’s the truth.) one symphony ran through four to six records: . . . (And in fact if you wanted to get something like the Mahler Second Symphony, of which there actually existed a recording, it was eleven records: twenty-two dollars. Okay? So a symphony cost the amount of money that you could support a family on in a week. What does it cost to support a family nowadays? You want 259

Mudrick Transcribed to guess? Certainly a couple of hundred dollars at least, would you not say? A family—I’m not talking about just two people. So imagine if you had to pay two hundred dollars for a record of a symphony. Isn’t that unbelievable?) at the time many a breadwinner supported a family on a weekly paycheck of twelve dollars; so one symphony album could cost enough to keep a family solvent for a week. It wasn’t till the end of the decade that the price per record was cut to a dollar—the first blessing of mass production that I benefited from directly and took imprudent advantage of. Meanwhile I had no money to buy records with; but at Poster Radio on 60th Street, a ten-minute walk from home, under the ludicrous pretense of being a prospective customer (I was fourteen, and in winter wore the raggediest overcoat west of the Schuylkill River) I could ask at the counter for an album of my choice and carry it off to one of the booths. Looking back on what still seems to me a policy of open-handed charity from habitually tight-fisted merchants to penniless music-lovers, I’m as baffled and thankful now as I was then. A few years after the Second World War long-playing records arrived and the booths vanished, perhaps because LPs were so cheap and easy to manufacture that they encouraged really torrential mass production with its concomitant of discount selling which required a quick turnover and no layabouts or deadbeats on the premises. At any rate, some of America’s finest hours were passed in those ages-since-disassembled cubicles. Surrounded by sound in a small space, I soon learned that Tchaikovsky and Franck and every other durable nineteenth-century symphonist back to and by all means including Beethoven not only had my gorgeous big tunes that kept moving and building (in chamber music the tunes seemed indecisive and kept trailing off into the shrubbery, in opera the momentum stopped whenever the voices started), they also had resources that would make the small space as big as life for any listener who could brave periodic dirty looks from the management or even an order to turn it down! to turn up the gain knob to a level at which filling the space from wall to wall the sound would be heard in all its gradations—a range of instrumental color, a range of density and volume from feathery whispers to apocalyptic brass blasts like the heavens opening—and here in the middle of these momentous actions, these movements properly so-called, here in charge of traffic was where I belonged, they were my albums of choice. Many years later in Santa Barbara I attended a rehearsal of an orchestra conducted by Maurice Abravanel, and knowing that a sustained fortissimo passage was coming up I stealthily made my way to a position in front of the first row of seats as close to him as I dared—I could have reached out and touched his shoes—in time to hear what the conductor heard when the sky fell, enthusiastically expecting the tumult but astounded 260

“Teaching Is My Hobby” by its terrific loudness: afterward I wondered whether spending decades in the middle of it conductors don’t necessarily give up as much of their hearing as pneumatic-drill operators and hard-rock fans are alleged to. It is amazing by the way what the volume of sound is on the podium at a big orchestral climax. STUDENT: Do they go deaf? MUDRICK: No, apparently they don’t—well, I guess they do in the course of things as people get older. A musician once explained this to me by saying that it’s not like hard rock in the sense that your ears have time to recover. That is, there are these tremendous climaxes and there are also soft passages between, and it’s only that continuous battering, that kind of boiler-factory battering that will do it. Yes? STUDENT: What did the record companies do about symphonies that had movements that ran more than three minutes? MUDRICK: Well, almost all symphonic movements are more than four minutes. STUDENT: Yeah, I know, I was joking. I mean, do they fade out or— MUDRICK: No, they just make various kinds of compromises, just as even on LPs they make various kinds—for instance Toscanani conducting the (this is a sort of funny thing that could happen) they wanted to record The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, played at a relatively normal speed, takes about ten or eleven minutes, and the absolute maximum that you can get on both sides of a 78 record is nine minutes—you cannot get any more. So they asked him to play it fast enough [laughter] and so he did. And it’s a wonderful performance, and moreover it sounds right. Another marvelous thing about classical music is the variety of tempi which are possible, even within the range of the directions that the composer gives. So that [hums a tune] [inaudible] heard Toscanini’s— the Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: unbelievably fast—that has to be a tremendous virtuoso orchestra to play it. I don’t know whether that was the result of any initial problem with one side or not [laughing]. The same thing I was told happened with a Stowkowski performance of Afternoon of a Faun, that is, which he just barely got in on one record. So they could do things like that. Sometimes of course they couldn’t, I suppose. I’m going to read just one more section. Myself in the booth, the conductor on stage, each bending a ravished ear to pandemonium. In B. H. Haggin’s book Conversations with Toscanini there’s a tantalizing bit of information about Toscanini’s ear for recorded music, or rather his lack or it. On one occasion at Toscanini’s home, having set the phonograph at maximum treble boost and maximum bass—evidently his typical settings—Toscanini played a recording which “pleased him with its clarity and sonority” but in which Haggin “found the brilliance of the violins excessive and unpleasant”; in another recording Haggin found the violins “harsh” and the bass “a huge confused rumble” till he asked that both settings be turned down: 261

Mudrick Transcribed once they were, according to Haggin the violins sounded “lustrous and sweet” and the bass “clearly defined and in correct proportion.” (I envy Haggin his true grit and sheer moxie—correcting Toscanini’s musical judgement!—and for reasons I’ll go into farther along in this chapter I trust without reservation his ear for recorded sound and have no doubt that his description is accurate.) The year was 1944: Toscanini was “only” seventy-seven, he would conduct triumphant regular seasons of broadcast public concerts for ten more years, his unprecedented musical powers were by every account intact, his ear in the concert-hall and his capacity for achieving transparent moment-by-moment balances of all the instruments of the orchestra in whatever combinations and at whatever degrees of density and volume may well have been the most phenomenal in history, nobody ever had cause to suggest that his hearing had become less acute and certainly there was no such indication in his performances; so I needn’t after all have worried, conductors very likely kept their keen ears forever, sixty-eight years of conducting hadn’t afflicted or impaired Toscanini’s as late as the day he retired at eighty-seven. Why, then, the distortions in recorded sound that he not only accepted but himself turned the knobs up to and was even “pleased” by? Haggin says nothing about the volume level set by Toscanini, but judging from the “huge confused rumble” one infers it was high, and there’s another tantalizing bit of information in Harvey Sachs’s biography of Toscanini, who, according to an old friend and former musical assistant of his, when friends visited played them his recent recordings “at an unbelievable volume.” The explanation might be that, having all those years listened to music in the middle of it, being physically and sensually assaulted by it, being moreover a ragingly passionate man, what he missed most of all while listening to records—exasperated by the deficiencies in projection and dispersion characteristic of recorded music and particularly of the monaural records of the time—was this physical assault from all sides by the music, the live music he lived by, which, filtered through records and phonographs into merely “correct” balances and timbres at drawing-room volume, seemed so pallid in comparison to the music he brought to life in the concert-hall that compensating with a vengeance he turned up every knob to its maximum setting (except maybe the gain knob short a mark or two when Haggin was there to complain) and created pandemonium: it would shock and confound anybody less mad about music than he was, but at least it surrounded him with a gross approximation of the top (“harsh,” “excessive brilliance”) and bottom (“huge confused rumble”) and unbelievable volume he was accustomed to experiencing in the middle of his own orchestra. When it’s a matter of appetite, taste or pickiness is for the birds. (I like this explanation because it associates me with 262

“Teaching Is My Hobby” a musical genius and vindicates or excuses how I myself listened to records early and later. Married, new at my job of teaching in the university, ready to save the world, I started inviting some of my students over for musical evenings, I was sure that unspoiled young minds were just the audience to concentrate on, that having them listen to great music played through up-to-date equipment at saturation levels—No, John, it isn’t that I’m deaf, I know it’s loud, but there’s no substitute for the feeling of presence—would confirm the novices and convert the rest. It wasn’t till Sachs’s biography came out a couple of years ago that I learned that Toscanini had subjected guests to the same treatment, but I learned much sooner on my own that the treatment didn’t work except sometimes in reverse, I never converted any of them, and I made a few lifelong enemies. Even now, though, playing my records for myself, I continue to believe that there’s no substitute, Marsha, for the feeling of presence.) I think that’s what music is, as a matter of fact, it is presence. And it’s the closest thing to sex there is in the world. It really is like that. And it is physical. And if you don’t like music that way, you simply haven’t experienced music. You’ve experienced something else, but it’s not music. And when somebody tells me how he loves to listen to music while he’s washing the dishes or something, turned at a volume at which it’s barely possible to distinguish that there are instruments, that it isn’t say a computer which is producing pure sound simply at those pitches . . . Music is physical, it really is physical. [Looks at his watch.] Well, I gotta stop. Thank you very much.

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From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell 30 September 1986

MUDRICK: I’ll tell you, first of all, approximately how the course will be organized. You will be doing simultaneous reading for at least the first seven weeks, and the simultaneous reading will consist of what it is that we’ll be talking about in class, and a section of the Life of Johnson. We won’t talk about the Life of Johnson in class unless you want to bring up—I mean, at the beginning of the quarter. At the eighth week you will owe me a paper on the Life of Johnson—the eighth meeting. And the eighth, ninth, tenth meetings and possibly, if there seems enough interest or enough left over to discuss, that time which is set aside for the final exam in this class, because I don’t give final exams. Now as far as the length of the paper is concerned, I would like it to be, oh, say five to eight double-spaced typed pages. And it’s extremely important, as far as I’m concerned, that you make absolutely clear—how you do this I have no idea, and I can’t give you any tips—but don’t allow me to suspect that you’ve done only intermittent reading in the Life. Nothing will irritate me more than a feeling that you’ve decided: Oh, well, one part of the Life is just like any other, it just happens to be a different year, and so if I talk about one year rather than another I’ll be able to fool him into believing that I’ve read the whole thing. I think you’ll discover that that’s less easy than you think, but you will also deprive yourself . . . I think it’s probably fair to say that the Life of Johnson is one of the two most important books in English. It is for me anyway. (The other one, for those of you that are interested, is Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.) And I think that any student of English literature who hasn’t read every word of the Life of Johnson should be simply summarily dismissed from English studies [smiling]. It’s not just that. If you don’t take a special satisfaction in reading it you probably ought to be dismissed too. It’s a very special kind of book. It’s a kind of book for people who like to read, who like to read about writers, who like to have a sense of what life feels like while it’s being lived. And if you don’t have these attributes then you shouldn’t be studying literature anyway. It’s not a book which can be abridged, there’s no way to abridge the Life of Johnson. (I know that there are abridgements all over the place.) By the way, don’t

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From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell hesitate to bust in with questions or comments anytime. In fact this is absolutely essential as the course goes on. Well, I’ll back off a little and then tell you how the rest of the class will go. For next week, in addition to expecting you to have read—and you mustn’t fall behind, because if you fall behind you’re doomed. You won’t be able to keep up, you won’t have time to write the paper . . . you’ll get into all kinds of trouble. You’ve got to do a lot of reading, and we’ll talk about the problem of reading in a moment. But in the meantime, for next week, in addition to—I suppose I should say that you should read about one seventh of the Life of Johnson. You should read well over two hundred pages a week of the Life of Johnson—that’s what it amounts to—in order to allow yourself say at least a week, or a week and a half or two weeks for writing the paper. All right, I will also assign what I consider the more formal parts of the Johnson collection edited by Bronson. I did finally assign the Bronson collection, didn’t I? I had some hesitation. Anyway, I was trying to save you a little money, but finally I decided that the Bronson collection simply contains more and a greater variety of stuff than any other collection, and you really had to have it. So I’m going to make the assignment of what amounts to about half of that volume for next week. The week after that, which will be the third week of class, we’ll read the remaining half of that volume. The following week, which will be the fourth week of the class, we’ll read (I think this is the way it will go) the first half of the London Journal. I did assign that, didn’t I? STUDENT: Yes. MUDRICK: The week after that will be the second half of the London Journal. The week after that will be Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. The week after that will be the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. And the week after that will be the paper and the Life of Johnson. If you take any satisfaction in this sort of thing, I might remind you that if you keep up with your assignments, in effect you won’t have any assignments for the last two meetings of the class, and if we have a meeting during the time when we would otherwise have the final exam, you won’t have any assignments for the last three meetings of the class. Yes? STUDENT: Is there a midterm? MUDRICK: No midterm—no exams at all. You owe me one paper and your constant attendance in class, and your contributions in class discussion. Don’t take the class if you think that a class is something that you take in order to do certain kinds of reading, turn in papers, and get units. That’s not the kind of class that I try to conduct; it’s not the kind of class that I can conduct. So if you can’t attend the class meetings regularly, and I hope invariably, please don’t take the class. There are a number of questions that some of you might want to ask which will be at least in part anticipated by some of the things I’m going to say now. A couple of years ago I taught a class in eighteenth-century English prose. (I think it’s even possible that one or another of you was around at the time and even sat in on one or another of those meetings.) And it was a lunatic class, and I knew

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Mudrick Transcribed perfectly well that it was. You might be amused, for instance, to realize that the assignment for one week was the Life of Johnson unabridged. The assignment for another week was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, more or less unabridged—essentially the first half. And then there were things like Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution and so on. And I tried to explain myself in that class, to ask why anybody would conduct a class on such a basis. I think I can defend myself (effectively enough from myself anyway). I don’t know of any reason why anybody would be a lit major except because he loves reading, and I hope also—and this makes the complete man or woman—also loves writing. There’s really no other reason to be a lit major. So to begin with, you love to read, and there’s no end to reading. You love to read—you love to read everything. I mean, at breakfast you read the advertising material on the Wheaties box, and you read everything, you just read everything! because reading is an addiction. And that’s certainly what reading has always been for me. It’s a kind of consolation in bad times. And it’s the natural thing that you do when you dispose of all your other obligations. Well, what am I thinking about when I ask students—am I just kidding? am I pretending?—when I ask them to read the Life of Johnson in one week for the next meeting of the class? I don’t know how it is with some of you, but certainly when I was very young I would go to the library and take out books particularly because they were long and had small type. I always thought of that as marvelous, wonderful, that all that material was contained in this little cube. And of course I would love to have had the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin if that had been possible. Because I think that whatever else can be said about myself, I am a kind of natural literature major. I mean that’s what I was born to be. I don’t think that the way literature is taught in most institutions of socalled higher learning is right, and I welcome any comments that you have. By the way, for those of you who are already getting tired and bored, I should tell you [glances at the wall] (somebody stole the clock [inaudible]) but in any case I’ll give you a break after about forty minutes, and those of you who want to take the class will come back. But I want to be sure that any questions that you have about the class that can be answered in the first meeting will have been answered before we break up, so as I say, don’t hesitate to interrupt me. Anyway, all the nonsense that you get, in freshman classes for instance, about reading very carefully and understanding everything you read, it seems to me is directly against the nature of serious reading. The only kind of serious reading is the reading that you do with a furious appetite, not understanding sometimes half of what you’re reading and not really caring about understanding it, but simply gobbling it up. And that is particularly true when you’re young. If you can’t read like that when you’re young then once again you’ve either been hopelessly corrupted by the system or you’re not a serious lit major. Whoever gave you the idea that you have to understand everything you read has probably done you a greater disservice than anybody else you’ve ever run into professionally. 266

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell Why the hell should you understand everything that you read? Why the hell should you be picking up a book that was written say 250 years ago by a man of enormous intelligence, tremendous variety of experience, living in an entirely different time—why should you be able to pick up, say, a volume written by a man like John Locke and be able to understand every word that he says, and be able to understand it while you’re reading it for the first time? Or, if you can’t do that, reading it the way you’re told to read, let’s say, one of those wretched Shakespeare plays that you read in a freshman class so that you’re given a sense of achievement and accomplishment because you read one scene a week of one play. I don’t know what this qualifies you for. It qualifies you of course to be an English professor, but since that’s the most useless and pointless occupation in the world . . . It certainly doesn’t qualify you to be a serious lit major. You don’t read for understanding, you read for excitement. Understanding is a product of excitement. If understanding is a product of anything but excitement then it’s . . . like making love by the numbers. And you read because it’s exciting to read, and because the act of reading is exciting, almost irrespective of what it is that you’re reading. I mean the idea that this much material can be contained, and that somebody’s life is there. Many lives are there. I think there are special problems with eighteenth-century prose, because eighteenth-century prose writers live in a time when people still savor things word by word, but at the same time like to go on at great length, and they love the sound and feeling of words. But most of all, the combination of Johnson and Boswell is the most unique combination of human beings . . . it’s the great love story of literature. It’s a greater love story, really, than Abelard and Heloise, because for one thing they don’t betray each other and they don’t get mistreated; because they are so unlike and yet absolutely indispensable to each other—for our purposes, because they represent essentially two different centuries, I mean the eighteenth and the twentieth. I don’t know whether any of you know enough about literature and the study of literature to know in what bad odor Boswell is regarded by many Johnson specialists. You can almost be sure that you know a person who regards himself as a Johnson specialist if he hates Boswell. It’s a kind of natural cat and paw game typically. Part of the reason is jealousy. That is, they don’t like the idea that this person whom they consider a nincompoop and a jerk and a very silly man, and so on, should be sharing the stage with their idol. But Boswell, who is a silly man, and a man with very obvious limitations, personal and otherwise, is, I’m coming more and more to believe, the greatest English writer of the eighteenth century. And he’s a twentieth century writer, because he sees no reason to misrepresent or conceal anything. And Johnson of course is one of the glories of English literature. And since Johnson is the greatest Englishman ever, they are a very, very interesting couple. And to read them together (essentially of course you are reading them together when you’re reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson) . . . I should say for those of you who are really innocent about these matters, if you want to do a thorough job 267

Mudrick Transcribed on your paper, to get a real sense of how Boswell is catching Johnson to the life, you would do well to try to do prematurely the assignment of A Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides, because essentially Boswell is doing there what he does in the Life—he’s catching Johnson living and breathing. And nobody else could have done that. By the way, one of the most peculiar features, and this is one of the things that most infuriates the Johnsonians . . . See, another way you can tell a Johnsonian is that he will dismiss with contempt the notion that Johnson is more interesting as he is quoted by Boswell in the Life than he is in his own writing. This they regard as the most alarming and unacceptable heresy in literary studies. It also unfortunately happens to be true. [Laughs.] And this is not a feeling that I alone have. I think it was first expressed with great energy and correctness by a critic who admired Johnson in spite of the fact that he lived in the nineteenth century, that is, William Hazlitt. This is not to say that Johnson in his own words isn’t very interesting—he is. I think, however, that because he is more remote from us in his own words—I shouldn’t say “in his own words”—in his own words as he chose to set them down to represent himself officially, because of course there’s a good deal even in this selection from Johnson which he would not have chosen to survive. That is, he certainly didn’t expect his prayers and meditations to be published. He certainly didn’t expect—had no particular interest—in his letters being published. STUDENT: How come he didn’t destroy the stuff that he didn’t want published? I was reading at the beginning of the Life that he destroyed some stuff before he died. MUDRICK: All kinds of stuff, everything he could lay his hands on. If he had been able to lay his hands on those things, he would have destroyed them too—yes, no question. STUDENT: Why? I mean, just because of his own privacy? MUDRICK: Well, certainly that had a lot to do with it. Well, one way I can throw some light on it is by quoting (not, unfortunately, verbatim, because I don’t have that kind of memory). Johnson was being continually surprised by how smart Boswell was, because Boswell was one of those people who give you the impression if you watch them from day to day of being very silly. And one thing that is hard for you to understand is that silliness is not stupidity. You’re likely to think that a silly person is stupid, but many silly persons are extremely intelligent, and Boswell was one of them. And even Johnson, who probably was less silly than any other man who ever lived, kept being fooled by evidence of Boswell’s extraordinary perception and penetration and intelligence. Boswell was writing the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides while he and Johnson were travelling, and at one point in the Journal Boswell has (like mirrors within mirrors) Boswell has Johnson read some of the things that he’s been writing about their trip to the Hebrides. And Johnson is surprised by how good it is. He said, This is wonderful stuff. Of course it isn’t for (I’ve forgotten how he put it) it isn’t for public eye—that is, he would never have dreamed that anybody would publish anything like that. 268

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell He was very personal . . . I mean, among other things, in the original version you even have such spectacles as Johnson and Boswell urinating side by side. But the eighteenth century with its notion of decorum, of course, couldn’t conceive of anything as unaffectedly autobiographical and direct being printed. It would never have occurred to Johnson that almost before he had been laid in the grave the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides would be in print, the book that he had admired, or a section of which he had admired while he was reading it, but said of course this is not the sort of thing that can be published. So that’s another thing that you must understand about the difference between Johnson and Boswell. Boswell at one point in one of his journals notes: I have a strange feeling as if I would like everything about me to be publicly known. And of course if you’re a Johnsonian and you read Boswell, what that means to you is that he’s just a wretched little exhibitionist who doesn’t understand that certain things should be kept private. STUDENT: In the first part in the Life of Johnson [inaudible] he said that some people misunderstood the first book that he wrote about Johnson, where he appeared to be made a silly person by Johnson, so Johnson is making fun of Boswell. But people thought that Boswell didn’t know that he was being made fun of, so he decided to take those parts out that make him appear to be silly. MUDRICK: Yes, that’s a good point, an interesting point. And Boswell is one of those people whose best friends had no idea how extraordinary he was. That is, they thought of him as a nice lively guy who was very pleasant to spend an evening with. They had no idea how extraordinary he was and how closely he noticed everything and what an extraordinary writer he was. And one of the reasons of course they didn’t know how extraordinary a writer he was is that essentially he published only three books during his lifetime: the book on Corsica, which is interesting, the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and the Life of Johnson. And people could dismiss the latter two as impressive primarily because Boswell was lucky enough to have found a marvelous subject, and he had a kind of phonographic ear or a microphonic ear and he could simply record all this stuff. Imagine how dumb that is, by the way. Think about people deciding from the fullness of their intelligence that Boswell is a silly man, and who think that it’s easy to write down sayings in such a way as to allow them to appear intelligent. It didn’t even strike these people that there surely must have been somebody in all the previous millennia of human history who said things almost as interesting as Johnson. And if there were, why didn’t we have thousands of books in which these persons were memorialized? The Life of Johnson (the book), together with the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, is absolutely unique. There is no other book which represents the fullness of a great mind. And one thing that the Johnsonians would argue, once they’ve disposed of the notion that it’s the fullness of a great mind, they say: That may be so, but that’s just because Boswell was a kind of faithful little tape recorder. You try it—to record the eminent sayings or the brilliant sayings of somebody that you know who you think is very bright, and see how they come out on paper. 269

Mudrick Transcribed Anyway, these two men in conjunction form a kind of partnership such as doesn’t exist anywhere else in literature. And if you have any curiosity at all— about books, about human beings, about centuries which are different from ours, about people which belong in one or another century—you will read much of this material with absolutely breathless interest, even if you fall behind. Anybody have any questions? STUDENT: For the simultaneous reading, [inaudible] read over two hundred pages a week of Johnson, but on the side we’ll be reading, what, another fifty to a hundred pages a week? MUDRICK: More like two hundred. STUDENT: So we’re talking about four— MUDRICK: Something like that, something like four hundred pages a week, yes. And I don’t know any way to get around it. I’m always interested and amused by these arguments the teachers give about how the quarter system is no good because a “natural” length for a course is a full semester, because you need fifteen weeks to do the—that’s like saying a natural course for, what, a love affair is three weeks and fourteen hours. I don’t understand comments like that. I don’t understand what is a natural length of a course. I don’t know that a natural length of a course say in eighteenth-century fiction is more like fifteen weeks than ten. You still have terrible problems. How do you read a book like Clarissa which is say twice the length of War and Peace? And Clarissa is not—any more than the Life of Johnson is the Life of Johnson when you read one third of it, Clarissa is not Clarissa when you read one quarter of it. All study is necessarily partial and limited, and what it tends to do is to sharpen and maybe even to madden an appetite that you begin with, an appetite which it can’t possibly satisfy. So if you argue that trying to teach this kind of— you see, I’m not being as crazy as I was a couple of years ago when I asked you to read the Life of Johnson in one week. And by the way there were people who did remarkably well in that class. There were people I think who probably did at least half the reading in time, and I was very grateful to them. Well, you don’t have anything like that problem. It isn’t that hard to read four hundred pages, provided you’re not expected to memorize them, or scan them, or whatever it is that your teachers are having you do in literary studies these days—or discover what deconstructive elements are being manifested in them. So I don’t think that I’m proposing an impractical, or certainly not an impossible kind of series of assignments. And I don’t know of more interesting material in English literature. You may not believe that—the first assignment—but if that’s true—I think it probably will only be the first assignment, so we might as well get it out of the way. I’ll give you the first assignment. I’m assuming that the volume still has approximately the same selections that it had in this much earlier edition, which is the only one that I have available to me at the moment. You ought to read the introduction. Then I would like you to read the poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” all of the essays from The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler, and finally Rasselas. Is that clear? For those of you who’d like 270

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell to go ahead I would say that for the following week we’ll read everything else in the volume. Yes? STUDENT: Can you repeat the essays? MUDRICK: All of the essays. I didn’t really even have to tell you from where because I would like you to read all the essays that are presented—but none of the criticism, none of the biography, none of the poetry except “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” none of the Prayers and Meditations, none of the letters, none of the biography. So the assignment is clear, in addition to which you’ll be reading two hundred or more pages of the Life of Johnson. I would strongly advise you to—I was going to say take notes, but I don’t know what taking notes means to most of you. I have a bad memory and I can’t recollect very well unless I take notes of some kind. I don’t know how you people—I don’t mean long, carefully organized notes, I mean even things like a question mark in the margin or an exclamation point. I think you’re best off to do it in the book itself. I developed a bad habit when I was young because I had no books—the only books that were available to me were books I took out of the library. And it used to infuriate me when I saw marks in books from the library, so I resolved never to put a mark in a book from a library, and so the notes that I take, I take on separate pieces of paper. But that’s just my problem. If it’s your book, don’t try to save it for resale by not marking in it; you really ought to mark in it. And whatever shorthand way you find of reminding yourself how you react to something, use. It might be just marks of punctuation, it might be abbreviations—I don’t know. STUDENT: What you were saying—I’m thinking about the paper now. MUDRICK: All right. STUDENT: When we’re writing our paper are we recapping what we read? MUDRICK: It’s a fair question: Are you just expected to give me a synopsis? Well, you really can’t give a synopsis of a life anyway—I mean he was born, he lived, he died. It’s not like a novel. STUDENT: Can we pick an aspect out of it [inaudible]? MUDRICK: You can do that, provided you don’t give me the impression that you picked an important aspect which fits exactly between page 212 and page 298 and doesn’t include anything else in the material. That would bother me. One kind of paper I think has worked out very well is a paper which consists almost exclusively of notes. That is, instead of trying a highfalutin organization in which you’re going to prove something or other, you simply comment on something that has caught your attention or particularly interested you, here and there and somewhere else, and that maybe, as it seems to you, shows us something about Johnson and/or Boswell that is interesting to you. I think the worst kind of paper to encourage students to write is the kind of paper that most teachers, as far as I know, practically require students to write, which is a thesis paper in which you’re going to prove something about the books and the writer that you’re talking about. I don’t want you proving anything about Boswell or Johnson. There’s nothing to prove, for one thing. Literature isn’t like that. It’s not really like geometry or physics. You don’t prove 271

Mudrick Transcribed things in literature. You maybe show things but you don’t prove them. Certainly some of the best papers I’ve ever got are papers which consist in a series of notes, not particularly organized in any way except that they keep dealing with the material at hand. Any other questions about the paper? STUDENT: You keep on mentioning Boswell. Are you talking about Boswell from the Life of Johnson? MUDRICK: [Inaudible] as these people interpenetrate, especially. Much of what we know about Johnson we know only because Boswell is reporting it to us, very often because Boswell is the only person there. That is, Boswell will be visiting Johnson at Johnson’s home and Johnson will say certain things. And you could argue (if you were crazy or perverse) that Boswell was inventing all this stuff, that Johnson never said any of it, that it’s just the sort of thing that Boswell wants Johnson to say. You will know a lot about Boswell at the end of this quarter, and some of it will come from what Boswell has to say about Johnson. I wish—I mean if I had the choice I would have given you more, considerably more of Boswell’s journals, but they’re not inexpensively available except for the London Journal. The London Journal is fascinating. I don’t know whether I’m just reacting against the popular notion, but I think I would argue that it’s not really the best of the journals, it’s just what we have that’s available. And it reads rather like a novel, and it’s the young Boswell, and it’s got an interesting and amusing love affair in it and so on, so we can do it. And it also presents the first meeting between Johnson and Boswell, so that’s useful. STUDENT: How much was Johnson Boswell’s senior? MUDRICK: Johnson was born in 1709 and Boswell was born in 1740: thirty-one years. Any further questions before we take a break? and then those of you who are interested will come back after say a fifteen minute break. You have no—yes? STUDENT: How long did you want the paper? MUDRICK: I said, apparently before you came in, that I would expect about five to eight double-spaced typed pages. Okay. Those of you who are interested in taking the class will be back in fifteen minutes. MUDRICK: [Inaudible.] I’m not in the best of physical conditions, so I can’t really do it alone—more than usual I can’t do it alone. But I’m particularly interested in any further questions or observations that may have occurred to you during the break, even disagreements that you might have. Don’t hesitate to disagree with me because you feel that I’m some sort of fanatic who is amusing myself by feeding on one teat of the university while I attack all the other [inaudible]. Yes? STUDENT: Well, it occurred to me that [inaudible] the most important reading is the Johnson book, and then everything else we read, we read as we read the Johnson book. [Inaudible] skim it, just to get an idea so you can participate in class. MUDRICK: I don’t know why you would get that idea, because in the first place you’re expected to write a paper on it. Of course different people mean different things by skimming. If by skimming you mean what I call reading then we have no 272

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell disagreement. That is, what most people call reading I call—I mean most people in the university or what they would like you to think of as reading—I call simply some religious exercise that I’m not interested in. But I rather doubt that that’s what you mean. STUDENT: Well, what I was saying is that the priority is with the Johnson book because it’s the one we’re really going to have to concentrate on for the paper, take notes on . . . MUDRICK: Well, I’m a little bothered by the way you’re putting it. You’re putting it in a way which sounds—it sounds like the kind of argument that a student brings up when he comes into class with his little gimlet eyes, shiny, beady, and he says, How much work do I have to do to get four units in this class? Or, What do I have to do to get a B minus? STUDENT: No, I didn’t mean it like that, I just meant— MUDRICK: Well, I want you to read everything! and I want you to read everything with interest. And I think it’s perfectly possible that some of you will read, say, the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with more interest than you will read the Life of Johnson. Another thing that I occasionally say to my classes, especially at the beginning: there’s so much misunderstanding about teaching, teaching of literature, that as soon as you begin talking about it, all sorts of instances occur. And as I say, it’s perfectly possible that some of you simply think of me as the ugly little bird that fouls the nest that is protecting it, and so on. . . . And that image amused me at the moment—I saw myself as a little bird sitting in shit [laughter], so I forgot what it was that I was going to say. How did I start anyway? STUDENT: Something about doing all the reading? MUDRICK: Yeah—certainly came out of that. STUDENT: Or what about the [inaudible] little student with the gimlet eyes? [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Yeah—that was taken care of, though. Wait a minute, it’ll occur to me. The question of what constitutes reading and . . . yeah . . . oh yes—I know. Another notion is that there’s a kind of universal stock exchange of quotations on literature, and that the purpose of every class is to get the students to agree with the professor on the rating of all the books that are contained within that course. And as soon as you begin to think about this you realize how ridiculous it is. Why should you react to the Life of Johnson say the way I do, or to the London Journal? Not only can’t I expect you to, but it would be unnatural, completely unnatural for you to react that way. We’re separated by two full generations essentially—I mean most of you are young enough to be my grandchildren. And of course I’ve been doing all this reading all this time. I don’t mean that a lot of reading necessarily makes me brighter, I mean a lot of reading and a lot of aging and a lot of coming apart make me very different from you. And certainly it means that we can’t possibly share many opinions about things. And the notion that we share all sorts of attitudes toward the same books is of course ridiculous on the face of it. I think that the study of all the arts is based on an impossibility which you simply have to face bravely and go on as if it doesn’t exist, and try to do as much 273

Mudrick Transcribed with the limitations of the situation as possible. That is, don’t fake, don’t lie. It may be, for instance, that you will be bored silly by Rasselas—as I know I was when I was your age. In fact, to confess not a very great confession: I’m pretty well bored by it now [laughing]. Because in respect of my reaction to something like Rasselas I am more like what I was at eighteen than I am in many other ways. You may also be bored by Johnson’s essays. In fact I would be a little surprised and bothered by any eighteen- or twenty-year-old who plunged with riveting excitement into Johnson’s essays. I would think there was something wrong with you, or that you were—not really something wrong with you, you’re just lying. There’s no solution to this problem, as there are no solutions to most of the problems in life—most of the interesting problems. You just go ahead and read. You will discover that there are things that you will come back to as you get older. The study of literature has nothing to do with the establishment of order of value. I say that, and I’m a little nervous about it. I don’t mean that I think that a person who reads the Life of Johnson and then reads, say the next day, the latest novel by Judith Krantz, and decides that the Life of Johnson is fairly interesting but the Judith Krantz novel really is more interesting—I mean, there are incorrigibles in life. There are people who are simply untouched by human experience, untouchable by human experience. Or, they have simply been so badly educated—maybe they’re like me with respect to say painting. I look at a painting, it looks nice to me and so on: it has really no effect on me at all. I can recognize certain people in portrait painting; I can say that I enjoy looking at the elderly man that Rembrandt paints who happens to be himself as an elderly man—and I do, I find it interesting. But I certainly have nothing like the reaction to painting that I have to literature and especially that I have to music. So I don’t meant that there aren’t differences in feeling from one person to the next, even irrespective of age. But you have to understand that, to begin with, I am assuming that anybody who takes a class in Johnson and Boswell has some kind of interest in reading and writing. You have that interest; you wouldn’t be here otherwise. And this is where the problem shows up, because you are young . . . I said to some of you on other occasions that when I was your age my favorite poet was A. E. Housman, my favorite novelist was Thomas Wolfe . . . I don’t mean that I didn’t read the assignments that I was given in class: I realized that Shakespeare was someone that I was supposed to admire and I did, and I admired him for all the right reasons that my teachers told me to admire him for, and so on. I am saying that you mustn’t get into the habit of lying to yourself. Lie to other people, but don’t lie to yourself. If you want to lie to teachers because they force you to lie—that is, they want you to say that you like this, and this is why you like it—okay, do it, because you want to get the units and you want to graduate. But don’t lie to yourself, don’t pump up a phony enthusiasm for something which isn’t terribly interesting to you now, it may puzzle you . . . One of the reasons for reading in a, what I would call skimming away is that you can get on with it—that is, you can get on to something else. 274

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell There are all these books that you haven’t read yet, and the Life of Johnson is one of these books that you have to read. So get on with it, and read it. And Johnson’s essays, if you haven’t read them, you’ve got to read them. You may decide after you’ve read them that you would never want to read them again, but you’ve got to read them, that’s all. I’m trying to think of analogies in ordinary life. There are experiences that you have to have if you have certain kinds of interests. If you have literary interests you simply have to read the Life of Johnson. And you have to get some sense of the relationship between Johnson and Boswell, because it’s the most interesting relationship we know of exclusively through literature. We don’t know of it in any other way; that’s the way we know it. And it’s wonderful that literature is able to do this and it’s interesting to try to figure out, to some extent anyway, how it does it. I’m trying to get you to loosen up a little, as much as is possible in a university English class—I know it’s fairly hard, and I honor you for being willing to take a class like this. It’s not the ordinary kind of class that people take in literary studies. It’s not like novels, it’s not like certain kinds of poetry, it’s not like certain kinds of drama. The forms are not forms which excite most people in the twentieth century. Certainly we’re not interested in moral essays anymore; we’re not particularly interested in biography; we’re not interested in close accounts of things. So I’m grateful that you’re here to begin with, and I assume it’s because you have some at least initial, initiating interest in the material. Yes? STUDENT: When I saw this listed in the class list I said to myself, God, I’m a literature major, and I don’t even know who the hell these guys are. MUDRICK: Well, that’s an admirable way of reacting to it. STUDENT: And when I come to a class like this one—I love reading, I like to write, but I like to learn, too, learn from somebody else’s experiences. MUDRICK: Those are three admirable tendencies. STUDENT: But the learning part is something that interests me—from reading about these guys, what can I learn from them that I can pick up still today? MUDRICK: All right—that’s a good way, and if you have these impulses which have led you to speak as you’ve spoken just now, try to remind yourself in the course of the quarter that every time you have an impulse like that in the class and don’t exercise it almost immediately, you are damaging the class. Because if you said it at that moment you would enable us to get some sort of vibration from your reaction, which we lose forever because you haven’t told us. So for instance if you hadn’t said what you said just then—and what you said, I think, was admirable, and as far as I know it’s entirely true. So one of the things that happen when people speak as you just spoke is that other people are encouraged to speak in similar personal ways. And ideally, what I would want you to feel like is the way Boswell felt on that January day in 1776 when he confided to his journal: I have a strange feeling as if I would like everything to be known about me. I don’t mean that we’re going to “share”; I’m talking about our connection with literature, with 275

Mudrick Transcribed this material, because the class has a subject. And what you said, of course, did relate to a personal concern, to the material of this course, and I am grateful for that. And unless as many of you as possible react in this way during the quarter it’s going to be a very dead class. The class has no artificial excitement in it, it really doesn’t. This is not the sort of material that almost anybody in this class would have been likely to pick up to read just for fun, say, when he was a high school senior—that sort of thing. And that means that you’re going to have to make an effort. Yes? STUDENT: So we’re each going to have the opportunity to tell our personal feelings towards— MUDRICK: I sure hope so. You understand, I’m not talking about confessional sessions [laughter]; I’m talking about something very similar to what you said; that is—although what he said is at the very beginning of such a discussion—that is, he said he’s interested in reading, interested in writing . . . I forgot the third thing he said—and he would like to learn, yes. Well, those are admirable ways to begin, those are the—that’s where to begin. And then the issue is: How do you react to this? What do you make of somebody like Johnson telling you, let’s say, how you’re supposed to behave under certain circumstances? What does it mean to write a moral essay? What does it mean to read one? Is it interesting anymore? Is it just something left over from a previous age which we really can’t take seriously anymore? STUDENT: That’s what I want to know, is it interesting— MUDRICK: Well, absolutely. And this is one of the questions you have to ask yourself. It’s a question that I would prefer that you not ask in quite that way in class; what I would prefer you to say is something like, Okay, so Johnson says that people don’t lie about the pleasures that they take. Does that seem to you to be true under all circumstances? For instance doesn’t it seem to you that under this particular set of circumstances is that not so? and so on. Be as specific and explicit as possible. Try to keep things from simply evaporating in discussion. I did not say that Johnson was the greatest writer that ever lived, I did not say that he was uniformly and unquestionably interesting at every point. I think he almost is in the Life of Johnson; I don’t think he necessarily is in his own writing. STUDENT: I’m finding that the London Journal and the Life of Johnson get more interesting after Boswell meets Johnson. MUDRICK: Sure, because Johnson is his ideal subject. It’s as if he’s waited all his life to run into a man like Johnson. It really is like a guy who’s been playing, let’s say, for the Ventura Tiger Cats, and is maybe hitting .850 against high school pitchers, and all of a sudden he discovers that he’s in the major leagues. And it turns out that he can hit, he can throw, he can field—that he can do everything that he has to do. No, that’s true. And a lot of the time you almost feel impatient with Boswell for reporting some of the conversation that he records among the people that he’s associating with before he meets Johnson. Why bother, you keep saying to yourself, when he’s going to have Johnson soon? Sure. 276

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell STUDENT: And in the Life there’s lots of query letters of Johnson’s, and business— things that he’d been doing. But when he talks to people who later told Boswell what had been said—there’s a lot of that before he meets Johnson. MUDRICK: Yes. Oh yeah, Boswell was very conscientious, very diligent about collecting a lot of Johnson material outside the purview of his own immediate acquaintance with him; that is, he got in touch with people who knew Johnson when Johnson was a kid, when he was elsewhere . . . After all—I’ve forgotten— somebody calculated once exactly how much time Boswell spent with Johnson. Did you find it in any of your material? STUDENT: I think Pottle says like only a couple of months.a MUDRICK: Yeah—a very short time, astonishingly short time when you think, for instance, that they met in 1763 and Johnson died in ’84, so they knew each other for twenty-one years. And they were very close friends. But of course Boswell was Scottish, he lived primarily in Edinburgh, and he had all sorts of family and professional obligations there, and Johnson was in London. And Boswell could get down there usually only once a year for about a month. And sometimes he missed. Any other questions or comments? Yes? STUDENT: I just wanted to clear something that was in my mind. Basically class discussion is going to be on the other stuff, and we’re going to be reading the Life of Johnson as we go through. MUDRICK: Yeah, I would prefer that we not really discuss the Life of Johnson during the earlier meetings, unless you have what seems to you a question which is closely related to the material that we are otherwise reading. STUDENT: And then we’ll talk about it after we write the papers? MUDRICK: Oh yes. No, I’m assuming that the last three weeks of the quarter we’ll be talking about the Life of Johnson. STUDENT: I was curious—I take it our grade is based entirely on our paper. MUDRICK: No, not entirely. STUDENT: And also on— MUDRICK: Absolutely, on your regular attendance and on class discussion. STUDENT: Okay, that’s all I wanted to know. MUDRICK: Absolutely. STUDENT: That’s why—before when I said should I first read Johnson and then the other—that’s why I was I inquiring about . . . MUDRICK: No, I understand. And by the way I understand entirely why you people are as anxious as you are about what the teacher expects you to do, because a lot of teachers simply assume that it’s crystal clear what any rational person would expect to do in a university class, when it turns out that this guy has all sorts of eccentric ideas about what students should do—not only eccentric, but of course wildly impractical and so on. So I’m not blaming you, I’m talking about another kind of student who— STUDENT: Beady eyes . . . Actually one year and two months.

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Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: Yeah, yeah, the beady eyes—just trying to beat [inaudible]. STUDENT: Do you have office hours? MUDRICK: Yes. The office hours that will be listed are twelve to one on Monday through Thursday. I’ll make now about forty-seven qualifications. [Laughter.] I’m not well, I’m trying to recover from something, so I’ve been staying away. As those of you know who have taken me in the past, I’m ordinarily available for hours and hours every day of the week. But I haven’t really been able to stick around school much lately. I hope that by next week I’ll be better and will be available. The days I prefer you not to come in—unless you have an immediate, practical question, I mean not something that you want to talk about at length—are Tuesdays and Thursdays, because I teach Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. The best days are Mondays and Wednesdays. The best times are indeed between twelve and one. But ordinarily (if I ever pull myself together) I’m usually around, oh, I would say at least a half hour or an hour before noon, and if anything interesting is going on I will usually stay until two or even as late as three to talk with students. STUDENT: Where is your office? MUDRICK: South Hall 1718. Just around the corner. Any other questions? STUDENT: Do you have a phone number at your office? MUDRICK: Yes: 2428. Oh—well, of course, if you’re calling from off-campus you stick a 961 in front of it. By the way, if you have serious questions and you’re in something of a tizzy, and it’s at a reasonable hour, I don’t have any objection to your phoning me at home. And I am in the book, I’m listed. STUDENT: Did Johnson know much about the biography that Boswell was going to write? MUDRICK: He knew that Boswell was going to write a biography. STUDENT: Did he know what the length was going to be? MUDRICK: I don’t think he could have dreamed that Boswell would do the book Boswell was going to do. Well, nobody could have. The Life is unprecedented. Nobody had ever dreamed of doing anything like that before, and it’s never been done since. There have been other very long biographies since, but you may remember that one of the things Johnson said was that no man can write a biography of a man whom he hasn’t spent intimate hours with—that is, you have to know the person personally. And of course not only did Boswell have that experience, limited as it was, with Johnson, but he was also, to put it as briefly as possible, the greatest biographer who ever lived. Nobody knew this at the time—nobody could know it. His combination of qualities—all of his qualities: his virtues, even his silliness—he was willing to make a fool of himself in order to show certain things about Johnson that couldn’t otherwise have been shown, and sometimes he made a fool of himself because he didn’t know he was making a fool of himself. He’s one of the most interesting instances of a great man that I know—he’s a great man who doesn’t know that he’s a great man, and I think this is very rare. I think that almost the rarest thing in history is a person of very great qualities who doesn’t know that he’s great. 278

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell The notion of humility is a notion you have to be extremely careful with. For instance it always amuses me that Christians are great ones for talking about the virtue of humility. One of the biggest snots in history, on the basis of the Gospels, is Jesus. He’s always talking down his nose at people. I don’t mean that makes me like him; it makes me detest him, as a matter of fact—he’s a real pain in the ass. It just amuses me that the Christians tell you that humility is a great virtue. One of the reasons I thought of this, by the way, is that Bronson in his introduction goes on at great length about Johnson’s Christian humility [inaudible]. I think he’s wrong about Johnson. I’m not prepared at the moment to tell you exactly how I think he’s wrong. I don’t think it’s a terribly interesting notion. That is, he ascribes a lot of Johnson’s personality simply to the fact that he had Christian humility. Well, the fact is that Johnson had virtually all the qualities that he had later at a time when he had not yet become a believing Christian. I think that people are relatively seldom determined in their personalities and natures by convictions about one thing or another that they have. I think it’s just the reverse, as a matter of fact—that their natures are likely to be responsible for the convictions that they have. That is, if you have a certain kind of nature you will have certain convictions. STUDENT: Did that happen to Boswell? MUDRICK: Did what happen? STUDENT: Did his convictions change because of his nature or— MUDRICK: I said that Boswell—and he knew this perfectly well—was one of those people who found it extremely hard to have convictions, and he thought of this as a terrible weakness and a kind of failure of intelligence. Because all of the people who were praised to him, and certainly Johnson, had very strong convictions. Boswell had virtually no strong convictions, and he didn’t understand why that should be so unless he was stupid. There’s a wonderful—I’ve written a great deal on both Johnson and Boswell and I should have brought one of the pieces in which I quote . . . People, for instance, didn’t feel any shame whatever about insulting Boswell to his face, and he took this very meekly and generally believed what he was told. So that a friend of his father’s one day said to him (because Boswell was going on about something or other) he said, You know nothing. And Boswell said, I realized that he was right. But of course that’s not true—Boswell knew a great deal. Don’t ever let yourself get persuaded by some English prof that Boswell wasn’t a very well-educated man—he was. One of the amusing things occasionally in the Life is to see Boswell arguing a point about Latin verse with Dr. Johnson. And he’s often right, and Johnson is wrong. He read all that stuff. He really read it, and he knew it. He was, by the standards of the time, a very well-educated man. But he understood human power to be a matter of convictions. And it’s certainly interesting that he fixed on the man who gives one more of a sense of the importance of human convictions than probably any other human being who ever lived—Dr. Johnson. But Boswell had virtually no convictions. And so he’s much more like us than he’s like Johnson. We have 279

Mudrick Transcribed no convictions. We live situationally all the time. We live on the basis of the best we can derive from the situation that we happen to be in at the moment. And that’s the way Boswell is. And he didn’t know how to live otherwise. He’s really in the wrong century. He’s also lovable. Johnson loved him, and was also often very much irritated by him. He’s a wonderfully interesting man. I mean Johnson obviously is a wonderfully interesting man—one doesn’t have to say it—but what one has to say over and over again, because it’s so often denied by people who regard themselves as having some authority in the matter, is that Boswell is just as interesting as Johnson. Which is not to say he’s just as great . . . all the other epithets that one thinks of. I don’t know what qualification one can make. Boswell is the person whose biography has not been written. He is the most important figure whose biography has not been written, and whose autobiography is more interesting than any other biography in the world—that is, the journals that he wrote. And I love him, I’m very very fond of him. I’m fond of him for one reason—you know that way in which we’re so intimidated by the great? and Boswell is the greatest person I know of who had no notion of how great he was. I can’t think of any others. If anything like that ever occurs to any of you I wish you’d say so. It’s just to me an interesting notion: Do great people always know that they’re great? Do they have a much more than merely approximate idea of how great they are? I do think so, but I’d be very interested to hear what some of you have to say about, say, certain historical figures. Now obviously a lot of historical people vastly exaggerate their own importance, their own greatness. Almost nobody underestimates his own importance. Boswell is the greatest person that I know of who underestimates his own importance. Yes? STUDENT: What about George Eliot? She seems very, I don’t know, modest. MUDRICK: Why in the world would you have brought up George Eliot? Do you know her well? Have you read her— STUDENT: No. I’ve read [inaudible]. She was very self-depreci . . . MUDRICK: Oh yes, but just in a kind of Victorian-lady way. No, she was very highly regarded, and say for instance somebody like Trollope praised her enthusiastically, and she was very enthusiastically and even reverentially reviewed, and she was regarded by many people as the greatest novelist of the time, greater than even Dickens or, as they would have put it in those days, greater even than Thackeray, because Thackeray is one of the Victorians whose reputation has declined more or less precipitously in our century. And certainly, nobody would have questioned that she was greater than Trollope. But of course that’s not true [laughs]: Trollope is a much better novelist than George Eliot, much more important. Trollope didn’t know it—Trollope by the way is another great man who didn’t know that he was as great as he was. The discrepancy is not as much, not as extreme as it is in Boswell, but it’s still surprisingly extreme. If you’re seriously interested in literature, I think questions like this are likely to swim around in your head all the time. STUDENT: Do you think there are historical figures who are great but don’t think so? 280

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell MUDRICK: I just said so. I don’t see what you’re getting at. STUDENT: That’s what you think? MUDRICK: Oh, I certainly do. STUDENT: What about Cromwell? MUDRICK: Cromwell certainly thought he was a great man. You mean do I think that he was a great man? STUDENT: No—he seemed to be very humble. MUDRICK: Oh, no. I don’t know where you people get ideas like that. I mean maybe Cromwell would express himself humbly for what might be called token religious reasons, that is, the kind of Christianity he professed. No, there’s no question that Cromwell thought of himself as the man of the hour. That’s almost always true, almost necessarily true of political figures. I don’t really think you can be a modest politician—I mean if you’re an effective one. For one thing an effective politician almost invariably exaggerates the importance of his trade. Politics is not as important as politicians think it is, and doesn’t have nearly as much effect on human life as politicians would like to think it does. Yes? STUDENT: What do you think about Schubert as composer? MUDRICK: Well, he’s certainly very very great. If you asked me, Do I think that Schubert had any idea of how great he was— STUDENT: I guess I’m thinking of a comparison possibly to Mozart, Beethoven—Beethoven certainly thought . . . MUDRICK: Oh, Mozart knew exactly how great he was, no question about that. Beethoven knew exactly how good he was. STUDENT: In comparison to them—I’m trying to remember back, a couple of years ago, to that— MUDRICK: The class in music? STUDENT: The class. And it seems to me, if I remember, that Schubert didn’t seem to have quite as close a knowledge to— MUDRICK: No, I think that’s true. I think that Schubert had a very good idea that he was very good. Don’t forget also that Schubert died exceptionally young—he died at thirty-one. I think that Beethoven at thirty-one, though of course he was a very self-confident young man, I don’t think he would have dared compare himself to say somebody like Mozart. That’s an interesting notion, though, and I’m glad that you brought it up, I mean I’m glad that you’re thinking along those lines. Because doesn’t it seem to you an interesting notion that people should be great and not know that they are? STUDENT: Yeah, and that’s what kind of made me think of Schubert, because I realized that most of the other great composers, they knew it. I mean someone like Mozart, he was less obnoxious about it than Beethoven—I mean Beethoven was certainly— MUDRICK: No, I know what you’re saying— STUDENT: But Schubert seemed to be much less—I mean it just seemed that way to me. MUDRICK: I think he is. For one thing it depends on other personal qualities—how much these feelings are expressed. Schubert was one of the great composers who 281

Mudrick Transcribed were very social: he had a lot of friends, he loved musical evenings, he performed at them all the time. However Beethoven started out, eventually his deafness prevented him from doing anything like that. Mozart, though I think he was fundamentally a social person and even very sociable, had led such an irregular early life—that is, almost half of Mozart’s life was spent travelling around Europe, trying to get some sort of post at a court—that he didn’t really have time to accumulate any friends. I think Mozart could very easily have been a kind of Schubert, in the sense of holding musical evenings in Vienna and composing for friends, but he just never had the opportunity. Haydn is another person that I think might well have done something like that. He didn’t have the opportunity because he was somebody’s servant, turning out music regularly in the course of the week. But I like talk like this, and some of you may feel, My God, is that what we’re going to be fed for the rest of the quarter, and are we ever going to get back to Boswell or Johnson? Well, that’s up to you. For me, my interest is in having the class interesting. And if you can make the class interesting by sticking with Boswell and Johnson, that’s fine with me, I don’t have any objection to that at all. On the other hand, if the only way you can help me make the class interesting is to talk about Schubert and Mozart, that’s all right too. I don’t see any harm in talking about Schubert and Mozart—they seem to me fine people [smiling]. Yes? STUDENT: It occurs to me, it’s certainly something that makes Boswell, I suppose, likable. But it seems a discontinuity if he can recognize Johnson as somebody great and not detect whatever qualities he’s admiring in Johnson in himself. MUDRICK: Well, one of the reasons he doesn’t detect those qualities is that he doesn’t have them. [Laughs.] I mean the qualities that he admires in Johnson are qualities which he doesn’t have. He admires Johnson’s very strong convictions, he admires Johnson’s mastery of certain literary genres—which he doesn’t have. You see, the sort of thing that Boswell was mostly writing was not taken seriously at all in the eighteenth century. Nobody would have regarded writing journals as a serious literary activity in the eighteenth century. It was what he could do, so he did it. He did a few other things which are essentially compilations from his journals; that is, the books that he did publish during his lifetime obviously couldn’t have existed unless the journals existed, because those books were mined out of the journals. But still, he would have thought of the journals as raw material. And in fact they aren’t raw material, they’re the real stuff. They’re not even ore, they’re gold. There is a sense in which what he produced from them is the ore and they are the gold. (Figure that? I’m not going to try to retranslate that.) STUDENT: That’s sort of the thing I’m thinking of—his greatness is so [inaudible] talking about two great men that are great [inaudible]— MUDRICK: I didn’t mean to exclude women, by the way. STUDENT: No, I didn’t [inaudible] either. I wasn’t thinking about historical figures at all, I was thinking about teachers—I mean I would think people that to me are greater than [inaudible]. I was thinking about whether or not maybe they were [inaudible]. I was thinking it all through that way, but it’s really hard to know 282

From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell what exactly you’ve been talking about because Johnson was—people would stop him on the street and say, You’re a great man— MUDRICK: Oh, of course. STUDENT: During his time, say, there were people who probably turned into great men, women, later—or maybe can’t anymore because they’ve slipped through. I mean they weren’t [inaudible] the standards by which people judged them and because they weren’t— MUDRICK: You understand, there were plenty of people in the eighteenth century who would have been stopped by the same people on the street who said, You are a great man, who were not great men. STUDENT: [Inaudible] meet them, but I’m sure they were there. MUDRICK: Yes, they were there. Even people who were very distinguished—for instance if you asked me, Is Edmund Burke a great man? Is David Hume a great man? Oh, of course I’d have to say yes, they’re great men. But there is also a sense in which, talking as I am about Johnson and Boswell, I would say, In the sense in which I am now trying to define and narrowly circumscribe the notion of greatness, no, they are not great men. They are not great men in the sense in which Boswell and Johnson are in their very different ways. That is, Johnson and Boswell somehow incorporate a range and variety of human experience that these other people do not—that those other people are in niches. They’re in niches, and they’re wonderful, and it’s marvelous that we have them, and I love them and admire them, but I don’t think about them all the time. And I can’t help thinking about Johnson and Boswell all the time. Maybe that’s a way to put it, that the really great are those you can’t help thinking about all the time. Yes? STUDENT: I don’t know whether it came up before I came in—Pushkin said that he was a great man at a time that almost nobody else seemed to— MUDRICK: Yes—indeed he did. STUDENT: —wrote a poem about it. MUDRICK: Yes. And he’s interesting too because he has such a disarmingly likable attitude toward his notion, toward his awareness of his greatness. STUDENT: It wasn’t really a personal— MUDRICK: No, that’s right. (It’s funny, you used that in the same way in which–it’s almost the only interesting thing in The Great Gatsby, when Gatsby says something like, But it’s nothing personal. And I’ve forgotten what he says it about, some kind of love affair—it’s just a crazy thing that he says.) That’s exactly right: Pushkin was a wonderfully interesting and attractive young man who happened to know that he was the greatest Russian poet who ever lived, and the greatest Russian literary figure. And somehow it didn’t affect his likableness, his coltishness, his kiddishness—or his greatness [Laughs.]. He just seems to have escaped, he seems not to have been destroyed or limited in any way by self-consciousness. STUDENT: Do you [inaudible]? I mean, it’s so hard to get published, and the desire to publish [inaudible] incorporate something— MUDRICK: Oh, Boswell desperately wanted to be published and tried every trick imaginable, but that didn’t help him think he was a great man. I think he would 283

Mudrick Transcribed have felt, as a lot of writers through all history have felt: Somehow if I get published I’ll be able to think more highly of myself than I do now. STUDENT: Then that would be the validation? MUDRICK: Something like that. But if you need a validation, then don’t bother getting the coupon. [Laughs.] I mean, the validation is internal or it doesn’t exist. Nobody had to tell Johnson that he was a great man—Johnson knew he was a great man. And Johnson too was almost completely unself-conscious about it. I would like to be more specific about the nature of Boswell’s ignorance. It wasn’t simply that he had no idea that he was a great man. He would wistfully have liked to be a great man, he would have done almost anything to be a great man, and there he was, being a great man without knowing it. He just had no idea that he was a great man. STUDENT: He would have liked to have been— MUDRICK: He would have done anything to be a great man. STUDENT: In Johnson’s terms or— MUDRICK: Well, in Johnson’s terms or in any terms that he would have understood. He regarded Burke as a great man, he regarded Sir Joshua Reynolds as a great man, and he was honored to be friends of theirs. STUDENT: [Inaudible] seeking out great men— MUDRICK: Absolutely, he was a hero-worshipper. He sought them out all the time. Because even if I am not great, he would say to himself, I can at least amuse and interest great men. See, one of the extraordinary facts about Boswell’s greatness is that somebody as great and as shrewd as Johnson kept being surprised even just by how smart Boswell was, and that’s unusual, that’s strange. I mean if you read the Life carefully and if you read the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides carefully, you will see that Johnson really, in spite of everything, thinks of Boswell as a kind of ninny, a kind of fool. And every once in a while Boswell will say something or do something that brings Johnson up short, as for instance when Johnson reads the part of the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. He says, My! This is very good! as if—you know you turn up something that a child has written, and this child has wistfully wanted you to say something nice, and all you feel for the child is fondness, I mean for your idiot child. But the child wants to be admired, and the child finally brings you a drawing and you [pretending to look at one], Hey, you know, that’s pretty good! And of course that’s even more insulting than criticism because what it means is, I wouldn’t have expected you would ever be able to produce anything that I could admire at all. And Johnson certainly isn’t a cruel man, and the last thing he is is a stupid man. So that Boswell fooled everybody. Nobody really knew in Boswell’s time, and very few people have known since, and certainly the people who write about Boswell, have known how smart Boswell is—and how great he is. (The two are not necessarily associated). STUDENT: I was thinking, maybe they didn’t get a chance to know him very well since he was in Scotland more than in England.

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From the First Meeting of a Class on Johnson and Boswell MUDRICK: No, they got to know him very well, they thought they knew him perfectly. They associated with him, he was very sociable, made jokes all the time, tried to amuse them . . . STUDENT: Was that his profession [inaudible] to be a man of letters? MUDRICK: Well, he would have wanted to be. He was by profession a lawyer. You get a lot of that, of course, in the Journal. Okay. Well, I like the way the discussion is going, and I hope that when you’re refreshed by reading the Johnson material for next week you will be able to come up with material for discussion at that time which is like this. I’m willing to carry on. Because I’m having so much difficulty, I’m not going to volunteer to carry on. But if any one has anything more to say or would like to ask a question or two before we dismiss the class, I’ll be very happy to carry on. STUDENT: I saw in the list of works by Johnson that he wrote some biographies. MUDRICK: Oh yes. STUDENT: I was wondering how they were different from Boswell’s biography. MUDRICK: You’ll have a chance to read next week. Oh, quite different—though interesting. I have a somewhat unorthodox notion of Johnson’s—you’re talking about the Lives of the Poets—and I probably oughtn’t to talk about that now. I’ll try talking about that when we get to the Lives themselves. Johnson wrote those Lives very very late in his own life, and I can’t think of—there’s no modern analogy to it. That is, when Johnson was already in his early seventies he was approached by a group of publishers who asked him to turn out these Lives of the Poets, introductory selections of their poetry. And Johnson himself was, at the time that he was approached, the leading literary figure in the English-speaking world. So you see how strange a thing that is. He was an old man, and he was a man who was absolutely assured of immortality, a great man. And from this vantage point or from this height he wrote what he wrote. And his style in those Lives is considerably more colloquial, considerably easier to read than the style of his early essays where he—well, I won’t go into now why I think he wrote them that way. But there are, as I think, certain other problems associated with his writing of the Lives which I’ll bring up when we talk about them. STUDENT: I don’t think it’s a modern analogy, but Harold Bloom, who— MUDRICK: Well— STUDENT: As a critic, not as a— MUDRICK: No, I know, but I’m sorry, I—the idea of comparing Harold Bloom with Sam Johnson is for me like, like what, like comparing Lloyd Webber with Franz Schubert. [Laughs.] Bloom’s just a nobody by comparison with Johnson. In addition to everything else he can’t write the English language, which seems to me objectionable in a person who’s being asked to write [inaudible]. But if you’re interested in my view of Harold Bloom, I wrote a piece on Bloom a few years ago in Harper’s and you’re welcome to look at it. In fact I could even give you a Xerox copy of it if you’re interested. STUDENT: [Inaudible.] I don’t know anything about him.

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Mudrick Transcribed MUDRICK: No no, but—okay, then I’m particularly sorry for how I’ve been talking because it sounds as if I’m trying to be snotty at your expense, and I’m not. I know that you would have been told favorable things about Bloom by other teachers, especially around here. STUDENT: For a person that—just knowing that he [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Yeah. Well, if you read my piece on him you’ll know a little bit about him, because I go into some detail about what he thinks, how he writes . . . where he belongs. [Laughs.] But that’s good—I mean, the last thing I want to do is to discourage you from making that kind of contribution. It’s certainly what the people who would ask him to do something like that would think that they were doing—you’re quite right, and so it was good of you to bring it up, and smart, whether you’ve read Bloom or not. Every generation of publishers would like to think that it’s getting the master in the field to write something which will he the last word on the people that he’s being asked to write about—that sort of thing. Say, in the last generation for instance, a group of publishers might ask Edmund Wilson to write the lives of the twentieth-century poets—that sort of thing. STUDENT: [Inaudible.] It sounded crazy what they’re asking him to do. MUDRICK: What are they asking him to do, by the way? STUDENT: It’s introductions to volumes and volumes—something that’s supposed to be complete. I have an article on it— MUDRICK: That’s like Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, yes. STUDENT: So it’s an incredible volume—it just seems silly on the face of it, but [inaudible] Johnson’s don’t seem silly to me, I think they’re really enjoyable. MUDRICK: Yes. I like Johnson’s comment to Mrs. Thrale when he was asked to do it. He said, I agreed to write lives of poets about whose lives I know virtually nothing, and whose poetry I know scarcely any better. He was a very honest man. So he set about doggedly reading as much of the stuff as he could stand in order to write what he wrote. Well, I am pleased by the way things are going so far. I hope the class interests you, and I hope the material—most important of all—I hope the material that you are reading . . . [End of tape.]

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Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? 5 November 1985

This talk was part of a symposium on art at the College of Creative Studies. MUDRICK: I was reminded on my way walking over here of a remark that Beethoven made about improvisation. He said, The test of a good improvisation was that when it was over it sounded like a completed composition. I don’t expect to be that successful, but this is an improvisation. I have certain notions that I start with, and I would be extremely grateful for comments and questions from the audience in the course of this series of observations, and in fact I’ll probably have to stop dead if you don’t comment. What I said to Hank when he asked me to talk to begin with—Hank knows this because this has been a kind of continuing discussion between us almost since—well, literally ever since the College began, because Hank is one of the original students. In fact I think Hank was one of the first two or three students that I recruited into the College, at San Marcos High School. Anyway, I told him then, and I told him maybe fifty-two times since then—at least once a year—that I have no response to painting and sculpture. I have to exempt one of the visual arts, at least if you can call ballet a visual art—it’s certainly partly a visual art—I do respond to that. But I confess, a large part of my response to that is due to the fact that it’s accompanied by music, which I am very fond of, and two, that it has the good sense to be danced primarily by women, which is the second reason that I tend to respond to it. But I don’t really respond to painting and sculpture. I recognize paintings and sculptures—I recognize styles. I can of course recognize a style as distinctive and idiomatic as say Rembrandt’s or Vermeer’s, but that’s about it. I can recognize people there, and I can recognize a certain grandeur maybe, but it doesn’t mean anything to me in the way in which it seems to me the arts have to mean things to people. I think that the response to the arts is probably more misrepresented in talk about it than almost any other human response. The only analogues that I can think of are responses to romantic love and religion. I think these responses are extremely difficult to analyze, and one way that they bear a close resemblance to each other is that to anybody who isn’t experiencing them they seem absolutely ridiculous. This is the one thing you can be sure of. If you’re religious an

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Mudrick Transcribed irreligious person, especially when you’re in the throes of some sort of revelation, regards you as out of your mind, and the same thing is likely to be true of romantic love, and the same thing exactly is true of response to the arts. And one of the strangest things about response to the arts is that when people write about the arts they don’t really bear this in mind. I was a participant in what was to be an interesting, a very interesting conversation just the other night, when I was making my usual categorical assertions about the incapacity of various critics, especially music critics, and I said that people who write about music in that way cannot possibly have any response to music. I was bringing up one of my favorite whipping boys, the man whom I occasionally jocularly call the worst writer who ever lived, that is, the music critic of the Los Angeles Times, Martin Bernheimer. And I was challenged that evening by somebody who said, “But suppose he just can’t write about it. Suppose he really does have a response.” And that dichotomy had never occurred to me before [laughing]. It was very shocking to me; I had to think about it awhile. But one thing that it made me think about was that I think that people have the wrong idea. I was also reminded of this when a graduate student told me about teaching a class in which he had a faculty observer there and Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion was being discussed. And according to the teaching assistant this was a very successful meeting. The students were responding and there were a lot of interesting things said, and the faculty observer seemed to be himself completely caught up by the discussion—interested by it, fascinated by it, moved by it, and so on—and so the TA felt very good about this. But afterward he began criticizing the class, and it was clear that he had entirely different notions of what ought to be said if you were acting as a critic from what you were to say if you were just responding to a book or just responding to casual discussion about the book. There were things that critics had to do which were different and which didn’t have anything to do with the direct response to a book. And that, of course, seems to me some sort of blasphemy. I don’t know how to respond to the arts except enthusiastically, or except with a great deal of feeling. And this is what I mean when I say that I don’t respond to painting and sculpture. I mean I can recognize, I can distinguish—I can do the sort of thing that this professor was doing with this TA. In fact I could probably teach a very good course in art history if no feeling were involved—if no feeling had to be involved. And of course in such classes, feeling usually isn’t involved. [Laughter.] But when I think of my own involvement in the arts, I think for instance of what a library meant to me when, say, I was seven or eight years old. I can remember walking to the neighborhood library, and this was one of the most exciting and breath-taking experiences of my life. I mean, the weekly walk to the library—infinite riches in a little room—unbelievable. And I can remember my first experiences of classical music, which were simply overpowering—I mean the same kind of experience that you get with (some people get anyway) with their first experience of romantic love. 288

Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? I remember my first response to ballet, and I remember that very well because that occurred when I was already at a relatively advanced age. I had seen ballet before and it had never meant anything to me. It had seemed to me a very artificial kind of art. I wasn’t particularly interested in the movements, which seemed to me very restricted. I liked listening to the music, but that was about it. And I was aware of some kind of gracefulness. But I remember that this friend of mine,a who happened to be very much interested in music and ballet and was quite a proselytizer for the arts that he was fond of, absolutely insisted one—one day I was in New York and there was a performance of Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker on, and he insisted that I go with him in spite of the fact that I said I had no interest in ballet. (This was in . . . Christmas of 1958.) And so I went. And just by accident one of the dancers in the performance was one of the very great dancers of all time, Allegra Kent, and as a matter of fact her partner that evening was Jacque D’Amboise—they were dancing the final pas de deux from The Nutcracker. And I was absolutely overwhelmed. And there, of course, the experience was a kind of compound experience, because not only did I fall in love with ballet but I fell in love with Allegra Kent, and which came first I have no idea. So that’s the way I understand response to the arts. And I also understand that those arts I don’t respond to seem slightly silly to me, and I always get the impression that people who seem to be responding to them are only pretending [laughter], that there is some kind of fraudulence going on. And I am not being persuaded—I’ll be polite, I won’t directly challenge them, most of the time. For instance you know how kids react when they hear, say, a trained soprano’s voice over the radio [squeals]—that sort of thing—that’s about my reaction [inaudible because of laughter]. When people tell me for instance that they went to this performance of kabuki and they were PROFOUNDLY MOVED and so on, well, I have several reasons for being extremely skeptical. For one thing I suspect that to respond to that kind of art which depends so very heavily on a particular culture, a culture to which all of us come very late and as a very foreign experience, it’s virtually impossible that—what’s going on is a kind of snobbery. When I look at it I see funny-looking people moving very slowly in very stately gestures, made up (as far as I’m concerned) like Halloween people. And I respect it, because I know that there are smart people who have responded to it and written about it. But I’m extremely skeptical of cross-cultural experiences. I think the arts are very closely related to certain cultures—they are born in certain cultures, and you have to grow up in that culture in order to be able to respond directly to it. It’s very much like romantic love in that respect. You grow up in certain cultures with certain predetermined notions of physical beauty and sexual attractiveness, and so if you see people who grew up in a different culture and have different appearances you’re much less likely to respond to them in that way. I would be very grateful for any comments at all, so—yes? B. H. Haggin.

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Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: How do you justify your response to classical music, then, if you weren’t raised in that culture? MUDRICK: Well, I’m raised in a culture in which classical music exists, I mean I grew up in Western culture and it’s a part of Western culture. And as a matter of fact, pop music is essentially, I mean it springs from the same roots. The music that I was responding to at the time, I mean the popular music of the time—music being played by the Big Bands, and sung by Bing Crosby and Russ Columbo— all that comes out of the same tradition. And George Gershwin for instance—I was listening to that sort of thing. The melodies of pop music at that time come out of the same sources from which classical music comes. This is not to say that when I first listened to classical music, say when I was five or ten, that it didn’t sound completely incomprehensible to me, and of course I was extremely suspicious of anybody who pretended to find it interesting. Now if you asked me what happens at the precise moment at which you fall in love, there I think we get into a problem which is one of the serious pedagogic problems of the arts. I mean trying to teach the arts is extremely difficult, because if you’re dealing with people who are already converted, essentially it’s just a kind of celebration. If you’re dealing with people who haven’t had any response at all, it’s very much like trying to evangelize in front of the library, I mean with young skeptics who know that you’re full of baloney and so on. There don’t seem to be any stages—I mean either you’re in love or you’re not—and how you get people to the point at which they fall in love I have no idea. You can use various seductive gestures—not if you’re a teacher, really. I mean, there the analogy breaks down, because obviously in romantic love there are certain biological attractions which can be formed, but in the arts this really can’t be done. I don’t know what made me go wild about books from the time I was about five years old or six years old, I can’t imagine why. I can’t imagine why it happened with me and with none of my brothers and sisters, who were certainly as smart as I was. Yes? STUDENT: A response to the art [inaudible] hard to see through the cultural context that they’re in. I always thought of art as touching on something, you know, bigger, something that you can’t really explain. And hopefully that comes through in some simple way like—I don’t know, it’s very hard to explain [laughs] obviously. But the movements just seem to be indicating something larger that I think of as being personal. MUDRICK: I don’t have any argument with that. I certainly think that the arts feel that way when you’re experiencing them. But they don’t feel that way when you’re not experiencing them [laughing], and that’s the other side of the coin; that, I think, is extremely interesting. I think it’s very interesting that there’s a human experience of that profundity and grandeur and intensity which is so insusceptible of analysis—except after the fact—after the fact you can talk about it as much as you want. For instance when I fell madly in love with classical music I ransacked the library for every book on music, read every piece of junk ever written on music, and it was all fascinating to me. I read books—I still remember one 290

Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? which—I mean I hate that man—it was called The Tune Detective. His name was Sigmund Spaeth, and he was on a radio program—one of those brain-trust radio programs—he identified the music. Well, what he did was to write a little book, and I fell into that book by sheer accident (it was one of the books I shouldn’t have read), in which what he did in order to make you like music was to attach words to symphonic themes. And it took me about forty years to get rid of some of his asinine themes. [Laughter.] But one I never got rid of, and every time I hear the opening theme of the Beethoven Ninth his unbelievable words come into my head: “Stand! The mighty Ninth is now at hand!” [Laughter.] I hope he is rotting in hell. [Laughter.] I mean he meant well, but it’s a very good instance of how the more you try the worse you do; that you don’t tamper with things like that. I remember another instance, a very peculiar crossing instance. I had a terrible time for years and years with the Beethoven Missa Solemnis because—some of you may remember at least the name of the radio comedian Eddie Cantor, who was very popular in those days—of course we all listened to him every Sunday night and so on. And he conducted a kind of mock-presidential campaign every four years—that is, Cantor for President—and he had an old tune which they sang, which was “We Want Cantor!” And unfortunately it was sung, as I discovered to my intense dismay about fifteen years later, to one of the major themes in the Missa Solemnis, which for me still carries [laughs] Eddie Cantor’s presidential campaign along with it [laughter]—I can’t get it out of my head. So there are unfortunate combinations—individual, freakish connections—which are made in minds. Yes? STUDENT: I have a lot of more particular questions, but what I’d like to ask just to start with is a different one, and one that I’m sure you must have thought of yourself for a long time. And I would like to ask, why do you think people make images? Because you must have pondered that question. It seems so . . . MUDRICK: Sure. I think probably most of you would have much better answers than I because you’re more interested in making images, so you would be answering your question from impulses that you have. Since I myself have never had a strong impulse to make a visual image, though like everybody else I’ve tried from time to time, I don’t really—I know what it feels like to want to sing and I know what it feels like to want to write, but I don’t really know what it feels like to want very much to make an image. STUDENT: I guess it’s kind of a tough question, because I can’t really answer it either. But people have had them for so long—they seem to have been making images as long as they’ve been writing or as long as any of the other arts have developed. I mean they seem to have gone hand in hand the whole way. MUDRICK: And one of the most astonishing things about the arts, of course—it’s one of the few little bits of prehistoric verification I can use, that is, the Lascaux Caves with the animals and so on. And those animals (as everybody seems to agree—I defer to your judgment) but nobody can improve on them artistically. So when Cro-Magnon man was walking the earth the arts were being done just 291

Mudrick Transcribed as well as they’re being done now. One of the things about the arts is that they are not progressive—in some ways they’re not progressive (you have to be very careful about that). But certainly, art can achieve a kind of perfection almost from the beginning. (It may extend itself in other areas.) I think the arts are the most mysterious of all human achievements, I think they’re absolutely inexplicable. That is, they are things you simply admire. They come out of resources of human nature that I don’t think anybody can begin to understand. I think for instance (I said this in a class in music that I taught) that is, when I say that for instance the arts are not progressive, then immediately I have to think of something like the flowering of classical music in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Vienna. And I do believe that the arts in that one instance probably were progressive. I think that things were discovered that could be done with music—with phrasing, with development, with dramatic emphases, with sheer length—that could never have been done before. There’s a nice neat little period that I like to define—there’s a period from, say, the maturity of Mozart and Haydn to the death of Schubert, which is a neat little fifty years. From 1778 to 1828, in and around one city in Europe, Vienna, was created the greatest art in human history. And I also happen to believe myself that a larger number of individual masterpieces was created in that time and in that place by four men than were created everywhere else in the world by every artist who ever existed. Okay, so you see I am very extreme in my admiration [laughter] of these people. And that kind of fact—if it is a fact, and I think most people who like music would say, Well, he’s being a little ridiculous; he’s excluding this and not counting that. But even that a statement like that could be made without my being hounded out of the room is an interesting instance of how mysterious the arts are, how absolutely incomprehensible they are. That this could have happened—I mean, for instance a composer like Haydn wrote faster than it’s possible to copy music. And so did Schubert, for that matter. Now these things are incomprehensible. There’s no way of describing or—there’s no way of explaining those things. You can describe them but you can’t explain them. You certainly can’t analyze them. And one of the jokes of the teaching of the arts is the effort to explain things like that. Okay, so we have a kind of general agreement, do we not, that the arts are discussable but they are not explainable—they are not analyzable—and that essentially you’re describing love experiences. And nothing is harder to describe, because all love experiences are idiosyncratic: they depend on the individual personality that’s having them. Now obviously since we share a common humanity, one person’s experience resembles another person’s experience to some extent. But how many people for instance have you known in your lives who seem to you to have had the same kind of experience, for a relatively large number of art works, that you have had? I can tell you myself that in my own lifetime I have known one person whose reactions to music seemed like mine, with whom I could share, really share the experience of classical music. Otherwise there are a 292

Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? lot of people who are saying things that are moderately interesting to me, some of which I agree with, most of which I don’t, and I’ll conduct polite conversations with them about music—but there’s no sharing. It’s like reading Dear Abby or something—that is, you’re reading about love, you’re not experiencing it. Yes? STUDENT: Don’t you think it’s education [inaudible]? MUDRICK: Well, I’m trying to do it now. [Laughs.] I think all education is impossible but necessary. Training is possible and also necessary, but all education is impossible. And I think that a person who begins with the notion that education is possible has already gone wrong; that everything we know is extremely personal, private, and idiosyncratic, and that what we’re trying to accomplish . . . For instance if I’m teaching a class in which I pretend to be teaching something about literature associated with music, but I’m just desperately trying to ignite a feeling for music in somebody else—all I’m waiting for is some sign of excitement. I’m not much interested in what they say except insofar as what they say indicates a direct excitement. And most of the time you don’t get any response at all, of course. It’s easy enough to conduct a fraudulent class in the arts. You can give students the illusion of learning something, because there are a lot of facts associated with the arts. Literary history for instance is extremely interesting quite apart from anything about books and the value of books. I love literary history—I love history, I think it’s fascinating, and I love to talk about it, and in a literature class you can do that. And you can even talk music history in a music class (though I try to do that less) and students can get the illusion that they’re finding out something about music or literature by listening to comments about literary history and musical history, but they’re not really. They’re in the state that I am in when I’m reading about Vermeer and Rembrandt and Van Gogh. And I can almost get . . . For instance when I’m reading Van Gogh’s letters—terrifically exciting, because he’s a very great writer and a marvelous human being, a wonderfully, wonderfully interesting human being. And I say to myself, He has to be a great painter—I want him to be a great painter, because anybody who writes like that has got to be a great painter. [Laughter.] Which is of course ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Yes? STUDENT: Can enthusiasm be taught? MUDRICK: I think you can get examples of it. I think if you see somebody being genuinely enthusiastic or excited, it’s sometimes catching. But I think sometimes it’s not so much catching like a disease, which is the way it should be. I mean you should get the disease; if you get the virus, okay. But if it’s catching in the sense that you are simply learning to imitate . . . Students are wonderful imitators, and all of you have had the experience of listening to a bunch of students talk, and they are presenting various profound ideas and you say, Oh—that’s Iyer, isn’t it. Or That’s Bob Kelley.b What they’re doing is simply rehashing, without knowing it, ideas from somebody else, and they don’t have any real feeling for what they’re talking about. Enthusiasm is unique, but I think you can sometimes catch it. Professors at U. C. Santa Barbara.

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Mudrick Transcribed I think that teaching of the arts starts over again all the time, because you never know what’s going to appeal to somebody. For instance I have a pretty good idea of what first attracted me to classical music, I mean what allowed me even to spend the time to listen to it so that the infection could take place. I was always very fond of tunes—I liked melodies and I liked the pop music of the time—and it was when I was listening to a symphony on a radio broadcast that I began to hear tunes, I mean the melodies, which at first had been very hard for me to hear because they generally were longer—they were developed, things were done with them. But I began to hear them. And then an idea occurred to me which immediately overwhelmed me, and the idea was, not only do these things give me tunes, but instead of going on for a measly two or three minutes, they go on for forty-five, fifty minutes! And the idea was overpowering to me. It was like the first big book I ever saw in a library. I remember when I used to go into the library I was only allowed to take out a certain number of books each week—I mean they only allowed you to take out so many on a card—and so I wanted as much reading matter as possible, and I hated books for instance which had illustrations (that’s, you see, a bad sign from the beginning [laughter]) because they took up space. They also usually had large type, and I was always looking for books which had little tiny type and no pictures and many, many pages. [Laughter.] And I took them home, and it was really like practically stealing something. I mean the feeling was like being a sanctioned kleptomaniac. I remember the sense of excitement I had when I picked up (it was the first time I had read Jane Austen seriously) when I picked up in a—what do they call it?—the recreation places for soldiers overseas. I’ve forgotten the name. Anyway this was in the Philippines when I was waiting to get shipped back to the States in 1945, and I came upon the Modern Library Giant Jane Austen which was available and which had all of Jane Austen’s novels in one volume (which is very easy to do, I mean they’re short). And it was still very exciting to me in the same way, that I could have this book. So I pinched it, took it back it with me—that’s what I was reading on the trip back to the States from the Philippines. Yes? STUDENT: You know, there’s something else too that to me seems to unite all the arts, and that’s what I thought of when you mentioned education and someone else mentioned enthusiasm, and is it possible to create these things. And I’ve self-educated or self-generated enthusiasm for myself towards Shakespeare, Beethoven, people in the other arts through the process of making my own art, and I think it’s more I-make-it. And you can’t exactly call it self-education because it’s not like I set out to learn something and learned it, it’s more like I set out to do something, I can’t do it, and then just through doing that over and over again I feel that I’ve run up against the same barriers that all the other guys have or other artists, people in the arts, have run up against. But it’s different than—I don’t feel that I’ve run up against the same things that everyone else in the world has. But for instance the more that I continue in my arts the more I feel distant from, say, General Patton or Robert Kennedy. So there’s definitely other great people that 294

Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? I go away from, but it seems like I go towards other people in the arts. I don’t know if this is not . . . MUDRICK: I did get lost. I was interested by the way by the first thing you said because it started my mind working. In the first place I’m beginning to feel very guilty about this because it sounds as if I’m saying, Well, why do we teach at all? And what do I do for instance when I spend a whole quarter on one poem, Troilus and Criseyde, doggedly discussing and analyzing as many lines as possible, and so on? I don’t think I’m being self-contradictory. And it’s true that my notion of art really is focused primarily on music, classical music—classical music to which I respond. And there are several reasons for that. In the first place I’m not a professional musician. I can read music only with the most painful care and it’s almost not worth it. It’s a completely amateur experience for me. I’m a professional literary critic—literature is a matter of professional activity for me. Music seems to me much more mysterious in the way in which it works. Whether this is because I’m not a professional I don’t know. So that my efforts for instance to explain to somebody why it is that I’m so fond of music always seem to me to fail dismally. And they fail with me too—I’m not able to explain it at all. STUDENT: Well, as a writer, I guess what I was saying is, you must have sympathy towards other writers and share some kind of understanding— MUDRICK: Of course. Technique is very interesting. STUDENT: And I wonder if that simply doesn’t go beyond other writers to other musicians and then perhaps to people in the visual arts. I mean, have you never felt that if you knew why Rembrandt painted somebody’s expression just like he did— MUDRICK: Well, I can give you—and I’m glad you brought that up, because expressions are very interesting to me in paintings, and there’s a famous painting by Velázquez which I looked at a number of times in reproductions, and I think it’s in the Prado and I think I saw it there—I don’t remember. But anyway it’s a painting of one of the popes, Pope Innocent Something or other—the Third or the Tenth, I can’t remember. And what I love about that painting is how the painter could have got away with painting such a sleazeball [laughter], representing him with such incredible accuracy—you would think that the Pope would have had him drawn and quartered for representing him for all time as the man he undoubtedly was. And so [imitating the expression] very mean-looking, lowering expression—but he looked like a guy who looked like that all the time. So he is caught. And by the way, I should say that there are some things in paintings that I respond to— STUDENT: But you must see Velázquez do that too, though, in order to— MUDRICK: I don’t know, because it’s not tremendously exciting to me. You understand that—I want to make it clear what we’re talking about now because I think that some of you still think that I’m exaggerating. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING! When I talk, for instance—and moreover I’m not talking about ten-yearolds or fifteen-year-olds necessarily. I can still remember the feeling, for instance, of waiting for a Toscanini broadcast in say 1953 of the Eroica Symphony. And I 295

Mudrick Transcribed mean I am sure that I was a candidate for a heart attack at times like that, so that it was almost impossible for me to breathe, waiting for it to come on. Now that’s my understanding of what the artistic experience is. You may have another understanding of it; I’m just telling you what mine is. And at the highest reaches that is certainly my experience of great music of any kind, I mean without even necessarily the presence of a tremendous performer like Toscanini. But that was terribly exciting, and I can remember for instance going to Pasadena when the NBC Symphony was on tour with Toscanini in the spring of 1950 and seeing him face to face, and I can remember—and so on, okay. There is no other experience in life to which it can be compared except the experience of romantic love—that is exactly what it is. STUDENT: How do you find it out exactly what it is? MUDRICK: Fall in love. I don’t know how you—how do people fall in love? I don’t know! . . . Read a lot. [Laughter.] I mean, find out what’s lovable. STUDENT: Watch soap operas. MUDRICK: Well, I don’t know, I think that might discourage you. [Laughter.] I’m trying now to regroup my forces and to say, what is it that I think I’m doing for instance when I’m teaching a poem like Troilus and Criseyde? I think, by the way, there is such a thing as false or too easily aroused enthusiasm, so I’ll get on with my favorite—I mean something which even people who like my writing think is a particularly silly aspect of it, and that’s my attack on Shakespeare. I have it in for Shakespeare, and I take every opportunity to say nasty things about him. And one thing that I think about Shakespeare is that his kind of writing is likely to arouse a false enthusiasm; that is, it uses techniques of literature which are . . . vulgar. I think, for instance, the excessive use of metaphor and imagery in literature is vulgar. Its intent is to direct the reader from the facts of the situation. When I’m reading Chaucer I am very much aware of his interest in describing accurately what is there. And I should say by the way that I have a not dissimilar feeling about certain aspects of the music of Beethoven—I mean, that I do feel a little bit about some aspects of Beethoven the way I feel about much of Shakespeare. I think that Shakespeare encourages a tendency to show off, like the way people like to spout soliloquies. And they are wonderfully mouth-filling statements, I mean you can speak them and you don’t have to think about what they mean at all. They are just words, and they are such marvelous, mouth-filling, creamy words. I was trying to think—I’m not going to go through—you all know the standard stuff. I was thinking of the statement that Lear makes on the heath about “Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts.” And you have to think very hard before you can figure out what the hell he’s talking about. I mean you finally understand that he’s talking about thunder and lightning and so on. You never have that problem with a writer like Chaucer or with a composer like Mozart—you are directly in the middle of the experience. It’s a little bit like beautiful women who decide they’re going to seduce you, so maybe they do a belly dance [laughter] or they dress themselves up in very fancy clothes and so 296

Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? on, and it’s not nearly so attractive as they think it is. Or rather, probably what it does is to rouse different impulses from the ones—well, probably they are the impulses that they want to arouse, but they’re rather more temporary and more easily satisfied impulses. If you know French at all, you understand that something very bad happened to the French language. If you’re reading sixteenth-century French you understand almost immediately that it can say almost anything—that it’s like Chaucer in that respect. Chaucer can say anything, anything at all—the whole range of the language. He can use the most colloquial—I must tell you what is probably my favorite line in Chaucer, because it seems to me to do everything that poetry can do and it does it in the simplest possible way and in the simplest possible colloquial language, and thank God it translates directly into modern English. It’s when Troilus tells his sister Cassandra his dream (this is after Criseyde has gone over to the Greek camp, and in fact she’s already been unfaithful to Troilus with Diomede). And Troilus has a dream, and you may remember that Cassandra was a prophetess, and you may also remember that she was cursed by Apollo in a particularly nasty way for rejecting him—that is, she would always prophesy the truth and she would never be believed. [Laughs.] And so Troilus tells her his dream, and she interprets it—she interprets it of course accurately— and Troilus indignantly rejects her interpretation. And what she does is to say, this dream indicates that Criseyde has already been unfaithful to him, and the last line of her statement is (and I’ll just say it in modern English), “This Diomede is in, and you are out.” [Laughs.] And I don’t know of a better way of saying that (if you’ll excuse the expression) one lover has been supplanted by another. [Laughter.] There is no other writer in history who could have written that line. And that’s a fully expressive line, and its effect is very similar to the effect of a great deal of Mozart. You understand that the medium is being used with absolute purity. No effort is being made to trick you . . . By the way, I have something like that reaction to certain paintings by Vermeer, simply because they seem to me so attractive and so simple: a girl pouring a pitcher of milk, something like that. I can’t imagine its being done more simply and more beautifully, and that’s the moment in time, and so it’s wonderful. But anyway I want to go on about this business of French. Well, in the seventeenth century somebody came along, a man named Malherbe, who probably did as much damage to the French language and to the French psyche—he may well have been responsible for the French Revolution—decreed that certain things could be done in French poetry and certain things could not be done. And so you get the French neoclassic century with great poetry and so on, but a very limited kind. And then you get an effort to reclaim some sort of straightforwardness, but only in prose, by Voltaire in the eighteenth century. But the French never are able to get back to straightforward statement. I mean, all of their statements, including the signs on restrooms, read like speeches by General de Gaulle. It’s an impossible language to make a straight statement in, at least formal French. 297

Mudrick Transcribed And I think that Shakespeare is responsible for something analogous in the English language—that is, Shakespeare introduced the virus of abundant imagery. And it was impossible for people to get out of it, and the efforts that were made were always partial. So you have a writer like Pope and a writer like Swift and a writer like Sam Johnson, who are writing what could be called neoclassical stuff, but obviously a lot is missing. None of them could say—except maybe in a joke poem— “This Diomede is in, and you are out.” They can’t say that—it would have to be a gross or comic poem for them to say that. It couldn’t be, ever, in the greatest poem ever written, which is what Troilus and Criseyde is—in my opinion [smiling]. I always have to say that because students eventually say in a class that I’m teaching, BUT THAT’S ONLY YOUR OPINION! That’s true! Everything in the arts is somebody’s opinion, except of course the work of art itself, which exists objectively. But the rest of it is all opinion, that’s all there is. Yes? STUDENT: When you discovered dance, did you think there was hope for other arts that you might discover? MUDRICK [after a pause]: I’m a kind of optimist, yeah. When we made a trip to Europe in the summer of 1970 one of the things I determined to do—I mean we had a Eurail pass, and I went to every European museum of any stature at all, every single one. I swear, I think I looked at every picture. [Laughter.] Terrible. [Laughter.] Awful experience, terrible experience, absolutely hopeless. It gave me a life-long hatred of painting. [Laughs.] That’s not really true, it was interesting. You know, one thing that stops me about painting—this is a real problem. Whenever I go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York I look into a room and I see these paintings and I think, Three million dollars [laughter] . . . four and a half million . . . Suppose I took a cigarette lighter and put it against the painting. [Laughter.] The fact that these damn individual objects have such incredible material value really does put me off. I love it that books and music don’t have any material value, except for crazy people who buy first editions and so on. But an ordinary book has no value, and an ordinary record doesn’t have any value, except sensible merchant-like value. But I mean, what the hell can you do with a picture that’s just been sold for four and a half million dollars? I mean, Aristotle gazing at the bust of Rembrandt or something. [Laughter.] I can’t have a response to something like that. All I can think of is what the money would buy [laughing]—besides that painting, of course. I think that certainly the art of painting surely must have suffered as a result of the tremendous upgrading of material value in the twentieth century. I mean everything fails, the stock market doesn’t work and so on, so people collect paintings. And now, everything you do has to be sold. I would think that would be a terrible burden for a painter—at least until he started selling things. [Laughs.] I don’t know how you respond to it. STUDENT: Well, that is a tough one because it’s exactly how you say: until you start selling paintings. I mean it’s wonderful to not have enough money to paint, too. [Laughs.] 298

Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? MUDRICK: Yeah. STUDENT: And you realize that everyone’s getting exorbitantly high prices, especially people who are younger than you are. MUDRICK: Yes. STUDENT: I mean, very young people. And the alternative is, don’t let them have any money at all. [Laughs.] MUDRICK: Well, there is no alternative because times have changed. Robyn? STUDENT: Do you think Jane Austen was influenced by Shakespeare? MUDRICK: Everybody’s influenced by Shakespeare—it’s impossible not to be influenced by Shakespeare. But if you mean influenced in the sense that .  .  . I think that almost every eighteenth-century writer—and Jane Austen is an eighteenth-century writer—is influenced by Shakespeare, and that she knows instinctively that there are many things that she has to avoid. I think that’s what the eighteenth-century writers, the good eighteenth-century writers, are doing. They know that Shakespeare is a kind of swamp that they have to avoid, and the best of the eighteenth century is the least like Shakespeare of any post-Shakespeare writing in English. But somehow it’s . . . lobotomized in a way. I’m very fond of the eighteenth century. I think the eighteenth century as a matter of fact is the great human century. I think that more important and interesting things happened in the eighteenth century—I think it’s full of great people, tremendous people. STUDENT: Do you think the novel is a reaction to the drama? MUDRICK: Well, the novel (this is just standard literary history) is the reaction to the enormous increase in the numbers of the reading public, and particularly in the numbers of idle women who have—it’s essentially eighteenth-century soap opera—that is, women lying on sofas eating bonbons and watching soap opera. That’s certainly what Richardson was. This is not to say that Richardson isn’t a very great novelist. But people had a lot of time and they had to fill it in some way or other, and there simply is a much larger reading public than there ever was before. STUDENT: Is Mansfield Park Shakespearian? MUDRICK: I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I think that it’s Jane Austen’s nervous moral reaction—and since one of the bad things about Shakespeare does seem to me his nervous moral reaction to almost anything—if you want me to put it that way, yes, because I think that that’s another of Shakespeare’s bad legacies to Anglo-Saxondom—that is, not only did he overuse metaphor and imagery, but he also had this terribly bad conscience, especially about sex. He contributed a great deal to the rise of the Victorian temperament, I think. I don’t think there’s any—well, there’s no question in my mind about it anyway. Obviously this is all highly speculative, I’m sure there are people who are fuming and so on. You don’t even have to treat it as influence; you can simply say, There was a writer like Shakespeare, he was greatly admired, he certainly began to be idolized by the turn of the nineteenth century, he was simply unchallengeable through most of the nineteenth century by anybody and has become even more unchallengeable since. 299

Mudrick Transcribed And it does seem to me odd. I’m for instance always fascinated by the fact that women aren’t aware of how grossly misogynistic Shakespeare is. I think Shakespeare is the most misogynistic of all serious writers. And I don’t understand why this doesn’t leap out at people, simply doesn’t leap out at them. But that’s one of the things that people think I’m nuts to say or to think. I’ve tried to demonstrate it a number of times, so it’s not as if I’m just making these statements into the blue and not trying to verify them—I’ve written about them. And it doesn’t seem to me that what I’ve written is refutable. Nobody at least has ever satisfactorily refuted what I’ve said. But maybe they regard it as a waste of time—it’s so stupid it’s not worth talking about. [Laughter.] I don’t know. But I think one of the reasons that Shakespeare can get away with it, of course, is that veil of imagery and rhetoric—that is, people don’t even know what they’re reading. STUDENT: Do you think you don’t respond to painting and sculpture maybe because they aren’t developed in time and don’t have any movement— MUDRICK: I think I am more responsive to the temporal arts than to the spatial arts. Why that should be I have no idea. I was going to say by the way, when I began talking about my response to music, that I’m very much interested in the different ways in which people begin to respond to the arts, and I had simply taken it for granted that almost anybody who began to respond to classical music would find his way in through melody. But that turns out not to be the case. I have known people for instance who are first attracted by certain very marked rhythms. There are certain other people who are attracted by the artificiality of the human voice in music. It took me a long time before I ever became interested in music with voice attached to it. I was fond for years and years only of absolute music, but there are some people who for instance are first attracted to music through opera, and for many years, even after I had become crazy about classical music, opera seemed to me slightly ridiculous or at least tawdry. And I’m not talking about particular operas, I mean the very notion of opera. Well, since then I’ve developed a little. Yes? STUDENT: Which ones did you start to listen to first? MUDRICK: Operas? . . . I’m trying to remember. (By the way, I know it’s getting late and I’ll tell you what, so that people won’t feel guilty: It’s already two minutes of five. Anybody is welcome to leave anytime. I’ll be glad to stay for an extra fifteen or twenty minutes if anybody wants to talk a little more, but if anybody wants to leave, please don’t feel guilty about leaving.) I think I began to like opera at about the same time that I began to be aware that my juvenile infatuation with Beethoven—which persists as an adult infatuation I hope—but I began to realize that a composer that I had only thought of as kind of nice and pleasant was the greatest composer who ever lived, that is, Mozart. I of course had read a lot about Mozart being primarily an operatic composer, in books that I had read on Mozart, and so I began listening to Mozart operas. The first two I listened to carefully were The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, and was overwhelmed by Don Giovanni. I’m sure you know some of the reasons why: because there are certain 300

Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? extra-musical associations with an opera like that, and it’s wonderful for me . . . Now there’s a good instance as a matter of fact (talk about the moral aspect of art): Beethoven could not understand how a composer as great as Mozart would deal with a subject as tawdry as the subject of Don Giovanni—Beethoven. And another person, who was a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of Beethoven—the same kind of fiery temperament, and certainly the greatest performer of Beethoven—Toscanini felt exactly the same way, was astonished that Mozart could have treated such a subject. You see, this is the Shakespearean aspect of Beethoven. Beethoven is the bachelor whose only opera is a celebration of wifely virtue. [Laughs.] And he can’t understand what it is about a Don Juan character that would attract any Decent Woman, or that would allow a—I mean, when you begin to feel like that, there’s something wrong with you. Or the least that can be said is that you’re not as universal as you might think. Is that not so? And that’s exactly Shakespeare’s attitude. As a matter of fact Shakespeare’s different. Shakespeare knows why women are attracted to the Don Juan character: because they are pigs! [laughter] that’s why! And you can’t trust them as far as you can throw a salami. [Laughter.] But somebody like Mozart, or Chaucer, is not bothered by things like that. He really is interested in the whole range of human nature. He is interested in what people do—not what they ought to do, but what they do! And he’s inclined to think that what they do, for the most part, has reason, I mean the reason of feeling behind it. Doesn’t that make any sense to you people at all? I mean, what do you make of—I have to bring up something in Shakespeare so that some of you don’t think I’m simply ranting and—because you’ll certainly never read anything I wrote about him. [Laughter.] What do you make for instance of a play like Cymbeline, in which the hero leaves home, and he’s at some bar in Italy somewhere, and a guy comes up and challenges the chastity of his wife, his wife who’s back home. And the guy says—what the hell is his name? Posthumus— says that’s ridiculous. And he makes a bet—a bet! you understand—that this guy cannot overcome his wife’s resistance. And this guy travels all the way back to Posthumus’ home, and he manages to get into the lady’s bedroom, and he sees that she has a birthmark in a particularly vulnerable place, and he doesn’t even do anything, he just goes back and he tells the guy about her birthmark. AND POSTHUMUS RANTS AND RAVES—THIS PIG! WHY DID I EVER GET MARRIED TO A SLUT LIKE THIS DISGUSTING CREATURE! And on and on and on. It’s immediately proved, obviously, simply because this guy checked in the FBI files and found out that she had a birthmark. And that’s all that any Shakespeare character needs. Any male character in Shakespeare, that’s all he needs to decide that the woman is no good. But there’s something more interesting than that about it, because then Posthumus says—I wish to hell I had it with me but it’s something like this: And I thought she was a cold cookie. Why there’s plenty of times she told me she had a sick headache when I wanted a piece—something like that. So that another 301

Mudrick Transcribed thing Shakespeare does is to associate sexual responsiveness with wickedness in women—that is, wicked women are sexually responsive. There are very strange things in Shakespeare—in for instance one of the Fool’s statements in Lear. The Fool says something about—I can’t remember that line, it’s about a whore—but it’s clear that the Fool thinks that whores participate in sex acts, that they are excited by them.c And you read this, and you’re so impressed by the vigor and beauty and majesty of the verse that you don’t pay any attention to the sliminess there. It’s all slime—certainly almost everything about women. And this doesn’t bother you. You read it, and of course that’s what women are like. That’s what men are like, that’s what sex is like, and men have a right to expect women to be cold and virtuous rather than hot and wicked and so on. Yes? STUDENT: What about Cleopatra? MUDRICK: Cleopatra’s a special case—she’s an old veteran. He’s dealing with an historical situation which he can hardly mess with, but I think the thing to be said about Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra is that she’s a disgusting shrew, and there is absolutely nothing in the play to indicate why Antony would be interested in her. She just is a lousy bitch! I mean she has some wonderful speeches at the end, but otherwise she acts like any nasty woman who wants to mistreat a man so that he will not quite go with—he’s held in some way. And so she hops through the streets with him at night. Big deal. I mean, there is nothing in that play which persuades me that Cleopatra is attractive, until the last speeches she makes. STUDENT: Well, she’s smart. MUDRICK: She is smart, that’s right. She’s very smart and very shrewd, that’s true. But she isn’t sexy—I don’t think she’s sexy at all. Criseyde is sexy (I don’t mean Cressida).d Criseyde is very sexy. But I don’t think Cleopatra is sexy at all. I was trying to think—I don’t think any of Shakespeare’s women are sexy. I can’t think of any. Some of them are hot and some of them are cold . . . and some of them are in a pot nine days old. [Laughter.] STUDENT: What do you dislike about metaphor? MUDRICK: I don’t dislike it, I think it’s something that should be used with tact. I think it’s like ornamentation in music. If Mozart presents a theme—well, I’ll give an instance. Very often Mozart will present a pathetic theme, absolutely unornamented—one instrument with the slightest possible accompanying background—so it’s very clear what it’s supposed to be. And the ornamentation is usually very, very slight: he wants you to hear the phrase completely. And with somebody like Beethoven, he very often overdoes it. I think of the last movement of the Waldstein Sonata with the heroic theme or the noble theme which you hear ad nauseam and you hear it in all sorts of guises and you’re sick of it finally, you don’t want to hear it again, and it’s not that good to begin with. I still think that art is primarily—let me see if I can escape from a trap that I’m setting for myself. I think that art is statement, I do think that art is “This is a brave night to cool a courtesan.” Cressida is Shakespeare’s heroine, Criseyde is Chaucer’s.

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Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? statement. I don’t know what statement means, but I think that art is statement, it is not ornament. Ornament is incidental to art, and the less the better. STUDENT: Didn’t you say that the response to art is feeling? MUDRICK: Yes. The statement is so intense—by the way, I don’t mean rational statement, I mean statement. I mean if there’s a theme which comes, say—the theme which I use in my music class as an instance of the saddest theme in the world, the second theme of the slow movement of the Mozart A major Piano Concerto. I don’t know anything sadder than that in the world. It’s the saddest theme ever composed—in any of the arts, I think. I forgot what I was going to say about it. But anyway . . . What was I going—what did you ask? STUDENT: What’s wrong with metaphor? MUDRICK: Oh. No—the last thing you said. STUDENT: Oh Yeah—you said art is statement. MUDRICK: Yeah—that’s a statement—that theme is a statement. It’s certainly not a rational statement, it’s a statement of the most universal sadness. It has to do, for instance . . . If I had to talk about it I would say all sorts of terrible things which are stupid and which everybody feels at one time or another—but Mozart said it. That is, we feel it, Mozart said it. We feel alone in the universe, we feel somehow that what we desire or what we are capable of desiring is incompatible with what we can possibly get, we feel something about the brevity of life and the immensity of nothingness and so on—all those things. And this is one little theme which takes maybe forty-five seconds to play. So art is statement. And when Shakespeare is going on about “Vaunt couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts” and Milton is going on about [breathlessly]

Him the Almighty Power Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition; there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal fire, Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms. —that seems to me, in the highest and most majestic sense, bullshit. [Laughter.] Just bullshit. I mean, Milton is trying to get away with something! He is trying to pretend that poetry is as big as the universe. And it isn’t. It just isn’t. There’s something about metaphor, it seems to me, which is bloated by nature. It has to be used with the utmost discretion, the utmost discretion. It’s like symbols in prose (I mean prose fiction). I just read something in Flaubert—I’m doing a review of a nineteenth-century Spanish novel—very interesting. Very very exasperating, full of unnecessary stuff, much too long, but very interesting, and it’s a kind of takeoff on Madame Bovary. It’s translated for the first time into English—just translated into English. So I began rereading parts of Madame Bovary to refresh my memory of it, and one of the first things I came on was an incredibly 303

Mudrick Transcribed vulgar thing by Flaubert (the great elegant writer). It’s just after Emma yields for the first time to Rudolph. And after describing Emma’s very romantic glancing out at the forest and the trees and the leaves, and everything is so beautiful (because you know how sentimental women are)—then Rudolph, “cigar in hand” (I’ve forgotten what else he did). And that’s the way Flaubert ends the paragraph. Forty-two sentences of female sentimentality and one sentence of male . . . I was going to say hardness but I shouldn’t say that. Probably limpness would be better. [Laughter.] Alas, disguised as a Spaniard, doesn’t do things like that.e Yes? STUDENT(1): It seems like you’ve asked us to go out on a limb to put ourselves in your point of view, because you’re defining a response in a very, very narrow way. MUDRICK: Very. STUDENT(1): And you are simply saying that in order for response to be valid it has to be the most extreme in terms of feeling and emotion, and if you have not experienced that then it’s nothing. Obviously you’re talking about— MUDRICK: I didn’t say it’s nothing, I said it’s not an artistic response. [Laughs.] STUDENT(1): Well, it doesn’t have the fullness that it should have. MUDRICK: Yeah, that’s what I was saying [laughing]. STUDENT(1): You’re very exciting talking about Shakespeare—adding things— intellectual ideas— MUDRICK: Yes. Because I also like to argue. STUDENT(1): It seems to me that response has the capability of establishing a hierarchy, of which at one end the very deeply felt emotional response would certainly be the most strongly felt—perhaps the most touching and idiosyncratic kind of love. But there are other levels to which one can approach it, and would provide meaning, that— MUDRICK: —and would help you to get to that other response? They might. STUDENT(1): Your going through the museums in Europe seems to me to be a tacit attempt to try to see what this is. And in spite of that the bottom line is never hit. You walk out of these places with an “I don’t get it”—it hasn’t clicked. MUDRICK: Yeah, I would go along with most of—if I understood what you were saying. I was saying that; I am saying something as radical as that. I am saying that the artistic response is exactly what I was trying to describe, and I will say something else which will outrage a great many of you. I think probably the two rarest of all human activities are thinking and response to the arts; that they happen less often than any other human activities. So you see that I’m being very extreme, and I think that almost everybody imagines that—after all, the title of my talk was “Am I Enjoying Myself Yet?” and that’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people who want to learn how to respond and who want to know whether they’re enjoying themselves yet. Well, to answer the question . . . If you have to ask the question, you can’t afford it [laughing]. You go into the Rolls Royce dealership, you ask how much the car costs—you can’t afford it, that’s all [laughing]. Leopoldo Alas is the author La Regenta, the novel Mudrick reviewed.

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Am I Enjoying Myself Yet? Don’t worry about it! Life has other things in it. [Laughter.] You know, 99.99999 percent of the human race has lived without artistic response—don’t you know that? Don’t worry about it! Probably 95 percent of the human race has lived without falling in love. I think there’s a very good chance that that’s true, partly because what I understand by love is to a large extent cultural anyway. As far as I can tell, the Chinese culture, for instance, is so heavily grounded in the family that maybe romantic love in a Western sense is impossible there—I think that’s conceivable to me. So I think that there are certain very profound human responses which are incompatible with certain cultures—that is, they can’t occur in certain cultures. Well, isn’t that obvious? I don’t mean to get into cultural anthropology, but I think that probably if you’re a member of a New Guinea tribe you are not likely to respond to the second theme of the slow movement of Mozart K. 488 as I do, and as I think you ought to. Now this is not racism, it really isn’t. It’s just what’s available to you. Yes? STUDENT: That goes back to what you were saying before about not being able to understand something that’s outside of your culture. I should think a good example would be [inaudible] people in Japan and the Orient who seem to be so fascinated by Western music. MUDRICK: Japan is a wonderful instance! Japan is certainly the most peculiar culture in the history of man. They seem to be the most remarkable imitators, not only of machines but of feelings, who have ever lived. You know, there’s a wonderful story about the Japanese that I must tell you (I told this to some of the people in the room). Yeah—the Japanese love classical music now, it’s astounding. And of course, the Japanese stole everything from the Chinese—everything in Japanese culture apparently is borrowed from other cultures, but they take it over and they do these marvels with it. And of course they’ve done these marvels with technology—they’ve completely outstripped the US now, they’re way ahead. But this is a story I’ve heard—I want to believe that it’s true. I’m a little nervous now because it’s a large group and probably somebody will come up and tell me it’s apocryphal, but I like it even if it’s apocryphal. Supposedly when they were beginning to work out the technology for CD records (these new little records, which are marvelous by the way) they had to decide on how many minutes would go on them. And technically apparently it’s possible to get two full hours on those records. But naturally the commercial instinct moves in, they don’t want to give too much competition, or killing competition to LPs yet—maybe that’ll come later—so they have to decide on how much they’re going to allow. And so the Americans opted for sixty minutes, which is just about what you can get on . . .f f  The tape ends here. The story is found in an article on CD’s in the July 1, 1985, issue of Time Magazine (p. 38): “Philips originally” designed a 60-min. disk, but Sony convinced its ally that the current 75-min. version would be better. Recalls Sony Chairman Akio Morita: ‘The reason was so that we could put Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on one record. The Ninth has a special significance in Japan because we traditionally play it over and over at year end.”’

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An Interview This interview was conducted in Mudrick’s office by Mary Garman, a student, and another student identified only as Karen. The tape is incomplete.

January 1981

MUDRICK: But after a while I realized that it wasn’t so, that the very best work was being produced by students who had no business doing that kind of work, by all the standards of the establishment that they were now members of, I mean the university. They just had no business doing it. They had relatively low test scores, they appeared to be sloppy in their reading, and certainly in their writing, and then all of a sudden they would start turning out things, I mean absolutely original statements about literary works that I could never have predicted, that came from out of the blue. One of the most startling (I think I mentioned this to you) the best paper I got last quarter was done by this girl Lagerstrom (and she’s one of those girls who don’t like me, whom I make nervous and suspicious of me). And she certainly doesn’t seem like a particularly intelligent person. She seems sort of, oh, shy—maybe sharp and cunning but not smart, and I don’t recall having seen anything by her before that was anything like that. Well, what she did was to make Xerox copies of all the pages of the Lawrence short story “Samson and Delilah,” and I don’t know whether she used all of them or not—I’m not sure. She may have because it was a very long paper. Then she cut them out and pasted one on a page to save herself the trouble of typing it out. Then she wrote a series of notes on the particular passage that she had just pasted in. Terrific paper! So smart! The smartest statement about any individual Lawrence short story that I have ever seen written by anybody. And though that’s a particularly interesting thing, it’s not uncharacteristic. That is, I now say—you were in the Lawrence class, weren’t you? INTERVIEWER: Yeah. MUDRICK: Well, you remember I said, when I asked for the papers to come in, “I know there will be ten or a dozen absolutely first-rate papers.” When I was teaching in the English Department—just in the English Departmenta—if I were After the College of Creative Studies was started in 1967, many of Mudrick’s classes were offered through the English Department as well as Creative Studies. a 

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An Interview lucky I would get one or two papers that I could read with any pleasure. I now know, in any class that I teach which has Creative Studies students in it, that I will get a minimum of ten or twelve, and they will be absorbing reading from beginning to end. I mean for instance a guy like Cameron Hughes turns out a—right on top [referring to a stack of papers], he hasn’t even bothered to pick it up. He’s another guy—I never see him—very very smart, very smart. Beautiful paper. There isn’t more than one or two of my colleagues in the English Department who can come within a thousand miles of that paper—in brightness, quality, originality, anything. And there are at least ten more—I mean that girl’s was one—and there are students who simply have no business writing papers like that. There are a couple of students (I better not name them) whom I really gave up on a year ago, I mean little girls who obviously were determined to screw their way through the program without doing any serious work—they were looking for this loophole and that—and finally they just became too much trouble to fight with, so I would sign programs and so on. And then after a while all of a sudden up would pop one of these papers from one of them—crazy business—beautiful paper, coming from nowhere. What I believe is something like this. I do believe that intelligence is the commonest quality in the world, and that it really is the human quality—everybody has it. And it’s not surprising. If you think of animals, you don’t really make many distinctions. You say that one animal is more highly trained than another, but generally speaking you think of one animal of a particular species as being as intelligent as another animal of the same species. Why the hell should it be that much different with human beings? Generally it’s different primarily because a very high degree of training has gone into it. I mean for instance if you set a little kid to solving equations from the age of six . . . And I also believe in talent. I know you don’t produce a Mozart just like that, but I’m talking about ninety-nine percent of the human race. Ninety-nine percent of the human race is intelligent, and the question is whether the intelligence is going to be suppressed, whether you prevent the person from using what he has, whether you mold him, beat him down, put him into a pigeonhole, and so on. And then, he finally is discouraged enough and bothered enough, so he does what he’s told. It’s like breaking the spirit of an animal—that’s really what it amounts to. You can break the spirit of an animal. You can break the spirit of a horse, for instance, or of a dog. I remember, as a matter of fact, because I’m terrible with pets, we had a dog that I was trying to train (the last dog we ever had, we would never have one again) and she was a German shepherd. Very sensitive, beautiful, beautiful animal. And apparently my voice alone so frightened her that she was just defeated. She would never for instance perk up her ears, her ears were always down, and so on. So finally we had to get rid of her because I felt nothing but a terrible sense of guilt around her. And I really think people are like that. They break in different ways, and they break partly. If you give these kids a chance, in the sense that they know they’re not going to get punitive grading—they know it’s fun, it’s just something they can do, and they’re not going to get punished. 307

Mudrick Transcribed They’re not going to be credited for it either—oddly enough I think that’s part of it. It’s not just that the grading system isn’t punitive, it’s also not complimentary. So it’s not a question of being judged, it’s just doing it because you can do it. And so they go ahead and do it. I was thinking (once again I gotta be careful about what I say) I got a magazine—it’s a tenth anniversary issue of a very high-class magazine published in this country, and all big-name authors—must be about thirty-five, forty bigname authors—the biggest-name authors in the United States, as a matter of fact also in the world. And I was reading casually through it (very expert stuff). The day before yesterday, two people came into the office with stories. Their stories were superior to any of the stories that I had read in that magazine. Now this is true, and I know that people would think that I’m crazy, absolutely crazy. Well, I believe it. It’s not a question of self-aggrandizement—I don’t need the quality of their work to make myself feel like a good guy. I mean I do my own work, for one thing. I’m astounded by it, I really am, when say Shawn White comes into the writing class. Shawn is a good instance of another kind of person, I mean he’s another person who got too big a start. He’s too smart in his own way, so that when he comes into the College, or at least when he’s sitting in a writing class— you know who he is? INTERVIEWER: No, I don’t. MUDRICK: Well, he graduated from here about four to five years ago and he stuck around, and I occasionally have him teach classes. For me he’s the most beautiful human being I have ever seen—he’s the only man I love to look at. INTERVIEWER: He’s an artist—he paints. MUDRICK: Yes. But he’s this remarkable creature, I love to talk to him, and he sits in on the writing class often. So he writes, and he writes rather strange stuff. It’s very literate, but if there’s one impression that you get of him it’s of a remoteness and a detachment, a real remoteness. So that he’s capable of great kindness, but you wonder if there is any stronger feeling possible—rage, passion, whatever. Anyway, he sits in the class and he talks—everything he says is marvelous. If there were anybody that I would want to represent the College, he is that person. And he comes in last week and turns in a story. Beautiful story! beautiful, I mean from out of the blue—after all these years yet, so that’s even more surprising. But he sits and he talks, and what I’ve always felt about the stories was that they were limited in spite of everything by this odd limitation, this kind of coldness. Cold is too strong a word, but that’s in the direction that I’m talking about. Noninvolvement—something like that. And then here is this wonderful story—it has a kind of Chekhovian simplicity in its structure. A guy is receiving telephone calls—I mean he’s in his apartment trying to make his dinner, he’s alone, and first of all his old girlfriend calls up. And that’s a hilarious scene—it’s done completely with dialogue, and what she’s obviously trying to do is bully him back into the relationship by telling him that she’s delighted that it’s all over and has no use for him and she hopes he’s getting along well. He handles it very 308

An Interview well, and finally she says something like, I’m so glad I left when I did. And he says, Me too. [Laughs.] But it’s not malicious—you don’t have that feeling. And then a drunken woman calls up who’s interested in making time with him, and that is hilarious in its own way. I mean as drunks sometimes do, she gets stuck on a single phrase and she keeps repeating it, thinking that it’s very attractive or something [laughs]—and he gets rid of her. Then somebody else calls. It’s the sort of thing that people should try more often in fiction and it’s the sort of thing that Chekhov mastered—that is, that’s the way Chekhov wrote six hundred stories: if somebody told him a little anecdote he would write it down immediately. It didn’t have to illustrate life and death and all sorts of human problems, he just wanted to write a little story. And I like to tell the class, if you take fiction writing too seriously you’ll never continue to write, you’ll never develop as a writer. There’s a wonderful statement by Dr. Johnson when Boswell was asking him whether he (Boswell) wasn’t perhaps paying too close attention to little details, and Johnson said, with that wonderful combination of magisterial portentousness and common sense, “Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man.” [Laughs.] And it’s absolutely true. But the converse of that is true too, that is, that everything little is terribly important. Everything you do is important. Nothing is more important than anything else, really. It all resonates.b It’s been a great pleasure. The most astonishing and unexpected experience of my life has been the College, but most astonishing in the last three or four years, because I didn’t really get the hang of it until about three or four years ago, I didn’t really know what was going on. I knew, or at least I felt very strongly, that something was terribly wrong in the university at large, and a lot of the time I simply made it the responsibility of my stupid colleagues and the system and any system—and there’s a lot in that. But I’ve come more and more to believe that this business of suppression is the secret. And there’s no excuse for letter grades, I mean that’s the first thing .  .  . No, there’s no excuse for it at all, it doesn’t belong in any serious system. You know the justification that people always give: How is anybody going to get into graduate school? and so on. And of course, what that means is that the teachers themselves have to be more careful about the letters of recommendation they write—that’s about all that it amounts to—nothing else is important. In a sense, one of the developments that delight me in the present university and even in the high schools is the cheapening and inflation of grades. I hope it’ll come about that everybody in high school gets straight A’s. Then, of course, the system will be exposed completely and will have fallen of its own weight, and maybe they’ll give up. But until that time . . . INTERVIEWER: I asked Dr. [inaudible] how he chooses people for graduate school in biology at UCSB and he says, “If they can write a good short story I’d take him.” MUDRICK: That’s very good. Here the tape recorder was turned off for a short time.

b 

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Mudrick Transcribed INTERVIEWER: He says the better they are in English the better a scientist they’ll make. MUDRICK: Sure, sure. One of best students I ever had in literature went on to medical school at USC: Wes Fields. Terrific guy (I think he’s graduating in June)—wonderful kid—wrote wonderful stories. And a couple went on to law school. INTERVIEWER: Do you have any way of telling in the beginning who’s going to produce what— MUDRICK: I used to think that. And now, really the only distinctions I can make are between her kind [referring to one of the interviewers] and all the rest. And as I say, her kind now make me a lot more nervous. In the past, having people like you around was a kind of security blanket, because you could always point—I mean, people like you could be used as evidence against the fuddy-duddies on campus who said, Oh, they got a whole bunch of freaks over there. But somebody like you obviously could take on the English Department with no trouble at all, wipe up the floor with them. And so you provide us with this protective coloration. [End of first side of tape.] Well, I’ll just finish the story because it was interesting to me. Anyhow, she graduated and that was the last I heard of her. I think she sent me one letter—and it was a nice letter, smart—and that was the end of it, and I didn’t hear a thing until she showed up in the doorway two days ago. And she [inaudible] very startling, because I knew immediately who it was, which I often don’t—I mean especially after four and a half years (I hadn’t seen her since June of 1976)—but I had been so struck by her. But what I was struck by now was—another thing that happens to women when they lose weight: strange things happen to their figures, even stranger things than when they gain weight, so that she wasn’t anything like that stacked creature that she had used to be, but very interesting— more like a kind of Vogue model. She looked virtually like her mother, very distinguished—I don’t mean I’ve ever seen her mother, but she could have been her mother. She must be now I guess about twenty-seven, something like that: she could have been forty-five. She looked anxious—and also of course she’s been living in the East, and she had that pallid complexion that always surprises me—when first of all I’ve seen people in California and then they live in the East for a while—really is strange. She was anxious, too—I think she was nervous. I’m reasonably sure she had no particular interest in seeing me, but it may have been some kind of curiosity, I don’t know. But there she was, and as luck would have it, it was impossible for me to talk to her (I had to go somewhere—oh, the movie was on, I was going to show that movie) so I said, “Why don’t you come around tomorrow?” And she was reluctant to do that. She said, “It will have to be today.” I said, “I won’t be here.” So finally she agreed that she could come around the next day at eleven. So she came. And I had a very good day. I’m with women sometimes the way some people are with children—that is, if I pull myself together, and understand exactly what it is that alarms them about me, and act very detached and humane and paternal, and nevertheless remote, then they gradually . . . It really 310

An Interview is like being with an animal, and little by little you see the animal achieving some kind of—it’s one of the most curious things for me about women. I mean here are these extraordinarily intelligent creatures, very receptive, very responsive— and yet they really regard men as the enemy. And she certainly regards me as the enemy, or did. Well, it was a very very good hour, or hour and ten minutes, whatever it was. It was just right, because eventually—it’s one of the things I like about this office: there’s a kind of natural termination to almost anything, because somebody walks in or you have a class—something like that—which I think also would help somebody like her. And she was telling me about what was going on at Yale—she has a boyfriend in New York whom she probably will marry after she finishes at Yale—and what it was like doing work there. Of course what she was aware of was my thorough approval, but at the same time there was no threat involved, so she gradually became—she was more and more easy, and she was really fine at the end. And I took a very special satisfaction, quite apart from anything else, in feeling that I had overcome that paranoia, and she indicated it in a very spectacular way when she was about to leave. There were two other people that had come in by then, just at the last minute. She said, “Well, I’ve got to leave now because my grandmother . . . ” She had made this clear she had to see her grandmother in town. So I put out my hand. She said, “Well? Should I shake your hand, or can I hug you?” [Laughs.] And I said, “Oh, you can hug me.” So she hugged me. [Laughs.] And she wouldn’t have done that in a thousand years, four or five years ago. She wouldn’t have come near me, as a matter of fact. It’s very odd, that reaction that women have to situations like that. I had another wonderful illustration of it this morning. There was a meeting—the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which is the organization that “accredits” universities, is visiting on campus—they’re giving UCSB its regular accreditation thing. And so there was a meeting of all the deans and vice-chancellors, and the chancellor was there, and it was at this big table and so on. And there was the guy who was president of the whole organization, and then there was the woman who is chairperson, as they say, of the team that’s investigating this campus. She’s a woman about my age (and she looks my age too)—nice woman—she’s president of San Jose State University. And after the meeting was over she came up to me and she said she was particularly pleased that I was there, because she knew about the College and she was delighted that the College had survived, because so many academic units of that kind had not, and that she was fascinated by the idea and thought I ought to be congratulated. So what I did was (something that I shouldn’t have done, I suppose)—you know that gesture that people make when they move forward to make a kind of confidential statement to somebody? It’s mock, it’s a comedy, you’re going to say something that you don’t want other people to hear. Well, I did that, I mustn’t have moved more than about an inch or two inches forward like this, and she must have flinched about three and a half inches back. What I told her was, “Please, say that to the chancellor!” and I went ahead and said it anyway. 311

Mudrick Transcribed But I was so interested, it was practically as if she were reacting to a physical assault. And really! I only moved the slightest bit, there was nothing—I think that’s partly me [laughs], I mean that’s apparently the impression I make on some women. It was very nice. It was actually surprisingly flattering, because the guy who was president of the whole organization—every academic unit on campus makes up a statement about the unit, and this is put into a book which they read before they make their investigation. And he was talking very generally, conventionally, about the work that his outfit does, and then he said, “I suppose I shouldn’t single anything out, but I was very much impressed by the statement made about the College of Creative Studies.” One of the things I’ve always insisted on doing with the College is making—any statement I make about it has as much fact and statistics as possible, because there’s so much bullshit that goes into statements about academic organizations—it’s all completely unverifiable. They all have the noblest and highest ideas and so on, but you don’t find out any facts and you know that it’s all a cover. But we have very interesting facts. INTERVIEWER: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Oh, for instance the proportion of students who go on to graduate school, who’s in medical school now, the prizes that are awarded, the scholarships that are awarded. I mean for instance we’re 1 percent of the total enrollment of the university—we get 23 percent of the President’s Fellowships, we have 14 percent of the Regents Fellowships and so on—that sort of thing. And that’s what they were talking about, of course. They know as well as everybody else does that practically anything that’s said in a statement of that kind is just unverifiable, so they’re grateful whenever they see anything that can be verified, that consists of facts. All right, now you can ask me questions if you want. INTERVIEWER: I was wondering what you think of the caliber of the kinds of applicants that you get. What do you look for, what do you like to see in a student? MUDRICK: Sure, it’s a fair question, and of course when you ask me that, you’re essentially asking me about the applicants in literature, because to a large extent I take the word of the faculty members in the areas in which students are applying. I have my suspicions, as you probably know, in art. I’ve always been concerned about the fact that there’s such a high degree of illiteracy among the art applicants. And so if there’s a problematic art applicant I look very carefully at the academic record, and I’m particularly interested in the SAT verbal. One thing I have to admit: after fourteen years of doing this thing, though I hate all kinds of test scores and so on, the one test score that does work out very well is the SAT verbal, it really does. What it means is that you start with an enormous advantage. This is not to say that you can’t have a low SAT verbal and eventually do very well, it is just to say that if you have a high SAT verbal it’s almost impossible for you not to do well. INTERVIEWER: Do you look at that even for the art students?

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An Interview MUDRICK: Well, I do—after a recommendation has been made, if somebody says, I’m not sure about this guy, well, if I’m not sure about this guy or they’re not, and he has say a 320 SAT verbal, then I’m very sure that I don’t want him [laughing]. On the other hand if the SAT verbal is say above 500, I’ll be favorably disposed. If it’s above 600 I’ll immediately approve and tell the secretary who calls him or writes him a letter that it’s to be strongly recommended to him that he take my writing class his first quarter. So that’s one thing. But in the applications for literature, what’s happened in recent years is that I’ve developed what may be actually the most revolutionary attitude toward education in the world. I now believe, I guess about as strongly as I have believed anything about education, that everybody is intelligent, and that achievement in education depends almost entirely on the momentary stimulation that you’re getting from a particular teacher and the kind of character that you have; that the purpose of education as a matter of fact is to destroy intelligence. And that’s not surprising, it’s not a kind of joke. It has to do of course with the necessary repressive tendencies of society. What a culture does—all the sentimental crap about culture ignores the fundamental fact that the only thing a culture is interested in is order. It wants order. And what appears to be the simplest way of perpetuating order is to make people as alike one another as possible—to put them into pigeonholes, to make them conventional, to give them the same kind of information, to establish the same kind of expectations, to produce even the same answers on tests, the same kinds of papers, and so on. And that’s what education does, and of course once having done this these people go on to become the teachers of the next generation. So that anything that is out of the ordinary, that is unconventional, that’s original, that has a kind of life and fire to it, is snuffed out. Some people who survive, they survive in spite of the system. The most astonishing thing that has happened to me in teaching in my entire life—see, as a matter of fact, if poor Karen doesn’t mind my using her as an instance, you’re an instance like [inaudible]. Your problem is that you’re too smart in the conventional way. You have it all—you really do know it all before you come. You can cope with any system. And the extent to which you can cope with any system is the extent to which you are imprisoned by the system. You can’t cope with a system except from the inside—that’s the terrible thing about a system. People always think you can but it’s not true. And I know because I was exactly like you. I would thumb my nose at the system, but safely within the system. And I would collect my A’s, and I never got less than an A. As a result, what I did was to box myself in. I was the top product of the system, but that’s what I was, the top product of the system. And it took me years and years before I could write anything that in the last analysis didn’t turn my stomach.

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From a Class in Letters 7 March 1978

This is from a class in the letters of Keats, Van Gogh, Mozart, Joyce, Machiavelli, Pound, Walpole, and Freud. For this last meeting the class read collections of letters submitted by certain students the week before. The letters were real (one set, for example, was from a student’s grandfather) and were handed in along with a foreword and an afterword by the student. MUDRICK [responding to a student]: Yes, life is difficult in that way. [Laughter.] Yes. You hook up with somebody that you can handle, it’s no good, and if you hook up with somebody that you can’t handle, it’s no good—I entirely agree. Yes? STUDENT: [Inaudible.] [Laughter.] MUDRICK: I’ll give you the number of Dial-A-Prayer. [Laughter.] I’m gonna set up a little Dial-A-Prayer. Dial-A-Prayer for atheists. A little series of recorded messages. [Laughs.] Don’t give up—help is coming. [Laughter.] The next message is: It came. [Laughter.] STUDENT: You missed it. [Laughter.] MUDRICK [laughing]: You missed it. A little difficult. Yes? STUDENT: I think that being with someone you can’t handle is actually—well, this is my opinion—it’s a little bit better for you because it unsettles you, I mean you have to start thinking again. Because if you’re with somebody that you can handle, you just handle it, and you fall asleep [inaudible], you rot and stagnate. Whereas if someone is really active and different and you have to start thinking again, and you have to start trying to handle them. So you [inaudible] iron hand and grip. STUDENT: That’s just a rationalization so that when it’s over and you feel bad [inaudible]. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Yes? STUDENT: I can’t [inaudible] very well. MUDRICK: That’s all right—I’ll be careful. You’ve taken it pretty hot and heavy. [Laughter.] STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: All right. We’ll finish off philosophy now. [Laughter.]

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From a Class in Letters STUDENT: [Inaudible] would be that the person who viewed [inaudible] is the one who just coincidentally has the generally accepted [inaudible] post-existential type— MUDRICK: Oh, wait a minute—but isn’t that unfair? Because I already told you that a number of the papers were very—and not just of the Christians. Maybe we can get at it in this way (try very hard to be honest now): weren’t many of the women nervous, or some of the women nervous reading Kay’s letters? Okay, I see some shaking heads, I mean nodding heads, and I think it’s true. No, I doubt that Kay was very popular with the readers in this class. And I think the reason for that was what I said to you—that is, because most of you are still in the habit of looking at characters in fiction, or in letters or whatever, as persons to emulate, to share their lives, to think about being friends with, and so on. And certainly in that way she’s a horror, or could be. She would be extremely difficult to be with, I mean you’d be nervous all the time. And that, of course, is one of the marvelous functions of literature, that allows you to distance yourself from such people—not to be responsible for them, but to be aware of them. Yes? STUDENT: Maybe this is like five years of marriage [inaudible]. There’s a few people I [inaudible] rather be like than Kay. MUDRICK: That’s interesting—that’s interesting. STUDENT: She’s perfect—she’s got a public face that works—she’s a winner [inaudible]. “Maybe I’ll run for Miss Chinatown.” She’s the L.A. success story. MUDRICK: I’m glad you brought that up, because that is a very interesting aspect of Kay that you don’t really think about while you’re reading the letters—that she really is the All-American Girl—that she can do anything she wants out in the world. This doesn’t seem to do her much good in her private life. I don’t mean to say that in any gloating way. You know that dog-in-the-manger attitude that we have toward people who make it in every way, and then we like to see them staked into the ground because they got it all? I certainly don’t feel that way about her. No, as a matter of fact I’m glad you brought that up, because I am very fond of Kay. I do love her, and I’m just too much of a coward to be able to try to deal with people like that. STUDENT: I really envy her. MUDRICK: Yeah, and as a matter of fact if I knew her I would be madly in love with her. It’s true. She takes all the chances. And it’s so wonderful—people who take chances. STUDENT: Like that wonderful job at Universal Studios. I’d love to have that job! MUDRICK: Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. You jolted me out of my own cowardice. You’re right. I’m glad you said that. Yeah. But we make those very quick moral judgments, and we dismiss people. We’re so goddamn righteous, it is so terrible. We don’t want—in fact, the wonderful word that you used about her is that she’s a winner, and that’s the thing we don’t want to admit about her. If it gets into the periphery of our consciousness we [in a deep and mocking voice] Well, what good did it do her? Because . . . I remember, as a matter of fact—I was a very prudish little boy, I really was.

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Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: Hard to believe. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: No, it’s not hard to believe. that’s what happens in old age. I mean you always shift, you change, in that way. But I used to be teased by my brother, my older brothers, and so on who knew that I was very prudish, and they would often use dirty words around me because I never used a dirty word, never. And they would also [laughter]—absolutely true, it’s true. I still don’t, by the way, generally in private life. I use them, as I’m sure most of you know, very deliberately for megaphone effect in the class. That is, some of you don’t hear anything I say unless I say fuck or shit. so I [laughter] stimulate your attention from time to time. Otherwise you would fall asleep. STUDENT: Write it on the board. MUDRICK: Yeah. No no—then it would be evidence against me. [Laughter.] I remember talking with my brother once about a guy around who was a terrific lady’s man. And he simply had women all the time, and this was in days when that was a much harder proposition than it is these days. I mean you had to be a real charmer and you had to work at it day and night. I mean in all sections of town, ’cause you had to keep looking up prospects. [Laughs.] Partly I felt envy of this guy, though I didn’t really (I must have been about twelve or thirteen at the time, but I was already the local philosopher). And my brother was teasing me about this, talking about all the girls that this guy had, and I was pooh-poohing it all, and there were more serious things in life, and so on. [Laughter.] I believed all this, by the way [inaudible]. I believed that there were truths to be learned, and that one had to learn them, one at a time. Anyhow, he was describing in lascivious detail some of this character’s activities, and I was listening with considerable internal envy and external displeasure. And finally I made a remark, which apparently I’m too embarrassed to remember in detail. I can’t remember the remark in detail, but it had something to do with, Well, what’ll he do when he gets older? By which I meant, What’ll he do when he’s too old for that sort of thing? And my brother said something like, Well, by that time it’ll be time for him to die. You can’t afford to be righteous about certain kinds of activities. Don’t fall into the habit of thinking that certain kinds of images suggest immortal truths like “settling down,” or “understanding what is really going on,” or “coming to terms with yourself,” [laughter] or all that BULLSHIT. IT IS ALL BULLSHIT, it really is. (Fuck, shit—I want you to pay attention to that, so . . . [Laughter.]) You come to terms with yourself in the grave, that’s where you come to terms with yourself. They got your head on your knees, and that’s it. So don’t count on it until then. Okay, the letters of Grandpa (which we gotta do). This collection is interesting for a special reason, in addition to the letters themselves, because it’s the most serious effort made by the writer to give an impression of the character, both in the foreword and the afterword. And I find them both extremely interesting. I’m a little concerned about some of the things in the afterword, which I think are—I don’t mean that I think that the grandfather is not the man that the grandson thinks he is. I mean that the letters are more ambiguous than 316

From a Class in Letters the grandson is willing to admit. There are possibilities in the letters which are not really explored in the foreword or the afterword. Obviously the man is not vicious or a villain or anything like—nothing like that is the case. But there are even for instance possibilities of resentment in the man. There are moments in the letters when you feel that he could be resentful if he were given an inch— something like that. He’s more complicated, I believe, than the grandson makes him out to be, and some of the complications are not necessarily morally attractive. The image for me in the afterword is too rosy. I don’t think that it’s warranted by the letters—though I still think that, apart from the judgment which is made about the grandfather, the afterword is extremely interesting, and some of the details I’m delighted to have. Do you have any comments about the foreword or the afterword? Yes? STUDENT: I thought that [inaudible] the joke [inaudible]. MUDRICK: That’s a bad mistake in the afterword. There’s nothing offensive about that joke at all— STUDENT: I thought it was the funniest joke [inaudible]— MUDRICK: Absolutely, and it’s the nicest thing, and it’s the most revealing thing about the grandfather. It’s only at that moment that you feel that you are really on the inside of his feelings. The rest of it is for effect—but he really did like that joke. [Laughter.] And very often you find out more about people from the jokes that they like than from almost anything else about them. But there’s absolutely nothing offensive about that joke. That’s just an old-time ethnic joke, it’s no more objectionable than jokes about the stinginess of Scotsmen. STUDENT: I really liked it. MUDRICK: Yes! and it’s very odd that the writer would go on at such length trying to justify the poor old grandfather on the basis of having made this . . . It shows, I guess, something about how hypersensitive people have become about this whole business. We’ve lost a great deal, by the way, with the loss of those ethnic jokes, some of them are just wonderful. I’ll tell you one. [Laughter.] Just one. It’s a completely harmless one. You know, Jews are particularly aware of the old women. The old women are terrific, the old Jewish women—my mother was like this. A horror, absolutely horrid to live with, but fascinating at a distance—as the distance from which you observe Kay. It’s a story about a woman on a bus, sitting on a bus (I’ve told this to some of you). And she’s sitting behind a man who is reading a newspaper. And she looks at him and she looks at him very hard. Finally she can’t restrain herself any longer and she taps him on the shoulder, she says, “Sorry mister, are you Jewish?” He says, “No madam.” So she goes back to her seat and sits there, still looking at him very narrowly. Finally she pulls herself together, braces herself, goes up to him and says, “Sorry mister, I don’t wanna bother you. You sure you ain’t Jewish?” “No ma’am, I’m not.” She goes back to her seat, thinks a while, and she’s obviously gathering her strength, and finally she pulls herself together, she says, “I’ve got to ask you again. Are you sure you’re not Jewish!” And he says, “Madam, I am Jewish.” And she says, uh, “You don’t look Jewish.” I’m sorry, I messed it [laughter], because there’s— 317

Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: “Funny, you don’t look Jewish.” MUDRICK: “Funny, you don’t look Jewish,” something like that. [Laughter.] I’M SORRY! I STEP ON LAST LINES ALL THE TIME! [shouting above the laughter] THIS IS WHY I NEVER MADE IT AS A STAND-UP COMEDIAN. You know, that was my career before I became a teacher. But once at the Troubadour I tried this joke and I forgot the “sorry.” [Laughter.] “Funny!” “funny!” that’s what happened—“sorry” and “funny” crossed in my head, so I couldn’t remember. “Funny, you don’t look Jewish.” And to lose jokes like that is terrible [laughter], it’s a shame that jokes like that should be lost. Don’t you think? Don’t you? STUDENT: Yes. MUDRICK: Anything I say. I’m setting up a new little religion here, the religion of ethnicity. Ethnic jokes are often very funny, largely because they’re so truthful about a certain kind of enclave. That tells you more, as a matter of fact, about the effectiveness of the Jewish mother than any sociological document a thousand pages long. Because the curiosity, the pushiness, the interest, the total irrationality, the absolute certainty [laughter]—all of these things together. And there is no way of budging it! You might as well reason with the moon. You might as well howl at the moon. And if you lose jokes like that, you lose that kind of impression, you lose that sense of people. Yes, all the closed doors and all the terrific energy, all the unbelievable energy. STUDENT: That woman [inaudible] you feel that he’s kind of relaxed [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Yes, you’re right, you’re quite right. That’s good. Yeah, I’ll tell one story which I won’t mess up because it’s a story, it’s not a joke. And it tells you something also about the indomitableness of these people, the incredible strength that they have, the strength of conviction, which is a human resource of a sort that us poor, weak—that we poor, weak, anemic creatures lost with all our reasonableness and so on. In ethnic families in the early years of this century, especially among Jews, the great thing was to get the children the best possible education, they had to go on and on and on—especially they had to get a college education. And so my two oldest brothers who were twins were going to college—one of my brothers was going to night school, the other was going to pharmacy school. And there was no money, my brothers had to make whatever was made, and so on. And my brother was way behind in payments [inaudible] the pharmacy school, and they got a notice from the dean’s office that he would have to pay up or he would be suspended from classes. My mother, who didn’t read or write a word of any language, let alone English—somebody told her what was in this letter. So she got on the trolley car and she went to the university—she found out where the pharmacy school was and she got to the dean’s office—she said she wanted to see him about her son. She went in to see him, and she explained what she was there for. She said, “You’re the dean, you’re in charge, and you’re responsible for this letter?” And he said yes. And she said, “Well, we don’t have any money but we’ll have money, and we’ll be able to pay later.” He said, “I’m sorry, that’s the rules.” She said, “If you do this to my son, 318

From a Class in Letters I will go to your house and break every window.” [Laughter.] And he wasn’t suspended. [Laughter.] And they made special arrangements for the pay to be made over a certain period. Now you lose that, you lose something in the epic of humanity, you really do. People like that are heroes, and they are heroes because of a strength that they have as a result of growing up within a certain enclave. I mean not just that, because there were people who grew up under those circumstances who weren’t heroic—including my father, for instance [laughing]. But some of them got this kind of heroism, and it’s a pity to lose that sense of it! I mean, everybody to get to be mulled down into the same gray substance. It’s not right, it’s a pity. Some of the black ethnicity is marvelous! wonderfully interesting, the language is tremendous! Oh, as a matter of fact—I don’t know whether any of you saw this—one of the best newspaper stories I have ever seen appeared last Saturday in the Santa Barbara News-Press—I should have taken it out. It’s by a sportswriter for the News-Press who ordinarily writes perfectly trivial, uninteresting sports crap. His name is Bill Downey. And what he was writing about then was Bubbles, who had not yet been captured, and unfortunately died—the rhinoceros, the roaming rhinoceros, I mean hippopotamus (sorry)—that they were trying to capture. And he wrote this column, and it really is a kind of small masterpiece, which is told in a kind of black dialect, though people who don’t quite know what the black dialect is wouldn’t quite be aware of it—it’s trimmed a little. And somebody has suggested that what they should do is to start calling the hippo with the male hippopotamus call, because female hippopotamuses, or hippopotamuses in general are rather nearsighted, and if you call in this way they think you’re a male hippopotamus, and they rush toward you. [Laughter.] (You’ve gotta step out of the way very quickly! [laughing]) But he’s telling this wonderfully, and finally he says something like, The idea of four thousand pounds of mama coming at me . . . [Laughter.] That’s terrific! That’s such a marvelous image! I mean the whole image of the overpowering female in heat [laughter]—there’s nothing like that, you can’t convey that in any other dialect. There’s no other dialect that could present that image in that way. Moreover it’s very loving, isn’t it? Part of the effectiveness of that image, of course, is the fact that you know, or you should know, that blacks are much less concerned about things like svelteness in sexy women. They love big fat mamas—some of them do, and certainly some of the songs are about it. So this hippopotamus somehow has a kind of double image. And you see this amorous female hippopotamus making a dash in the direction of her lover. That stuff shouldn’t get lost. You really ought to look that up—I really will have to try to reclaim that and get a copy of it, because it’s wonderful from beginning to end, it’s very well done.a Yes? Here is the article. It is called “Hippos Need Love, Too.” If the Lion Country animal keepers down in Irvine haven’t recaptured Bubbles the hippo by now, they should call me and find out how to get her back. a   

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Mudrick Transcribed STUDENT: There’s a story I heard in Alaska that’s amusing about—this guy had a wounded rabbit call. And he was in Mt. McKinley National Park and he wanted a picture of a grizzly bear, so he blew on his wounded rabbit call. But they found him with a picture in his camera, because he’d been mauled and taken away. But it was a picture of a charging female grizzly bear coming at him after he had blown on the wounded rabbit thing. MUDRICK: Oh. STUDENT: Rather unfortunate. [Laughs.] [Inaudible] punch line: “He died.” MUDRICK: Yes. You and I maybe could go into business. [Laughter.] Hampton and Mudrick: Failed Comedians. [Laughter.] Which reminds me of another ethnic joke! and a very interesting one. Indians from India, because they were raised in the British raj, thought that nothing was so high class as a British education. And any Indian who had gone to Cambridge or Oxford to get an education, or even one of the private schools, was really looked up to with tremendous respect by other Indians in the same village.   I am not a hippo catcher myself, but I know this fellow, Jack Chadwick (only his name is not Jack Chadwick, he just wants me to call him that.) He had a lot of years with Ringling, I was told.   Chad called when the hippo first broke out and told me what was wrong with Bubbles, but I just laughed it off. Now I am beginning to feel that there might be something to what he says.   “Ain’t but one thing that would make a female critter bust out of a place where she gets all she can eat with nothing to do but loaf all day.” Chad said after telling me that he was the one who saddle broke the hippo the used-car nut rides on television.   How did you learn so much about the emotional quirks of hippos? I asked Chad after hearing his lengthy animal credentials.   “No different than my first wife,” Chad chuckled. “Ran off with a siding salesman ’bout 15 years ago. Served him right, too.”   What has that to do with Bubbles?   “Tell you what,” Chad popped back still laughing. “Female falls in love, lookout, I say.”   This was almost too much and I asked flat out: Are you trying to tell me Bubbles is in love?   “Only reason she ain’t in love is cause there ain’t no big dude of a hippo around for her to fall in love with,” Chad said. “What I’m saying is that she is ready to fall in love.”   I knew what he was getting at but I did not know how that would help catch her. To me, a lovesick hippo with nobody to love would be less likely to return to mundane living in Loin Country where her biggie of the day is a couple of hundred cabbages.   “All you gotta do,” Chad explained, “is to slip over that pond where she is hiding about evenin’ time and go, ‘Ahroooma, Ahrooma’ then git out of the way.”   I had no idea what happened after that but Chad said she would come up out of that water with serious intentions. “And what I mean is you don’t want to be messin’ around when a female hippo comes out to hold hands.”   I couldn’t imagine myself going “Ahrooma” then standing there to see what would happen. A 4,000-pound female hippo is a lot of mama and I had no intentions of messing with her emotions.   “It would take a little courage,” Chad went on. “Hippos have bad eyesight and when a female hears the call she don’t check out your credentials, so to speak. She goes for the caller.”   Chad a splendid idea and I guess the Lion Country folks will just have to find someone fast on their feet to call Bubbles out of the water and then set a record for the mile and a half back to her compound.   If she gets as upset as Chad said she would, it certainly would be an incentive to move right along.   —Santa Barbara News-Press, 5 March 1978

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From a Class in Letters STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Well, whatever. I mean, that’s a complicated issue. But anyhow, there was a guy who was in India in the ’thirties who actually saw a sign on a man’s house which gave his name, Bla-bla-bla, comma, CAMBRIDGE BA, in parenthesis, FAILED, end of parenthesis. [Laughter.] So that too—that doesn’t make any sense at all unless you’re aware of the ethnic circumstances, and why it is that a person would put such a high value on that. And there’s something very touching about that. There’s nothing contemptuous about that story. As far as I’m concerned that man is admirable in his desire to indicate how far he got. He didn’t quite make it [laughter], but what the hell, a miss is better than a mile [laughing]. See, these are variations on old . . . okay. All right, “The Old Man,” we’ll do “The Old Man.” I am bothered by him because he is so intimidated. He’s such a wet-head. And to see that over and over again, to see the poor old guy having to say each time, Gee, I hope I’m not off the beaten track again, or something like that, I just feel that he’s been so defeated by these wretched children and by his wretched wife and by the circumstances of his life, that I am unhappy for him. I’m afraid there I do make some kind of moral judgment. Yes? STUDENT: I couldn’t understand [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Well, that’s what makes it so sad, that he’s so uncertain—he doesn’t even know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know where he’s going, he doesn’t know how to keep them from being offended . . . he’s like a beaten dog. Nothing is so distressing as an animal which you can’t even talk to, I mean an animal [gestures] like that. What can you do? You try to comfort him and he— STUDENT: He still [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Yeah, there’s some—it’s not as bad I’m making it. But if you contrast it, for instance, with somebody like Kay, who is so frantic, and moving in all directions, and doing what she does, and doing it out of her own personality—whatever the mess of her personality. STUDENT: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Yeah! Now, let me make myself clear. What you’re saying will be helpful at getting me to make more definite what my concern is. It’s not that I don’t believe that the old man is admirable in his way, if you could get at him. I believe that he is forced by the circumstances of these letters—in other words, the sender is determining the quality of these letters much more than in the other sets of letters that we have. Lynne is obviously writing to Mary on a completely peer basis. They love each other, they’re fond of each other and so on, and there’s no problem. And the frame of course is the Christian frame and they share it, and so that limits them in ways that I’ve already said. Kay is just free, Kay is wonderful. And when my youngest daughter comes into the house these days, I swear, it’s as if the door has been opened and a fresh wind has blown through, and she can be miserable and unhappy, and the latest experience [inaudible] this guy she’s living with has thrown her out, and she calls him up and she says, “Are you still mad at me?” [Laughter.] (This is in Los 321

Mudrick Transcribed Angeles.) And he hangs up, and she hangs up. And he hangs up when she says, “Are you still mad at me?” She hangs up and in a few minutes she’s talking about something else and she’s going on . . . Really, don’t underestimate the power of interest of such people—they are marvelous. As soon as you stop believing that you can control the world—that is, first, for years what you think of is your own little room, where you’re gonna have a pile of gold, three girls locked in a bed, gourmet cookbooks surrounding you, and the door is locked up and guarded by three dogs and four eunuchs, and you go out during the day to make your living, and at night when you come back, there they are, all ready for you, fresh, open, excited, interested, indefatigable. But once you get over that, you will begin to understand that people like Kay are very interesting, and not really immoral.

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A Debate With Susan Sontag 25 February 1966

This debate was part of a symposium on modern fiction held at Oregon State University. The first half of the debate consists of Sontag’s reply to an essay Mudrick read on Malamud, Bellow and Roth (the essay appears in his book On Culture and Literature). The second half, which I present, consists of Mudrick’s reply to Sontag’s defense of a formalistic approach to fiction.a Sontag began with a summary of a disagreement between H. G. Wells and Henry James about the purposes of the novel. In a book called Boon Wells attacks James for treating the novel as an art form: “James has never discovered that a novel isn’t a picture. . . . He wants [a novel] to have a unity, he demands homogeneity. . . . Why should a novel have that? For a picture it’s reasonable, because you have to see it all at once. But there’s no need to see a book all at once.” In a letter of reply to Wells James says that the novel “is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner.”b If one were to side with James and treat the novel as an art form, then one could talk about the novel’s rigorous formal structure. Yet for some reasons the novel has not experienced a revolution in technique in this century to the extent that other art forms (like painting and music) have. The systematic use of metaphor, for instance, has remained for the most part undeveloped. An example of a formalistic approach would be the study of the creation and development of the close-up in movies. This technical device was first used around 1910 in detective serials. Somebody will discover a clue, like the hairpin of the murderess, and there will be a close-up of the hairpin to emphasize this information and help us to see it better. D. W. Griffith, however, used the close-up for a different reason. In a revolutionary shot Lillian Gish is shown wringing her hands at a distressing moment—it is a shot just of the hands. With this new use of the close-up film became a means of representing pure emotional states, with particular emphasis on facial expression. Movies, in a sense, have discovered Sontag requested that I print a summary of, not quotations from, her remarks. Henry James and H. G. Wells (University of Illinois Press, 1958), ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray, 244-45. 266. a 

b 

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Mudrick Transcribed the face, or perhaps recreated it, for we have a new relation to our own and to others’ faces. Sontag then remarked on the technical accomplishments and legacies of Hemingway and Faulkner; on the originality of Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch, especially Burroughs’s abandonment of the story form; on zero-degree or transparent-word writing, as practiced by Kafka, Borges, Blanchot and Camus; and on the Joycean legacy of emphasis on language and on the texture of language, as seen in the work of Djuna Barnes, Beckett, John Hawkes, and Burroughs. Sontag concluded by acknowledging that people might find her approach to fiction too specialized or too esoteric, and likely to deprive the novel of an audience not necessarily familiar with those revolutionary techniques that have overtaken other art forms in this century. She maintained that she wasn’t trying to legislate what people should do, but hoped it would be possible to convince the art audience that many possibilities exist and that one shouldn’t rule out one thing in favor of another, in the way that H. G. Wells disapproved of the kinds of novels that James was writing.

Mudrick’s Response Now what are we pleading for, and whom are we pleading to? Are we asking you to read experimental novels? I think the serious mistake that any critic or writer makes is to ask an audience to take special trouble to read what he writes. When I write anything—and I seriously believe that other people write this way too—I don’t believe in the existence of an audience. I can’t believe that anybody will ever read that except me. I don’t have that much vanity. Why should anybody else bother to read anything? And what business is it of mine whether they read it or not? If somebody is silly enough to publish it, and if I get offprints and my friends read it, what do I care? What business is it of mine if you want to watch KEZI-TV twenty-four hours a day? That’s your business. And I’m sure you’ll live happy healthy lives if you never hear a note written by David Diamond—or, as a matter of fact, Pierre Boulez or Stockhausen or whatever. And it probably won’t change your lives very radically. I think there are all kinds of loaded terms that were used here. You remember the terms revolution and revolutionary occurred a number of times. This is an interesting scare word, of course. What is revolution, and what is revolutionary? As far as I understand revolution, a revolution is when people rush to the palace, burn it down, kill the royal family, and institute a new government. I don’t understand revolutions in art, I’ve never been able to understand them. This is a term that you use when you’re trying to suggest that there’s a bad old gang which is holding onto the castle and you want to get rid of them. I think a much more modest and sensible term in talking about what goes on when artists are practicing new things is innovation . . . experiment, even—some mild little term like that which suggests that really nothing political is going on. I think 324

A Debate With Susan Sontag from time to time Miss Sontag had said things like art is play, art is a game, in fact art is style, art is artifice. It’s not as serious as that. Really, it isn’t. And Mr. Griffith’s close-ups aren’t as serious as all that either. And I think it’s interesting, in all this discussion, that not a single word has been said about what we call character, the idea of character—which I do think of, by the way, as a genuinely revolutionary idea in a political sense, not in this trivial critical sense. That is, the idea of character as we know it in, say, nineteenth-century fiction and in the best twentieth-century fiction is unknown, except for a few rather rare examples, before about two hundred years ago. Shakespeare had it; Chaucer had it; maybe Dante had it; Homer probably didn’t. And then all of a sudden in the eighteenth and nineteenth century this wholly new conception of what people are like and how they’re to be examined appears in the novel. And it’s interesting to me for instance that when Miss Sontag was talking about the movies (which I too enjoy, bad ones as well as good ones) she talked about these marvelous close-ups by D. W. Griffith of a face. But as far as I could tell, it never occurred to her that that face belonged to a human being, and that what you were seeing was something about a human being. As far as I understand them, emotions occur in people. Now think about some of the other movies that were being made at the same time as D. W. Griffith’s movies. Think about the movies being made for instance by Charlie Chaplin and by Buster Keaton. And let me tell you, kids, if you want to have a good time one night and you have a chance to see either Birth of a Nation, or a Buster Keaton movie or a Charlie Chaplin movie, go see Chaplin or Keaton, or you’re going to be bored to death. Because one of the dullest movies ever made, except for people who are interested in technical innovation, is Birth of a Nation. It’s got one of the sappiest plots and one of the vilest attitudes toward human experience that I know; it’s almost completely sentimental from beginning to end. Whereas what happens in a Chaplin or a Keaton movie is the creation of an extraordinary character with an extraordinary response to his environment, an extraordinary capacity for responding to it. And what is perhaps even more extraordinary is the persistence of this object from movie to movie. For instance, you go to see a Keaton movie and you say, Gee, I like that. And the next time you will go to the next Keaton movie and you will recognize that character, and there will be a kind of increment of great satisfaction from knowing approximately what this character is going to do, but not quite. In other words, almost precisely the same attitude that you have toward those people in life that you really enjoy knowing. You enjoy knowing them because they’ve already pleased you and amused you and interested you by what they have done, and they have also indicated enormous unexhausted possibilities. And the very fact of personality is something which it seems to me is the peculiar province of fiction. Now it has been. I don’t mean that this is all that fiction does. Of course it does other things. Fiction does all kinds of things, and it can do very well what Miss Sontag says it does. I think I’d like to quote Joyce at this point (and Joyce is a very great novelist). Frank Budgen, who was Joyce’s 325

Mudrick Transcribed best friend, encountered Joyce after Joyce had read all of the reviews of Ulysses. (And Joyce was a very shrewd publicist of his own work, as well as a very great novelist. He was very interested in these things, he planted some reviews, and this was necessary too—okay.) And Budgen met him this day, and he was very down in the mouth (Joyce) and Budgen said: What’s the matter? And Joyce says: I’ve read all the reviews. And Budgen said: Well, what’s eating you then? And Joyce says: Nobody said it was funny. In other words, I’m sure that people talked at great length about this extraordinary interior monologue which is going on, and the extraordinary technique which is used here . . . Now these techniques are extraordinary, of course they are. And they deserve to be discussed very seriously. Of course every critic has a limitation of time—there are only so many things that he can say. And in fact certain writers are technically far more interesting than certain other writers—this is true. Joyce is technically far more interesting, let’s say, than Malamud—of course he is. And he’s a much greater writer too, though this doesn’t necessarily follow. The argument as between H. G. Wells and James is a phony, because H. G. Wells was nothing but a journalist anyhow—he wasn’t a serious novelist. And this is not a serious adversary of James. If James had been involved in, say, a correspondence with Tolstoy, then there might have been some interest in comparing notes. But you don’t argue as between gnats and elephants. And I must say (if we’re playing one-upmanship) I too am astonished that Miss Sontag has never heard of that correspondence before, because it’s one of the landmarks in . . . twentieth century banality or something, I don’t know. It’s used by all sorts of people to prove that there are very corrupt spirits around who want to hold down us pure artists. Have any laws been passed against revolutionary artists? I don’t know of any. As far as I know, both revolutionary and nonrevolutionary artists are unread. Is this true? I mean, maybe the nonrevolutionary artist sells one thousand more copies. And this may make him feel good. But the idea of pleading with a general audience to spend its time paying careful attention to the way the camera swings in to show the wart on the nose of the principal character, in this serious movie Night and Fog or whatever . . . There is a point at which the precise discussion of technique, at the expense of certain human effects which are intended by the artist, becomes, it seems to me, an affectation. It becomes a way of avoiding serious issues. As far as I understand art, it’s one of the ways of expanding consciousness. It’s only one of the ways. There are many other ways of expanding consciousness; art is useful in this way. But there has developed a kind of notion in the twentieth century—among many intelligent people, very intelligent people—that there is a kind of conspiracy against the avant-garde, and that this has to be put down. And they don’t quite know where it’s located. Sometimes it’s in the academy, sometimes it’s those dreadful professors of English, who are interested in Tennyson still. Those poor people haven’t got a prayer, they haven’t got any influence with anybody, least of all with their students. They’re not influencing anybody. Nobody is influencing anybody. Have you ever been influenced by anybody? 326

A Debate With Susan Sontag You read! And sooner or later you come across something that you like. And maybe there is a kind of discipline, but nobody even knows what discipline is. Nobody even knows how you learn anything. Nobody knows whether you learn anything, in the university or anywhere else. It’s all extremely mysterious, and the idea of exhorting people to LEARN, to do this, to do that, with respect to the arts seems to me, finally, cant. In any case I’m in favor of all experiments, in favor of all artistic revolutions. I’m in favor of everything, I really am, I really am. I think that any human possibility which will expand consciousness, any human attempt at expanding consciousness, is marvelous. And as far as I can tell, the only inhibition that I would want to put on it is that it doesn’t do measurable physical or moral damage to any other human being. [End of tape.]

327

A Heretic in the University February 1983

An interview with Marvin Mudrick and Ian Ross, professor of biology, about the College of Creative Studies MUDRICK: The College was first proposed by me to the chancellor in 1965—the late fall of 1965, as I remember it. The chancellor, who had asked me to help him work up an academic plan for this campus, suggested while I was working on it that it might be a good idea to set up a small college on the Santa Barbara campus, and he asked me if I would come up with some ideas. So I went home one weekend and worked up the plans, which essentially make up the structure of the College of Creative Studies. Like a lot of people who’ve been teaching in universities, I have all sorts of ideas about what’s wrong with university teaching, and I suppose the College can be regarded more as a reaction than as an action. There are certain things I disapprove of in the university, and it’s perfectly possible that I’ve tried as hard as possible to keep them out of the College. One is the lecture course; another is the introductory course. I have very strong feelings that the first two years of most university training is worse than worthless; that is, in many instances it’s a recapitulation of what you should have been doing in high school. And another very bad feature of it is that it tends to be an excuse for employing people, especially TA’s, because they need to give money to some graduate students. It also is a way of kiting student-faculty ratios by having very large classes, which of course can help to make look more respectable the upper-division and graduate classes which maybe have two, three, six, eight students in them. So you talk about student-faculty ratio and you have something like seventeen or eighteen to one, but that obviously includes classes with three hundred, five hundred, seven hundred, and so on. So I think the first thing that has to be said about the structure and philosophy of the College is that it was a very conscious, a very deliberate effort on my part to get rid of some of the most difficult and imperfect aspects of university education in the United States. I think I’d probably better turn it over to Ian now, because one of the great difficulties in the organization of the College was to persuade people in the sciences that it made any kind of sense. It wasn’t hard to persuade some people, at least, in the humanities, especially in the arts, that the university wasn’t organized for their benefit, or for the benefit of the best 328

A Heretic in the University students and the best teachers. It was much harder to do that with people in the sciences, and since I have no competence whatever in the sciences, I myself lost a little bit of my nerve in the early years because I felt I didn’t have a good case, but I hope that Ian will make some kind of case for it. Ian, of course, is a biologist. ROSS: Well actually, I was one of the major opponents to the creation of the College when it first started. When Marvin came around to the Biology Department to try and induce the biologists to contribute their time and the facilities to the College, I think I was probably the most vocal spokesman against it, because at that time I could not conceive of allowing a freshman into a research lab with any hope of that freshman doing anything worthwhile besides breaking all my valuable equipment. A year later Bruce Rickborn, who was then in the College, snuck a CS student into my lab under a different guise, and I found out this person, who was a sophomore at the time, had a brilliant mind that I would have missed completely if he had not been in my lab. And I realized then that actually we have been underestimating the abilities of freshmen for many, many years now. Any freshman is quite capable of coming into the research lab—in biology, and I want to emphasize biology rather than physics and chemistry and so on, for various reasons that I’ll go into—and become a productive scientist in a very short time. Biology is a little bit different from physics, where you have to have either pencil and paper for theoretical physics, or massive amounts of equipment, very expensive. In biology you can train a person in the practical aspects of modern research. All the modern ideas of cloning, of recombinant DNA, and so on— these are new ideas, but the technology and the methodology is universal, and any student can come in and essentially learn the procedures. A freshman, of course, will not know the theory, but they can learn the procedures, and it is extremely important in a science to know how to use your hands in a lab. It’s easy to get the theoretical science from the library, but only in a research lab—I don’t mean a lab designed to give you little projects for the quarter, but when you’re actually working on ongoing research, you get a full idea of the depth of frustration, the routine boredom of science—95 percent of science is routine boredom—and some concept of the excitement. And in the College we can give the freshmen this exposure. And so when I realized this I switched completely and became a very vocal supporter of the College, and I guess I’ve been in there for something like twelve, thirteen years now. In science, at least, the major role I see is to expose the undergraduate to really hard-core research at a very early academic age. MUDRICK: One of the features of the College that I think is relatively little known outside the College (and sometimes I’m not sure that isn’t a good idea, because when some academics find out about it they’re really horrified) is the so-called student-conducted seminar. I started this with the College—I sneaked it through various committees and was astonished when it got through, and I had a pretty good idea that they had no idea what was going on. And there does tend to be 329

Mudrick Transcribed rather strong negative feeling among more conventional faculty when they hear about it, but it’s been one of the most interesting aspects of the College. And one of the most interesting aspects of it as far as I’m concerned is the enthusiasm of some students for it. For instance it’s almost impossible to keep any of the better lit students—if one wanted to keep them—from proposing sooner or later a student-conducted seminar in literature; they’re fascinated by the notion. Obviously results are variable, but some of the students I have every reason to believe—from reports and my own observation—do simply splendid jobs. I think there are fewer student-conducted seminars in the sciences, but even there I can recall when our absent colleague, Max Weiss, once told me that a sophomore student he had (one of the best mathematicians we’ve had in the College, a boy named Gerald Edgar) was teaching a student-conducted seminar. Max took it, and he told me at the end of it that it was the best math course he had ever taken. And I believe him. It’s possible of course for very bright undergraduate students to have a kind of enthusiasm and a freshness about handling material that maybe some older university teachers don’t have. So that’s one feature of the College I’m very fond of. There are other features that I ought to describe because questions arise about them. For instance, the College covers only the arts and the natural sciences—if you include math, anyway—that is, it includes math, biology, chemistry, physics, literature, art, and music theory and composition. And if I don’t feel in a particularly combative mood and somebody asks me why, I say that the College started with a limited budget, and there were only certain disciplines we could handle, and I simply chose the most obvious disciplines. If I feel combative or desperate I say that what I included were all, as it seems to me, of the serious disciplines that could be handled in any novel way by undergraduate students. Because the only areas omitted are areas like history and philosophy—which I take to be serious disciplines, but in which I can’t imagine that an undergraduate student can make a serious contribution, or novel or creative contribution. And the others (and this is much more controversial) are the so-called social sciences, which don’t seem to me sciences at all, and very often they seem to me simply the manipulation of statistics for political purposes. I was, I admit, delighted to hear—there was an interview on PBS with Richard Feynman: very interesting, and among other things he referred—he seems to be a cheerful soul, enjoys himself, enjoys research, and of course is a Nobel Laureate, and was talking about a great many different subjects, cheerfully admitted his ignorance about anything except science, said he almost never read, and so on—but then he referred to what he called the “false sciences” [laughs], and I was very pleased by that. And the reason the social sciences aren’t included in the College is that I’m afraid they do seem to me the false sciences. And it may be that sooner or later they’ll develop methods which can be taken more seriously, but so far they seem to me more politics than science. ROSS: I think they’re at a state right now where they haven’t reached the quantitative values of science, but they’re trying to pretend they have. 330

A Heretic in the University MUDRICK: Yes, and that was one of the things that Feynman was talking about—he said they pretend to use data, but in fact they don’t use the data in any identifiably scientific way. And another aspect of the College which certainly goes against the grain of much modern educational theory is that there is virtually no general education requirement: it’s possible for a student to take almost nothing but courses in his subject (there’s a very nominal general education requirement). And this too is the result of very strong feelings I have about what is called the general education requirement, which usually consists in taking introductory, huge lecture classes in subjects, the material for which probably could be much more effectively learned from, say, reading a Sunday supplement article on the same subject, or at the very least a popular book over the weekend. ROSS: I think one of the important things that you mustn’t forget is the fact that in the College we have this very close student-instructor relationship. In the sciences—in biology at least, I say we have one criterion for graduation—that is, a graduate is a professionally competent biologist (and of course, the definition of that would depend upon the actual adviser). And no adviser is going to allow a person to graduate who is not well-rounded and competent. And consequently this lack of an education requirement is—to me, if a student has, say, eight courses in one field, say Portuguese history, they’ll know far more about politics, sociology, economics, the history and the literature, than just taking a single course. MUDRICK: Which also allows me to point out that I think that the College has a considerably larger number of double-majors proportionately than L&S does. And one of the reasons is that the merely nominal education requirement permits the student to work seriously in two different subjects. For instance there have been students who graduated with majors in biology and literature, and other rather peculiar-looking double majors from the standpoint of people who are accustomed to what goes on in the university generally. So I don’t mean to suggest that our students are very limited types. And in fact I think it’s wonderful—if I had my way, everybody would know everything. But I think the smorgasbord approach to education is just an approach that doesn’t work. To stick my two cents into something that has just occurred, I noticed that the L&S faculty has just voted for the return of the foreign-language requirement, or rather for one year of the foreign-language requirement, which simply seems to me pathetic. Because if anybody quizzes, let’s say, any student who’s taken one year of language at this institution, then he knows that that requirement is a bad joke, that it doesn’t have anything to do with learning the language—that there’s a kind of snobbery attached to it. There’s a snobbery which has the justification in say an area like Europe, where every time you take three steps you cross a border, but in the United States it simply doesn’t have that kind of practical justification, and I suspect it doesn’t have an educational justification either. It’s a little bit like the notion that English universities had at the turn of the century that everybody should know Latin. What it meant in practice was 331

Mudrick Transcribed that at meetings of your club you could quote the same three lines of Horace for just about every situation, and everybody else thought of you as highly educated. I don’t want to simply . . . babble on [laughing]. If you could direct us a little, or even if you want to start some sort of disagreeable topic, which would be all right with me. QUESTION: What kind of goals are there in CCS? Are there any set goals, or is it more open-ended? ROSS: Well, every student is an individual, so the actual goal of CCS to me is to provide the best possible education in the context of that person’s individual goals. You can’t do that always in Letters and Science because they expect a strict, rigid sequence of courses, and in the College you can do that because of the freedom of selecting different courses, and taking L&S and CCS classes. Basically it’s an individual way of attaining the individual’s goals. The College is set up, to me at least, to further that end. The College isn’t trying to turn out a goal-oriented product, or this kind of thing. I don’t think the College has a single goal. MUDRICK: No, and as a matter of fact this raises an interesting question for me, because every once in a while we get questions from the administration which assume that we have the same line of gab about our future and our prospects as say an L&S department will have. For instance departments will occasionally be asked: What are your plans for the future? And these plans are supposed to include, say, some big breakthrough in philology, or bringing somebody in structuralism who’s going to change the face of literary criticism for our century, and so on. And depending on how cynical the administration is, they will be more or less impressed by this kind of argument. The College can’t even begin to use that kind of argument, partly because of what Ian said, which is that the focus of the College is on the student. The focus of L&S really is on faculty. The assumption is that students are interchangeable, that when a student comes in, there are so many things that you can do with them, and these are all lined up, and the best thing you can do is to try to bring in very distinguished people who will increase the reputation of the university, who will publish all over the place . . . Maybe they’ll even attract a few extra students, but it’s likely to be numerical and quantitative rather than qualitative. I know that people would deny this if you argued it. But it is interesting to me that, in questions of this kind that one gets from the administration, one never sees a question: How would you go about trying to get better students in the university? There’s never a question like that, and this, it seems to me, is based on this assumption that students are all the same, and essentially they’re all putty, they’re all malleable; you essentially put them into one mold after another (I’m sure that image doesn’t work). ROSS: Filling up empty vessels. MUDRICK: Yes, that’s right. The important people, the people that you have to consider individually are faculty, and the only way you can improve a department is to bring in new sub-disciplines. You bring in something that wasn’t done before, or the Biology Department tells you that if they get one more electron 332

A Heretic in the University microscope there’ll be a tremendous breakthrough in research, and so on. And it is interesting to me that when I get questions like that I find them almost impossible to answer, because of course we get questions like, What do you expect to do in the future? And what I have to say (with all possible fancy rhetoric) is, More of the same. And that’s not a good bureaucratic answer. They don’t want that answer—they feel that you’re stagnating. ROSS: They want “innovative change.” MUDRICK: They want innovative change, which of course in the L&S departments means, indeed, more and more of the same thing [laughing]. ROSS: With different names. MUDRICK: Yeah—with different names, and sometimes different people, because people drop dead and retire and so on. I feel myself somewhat on the defensive always in talking about the College, and one of the reasons I dislike talking about the College is that I’m inclined to think [laughs], in some instances at least, the less that’s known about it the better. You see, my feeling about universities is quite . . . universal. When I make cracks for instance about lower-division programs, I’m not talking about UCSB; I’m talking about Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, UCLA—every university in the United States. That is, I think they all suffer from this fundamental mistake and this fundamental misjudgment about the potentialities of undergraduate students. I think there’s virtually no limit: certainly in the literature program, as a couple of you know, I have freshman students going into advanced classes immediately, and very often—after the first shock, the first week or two—they produce some of the best work, because it doesn’t even occur to them that they’re not qualified. Whereas the regular L&S program puts them into what I regard as Mickey Mouse courses—the introductory and intermediate courses—where gradually they lose any interest, any impulse, any initiative and drive, and by that time they’re ready to fill the role that the university regards them as having filled from the beginning—that is, nameless, interchangeable units. ROSS: They learn by that time how the faculty wants them to think, not how they should be thinking for themselves. MUDRICK: Yes, and I have often had students for instance come in to talk to me, both before and after the College started, who asked what seems to be a perfectly sincere question: I’m taking such-and-such with so-and-so. What kind of paper do you think he wants me to write? And they don’t mean that as a cynical question. ROSS: Oh no—it’s the same question as, What do you want on an examination? You can shock a Letters and Science class very nicely by saying, If you regurgitate 100 percent of what I give you, the highest grade you’ll get is a C. I’ve done that to a large introductory class because I wanted more from them than I had given them. And this is a concept which is not prevalent to Letters and Science courses. MUDRICK: The whole notion of authority in education never gets examined, and I sometimes—and maybe now, because we still have a little time, I’ll go off into one of my—well, I’ll talk as a matter of fact about a philosophy that I have in 333

Mudrick Transcribed my own class so this doesn’t sound as if I’m being too general. I do something in my own lit classes which I think most teachers would be simply horrified by. Oh, I remember one instance which is a good and interesting instance. A couple of years ago I taught a course in Shakespeare and I assigned for that course (it met only once a week, ten weeks) I assigned twenty-seven Shakespeare plays plus I think six Greek plays—there were at least six. So they read about thirty-three, thirty-four plays; in other words they were reading three or four plays a week. And I remember that a student who saw this course advertised (I was teaching it as a double-course—both in the English Department and in Creative Studies) and a student who saw the course listed as an English course asked another English professor (who doesn’t know me) whether I was being serious, whether it was possible that somebody would assign all these Shakespeare plays in one class, and the teacher said, “Oh, no. That’s just an advisory reading list. I am sure that what he’ll do is to assign just one of those plays a week.” Because it’s inconceivable to the average university professor what I happen to believe about reading—it’s that you learn things about literature by doing a great deal of reading! And the notion that you have to understand every word that you’re reading seems to me a leftover from the Middle Ages when teachers were priests, when their students were acolytes, and when what they were learning was in fact holy writ. Now obviously if you’re studying holy writ you have to understand every word, because otherwise you won’t get to heaven. But when you’re studying some mere human being like Shakespeare, it doesn’t seem to me that you have to understand every word. Certainly when you’re reading with the greatest enthusiasm, when you start reading when you’re a kid, there are hundreds of things you read without understanding them, and with the greatest enthusiasm. ROSS: That’s true in science, too. I encourage all my students to read as much as possible. The freshmen can’t understand the technology, the techniques, some of the jargon, but they can get the objectives of the papers, they can get the conclusions, the interpretations—they get an understanding of what’s going on in the field. MUDRICK: They can get a feel, they can get a sense of proportion! ROSS: The osmotic effect comes in there. MUDRICK: Yeah, and this too is real heresy in the university, because many of the methods of the university and many of the methods of even the so-called great teachers depend on that notion of authority which was essentially outmoded by two things: the decline of religion and the invention of movable type. That is, there were two reasons why a teacher had so much authority in the Middle Ages—one was that he represented God, and two, he had all the texts. And I have a very interesting story about this. ROSS: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: Yeah—the only books that existed he had, because they were much too expensive to reproduce by hand. But I remember something that was told to me by a Viennese who was teaching in the English Department in the ’fifties. He had gone to the University of Vienna after World War II, and of course Vienna was 334

A Heretic in the University in ruins. Anybody who visits Vienna now looks at it and says geez, it was spared by the war. All that stuff was rebuilt—Vienna was flattened. And I think every book in the University of Vienna library was destroyed, or most of them. And so he was a literature major at the University, and he took a course in Kafka, for instance, with one of the major authorities in Kafka in Austria. And the course consisted of the professor standing in front of the class and giving them, slowly enough so that they could take it down, the plots of Kafka’s novels and stories— because they were all unavailable. They weren’t in print, the students couldn’t buy them, and so this was a way of getting it to them. And that essentially is medieval education, and to a very large extent its ideas have been carried over to the modern university, because nobody has ever questioned it. ROSS: That’s particularly true of the introductory science courses, where you get these massive fifty-pound volumes, and you get these teacher’s aides and student aides [inaudible]. And it’s rare for the instructor to actually put his own ideas, because then it louses up the questions . . . MUDRICK: Of course, of course. In any case, if you try to question these things—one of the most interesting aspects of universities is that the faculty get a completely false reputation as liberals, radicals—this is because they tend to be fashionable liberals and left-liberals, especially at times when it’s safe to be so, I mean in the body politic—but in fact they are the most reactionary people in the world! And there are a lot of reasons for that. The tenure system is one reason. There’s nothing so awful as the academic fact that you have to keep telling people “what you’re working on,” or “what you’re an expert in.” For instance nothing amuses me more than the notion that somebody is a Conrad expert. Now any serious undergraduate student can read all of Conrad and all the criticism on Conrad in one rather enjoyable summer, and could be as much of an expert on Conrad as any faculty member who has grown gray with falsehood and misrepresentation, passing himself off as a Conrad expert who’s working on the Conrad book (I’m sure there are things like this in science), and so what you learn to do is to practice this shameless lying. One of the most interesting things about my own career in literature is that I discovered this very early—so I teach everything! I mean I’m absolutely shameless. And from conversations with my colleagues I almost always discover that I know more about their specialty than they do, partly because I’ve kept up, because it amuses me to keep up, because I read recent books. So there is almost every kind of intellectual fraud practiced in the university, in the very structure of the university, and it’s very sad and (I think, myself ) fundamentally unnecessary, but very very hard to challenge, except in extremely small operations like the College of Creative Studies. Because this fraudulence goes on just as much at a place like Yale or Harvard. I’m not talking about backwater campuses now, I’m taking about the very nature of American higher education. ROSS: I think, actually, what you want us to discuss is one of the philosophies of the College, which is the fact that the faculty too are not only encouraged but almost required not to be in the normal mold, and that the faculty is some of the most 335

Mudrick Transcribed free-thinking people in the sciences, and often are regarded strangely by their Letters and Science colleagues. So that the College basically is a place where an idea can flourish, whether the idea comes from the faculty or a student. There’s no authority, there’s no hierarchy, there’s no social strata which will affect the evolution of an idea and the birth and development of it. MUDRICK: Well, as I say, when you start talking about it, especially in the presence of people who are disposed to be somewhat hostile or at least alienated, you begin to feel very defensive because it sounds like a pretense of arriving at the millenium with your notion of how students should be treated and so on. I think many students just survive the traditional education more or less by accident. I mean they survive it because human beings are very resilient, especially young people. But I think we could do much better by them. ROSS: I think that’s shown by the fact that so many seniors, in biology at least, will come to me in their last quarter saying, I’m graduating—what do I do now? They haven’t been given anything or enough to give them intellectual satisfaction or even practical abilities to get a job, and so on. I don’t mind the not-getting-ajob practicality, but I do like to think a senior should be able to graduate having some kind of intellectual satisfaction. And at least in the sciences we are luckier than arts and letters in the College, because we can supply administrations with actual numbers of products produced, and we can point to the percentage of our students who’ve gone to graduate school or to medical school and have had high honors later on. So we can actually play the game and say, Well, look, we have fifteen . . . MUDRICK: I’m glad you brought that up, because one of the ways the College has protected itself, paradoxically, is that it has used the very criteria of the establishment to demonstrate to the establishment that its students are good. So that we have a very high proportion of our science graduates for instance go on to graduate school. (I think the latest percentage is something like eighty-eight.) It is in any case very high, and much higher than in the L&S programs. You can’t do things like that with the arts, because for one thing many fewer art students go on to graduate work. But there’s a great deal of impressive information there, too. Just recently a girl who graduated from the lit program in the College published her first novel. A number of these students went on to graduate school and did very well there. So we do have what the university itself would regard as objective evidence in favor of the success of the College. ROSS: I think the main successes, I feel, are not the ones who get on to say Harvard or Berkeley grad school. But there’s a student who would not have made it through Letters and Science, and who in a formal-structured course might wind up with a GPA of 2.2 (I have a particular person in mind) and who winds up, when he applies to grad school, having the chance of turning down Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, and Yale, and going to Princeton instead because of the creativity he had displayed during the lab work as an undergraduate, which he would not have been allowed to do with his GPA in Letters and Science, and he wouldn’t be allowed to do it as a freshman in Letters and Science no matter what his GPA. 336

A Heretic in the University And it’s this kind of person who obviously has a potential, and that potential cannot be developed in the formal structure of Letters and Science, but can be developed in Creative Studies. MUDRICK: And there are students of that kind in the arts, certainly in literature. As a matter of fact I’m thinking of a couple now (and I don’t want to go into details because the details would probably help to identify them) but students who simply would never have made it in the L&S English program and who have been simply spectacular after say a year or so in Creative Studies. I can remember—after all, I’d been teaching for almost twenty years on this campus before the College started, and I can remember first-rate students who finally dropped out after their sophomore year and they said, I just can’t do this anymore. It is so stupid, I can’t stand the teachers, I can’t stand the courses, I can’t stand the fact that they don’t let me do anything. And in those days there was nothing for those people to do at all, and it was very sad. And certainly the College exists as an alternative for students who are not temperamentally suited to that kind of self-flagellation that the L&S program tends to promote. ROSS: It’s interesting that some of the students who’ve dropped out of the College have been, by L&S standards, highly successful students. They have 4.0 GPA’s, but they’re totally incapable of taking a course for the content—they want the grade only. And that kind of student does not do well in the College because we don’t require them to get a 4.0, and this can be quite traumatic for some students, and we wave goodbye to those. MUDRICK: Well, I think probably we’ve just about run out, unless you can think of— QUESTION: Do you think that there should be something similar to a CCS-type of program at other campuses—other UC campuses and other campuses in general? MUDRICK: I don’t think you can prescribe such things. I think it’s a little bit like— here I’m afraid you virtually have to use religious terminology; you have to assume things like the “inner light,” or “real interest.” I mean, one of the most obvious facts about the College (and I almost hesitate to bring this up, because it seems to me the scandal is particularly great in the sciences) if you think of what has happened to teaching loads for university teachers since I started teaching . . . The first year I taught was the spring semester of 1947 at Temple University. My salary by the way for that half-year—the total salary for the year if I’d been teaching the whole year would have been twenty-four hundred dollars, but it was twelve hundred. This was 1947, and I taught five classes. Each class I met three times a week. I taught six days a week, Monday through Saturday, and I taught one night class, which I met three evenings a week. And this was a standard load, and certainly nobody ever thought of complaining about it. In other words it was what now would be regarded as a high school teaching load, or maybe elementary school. When I first came to Santa Barbara I taught four courses (in 1949, and that must have lasted about ten or twelve years). Well, as far as I can tell, the only thing that teachers ever lobby for are higher salaries and fewer courses. And little by little this worked out, so that especially around the 337

Mudrick Transcribed end of the ‘sixties university professors were getting fairly reasonable salaries, even at UCSB, and they were teaching fewer and fewer courses—until now, some teachers almost teach no courses. Now, the College of Creative Studies, or anything like it, depends to a large extent on a teacher’s being willing to spend more time than he would normally be spending if he taught in L&S, and this is a fundamental problem. So you do have to have a mission. I think there are some scientists for instance on the Santa Barbara campus who teach only one course every academic year. And if you talk to them, if you talk to other scientists, they explain to you about all the work they do and all the research, and they’re also working on some great breakthrough which will be made about 1998, and they are experts in this and that, and they handle all sorts of graduate students and PhD students—I mean my heart bleeds for them! I mean it really is rough what they have to do. So they really haven’t got time to teach more than one course a year, and they haven’t got time to talk to students. Now, when you have a set-up like that, you simply can’t have anything like The College of Creative Studies, even if you had other attitudes that were appropriate. So I’m afraid I would have to come up with the very pessimistic and maybe even cynical conclusion that a college like this is almost impossible, unimaginable, on almost any American university campus. And it was just a complete fluke that it developed here, just a very odd conjunction of time—I mean this was happening at the end of the ’sixties, everybody was getting a little worried about the student uprisings, they wanted to throw a bone to the students, there was a lot of money still coming into the university—that was when the good Governor Brown was still in office and poured money into the university, and there was no tuition. And that all ended very abruptly in January, 1967, which by the way was the meeting of the Regents at which the College of Creative Studies was approved, more or less I’m sure accidentally—it just happened to get through because nobody thought anything about it. But that was probably the last time—it may also have been the only time—when it could ever have got approved. And it survived more or less by accident and because it can show evidence of some kinds of achievement which are taken seriously academically. But if you talk to most teachers on campus, especially those who haven’t had direct contact with it, you’ll hear all sorts of wisecracks. ROSS: It’s often regarded as an easy way through, which is totally contradictory. MUDRICK: Yeah—which is about as wrong as can be. ROSS: There’s actually, in the sciences, a much rougher curriculum than in Letters and Science. MUDRICK: Well, I think the same thing is true in lit, and I think especially students who are taking some of my classes would testify to that. ROSS: We expect them to think for themselves, which is a very difficult thing for the average senior to do because they’ve been taught for three years not to do so. MUDRICK: Well, for more like sixteen or eighteen years.

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A Heretic in the University ROSS: The concept of the College should be university-wide, but it cannot be because of the way people are. And I think you’re quite right—it has to sort of happen; you cannot legislate the College. MUDRICK: No, you can’t. And as a matter of fact if it were legislated it would turn into just some other kind of honors program in which somebody was making his points. I’m sorry to conclude on that pessimistic note, but that’s the way I feel anyhow.

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“Ikey, Ikey, What’ll Ya Learn in School Today?” 2 November 1984

Mudrick was asked by the Hillel Foundation at U. C. Santa Barbara to speak about his upbringing. MUDRICK: I made a joke at one of my classes this week when somebody asked me about this. I said I was going to come out of the closet, which I hope you understand that (those of you who take classes from me will understand) that I’m only making a joke. I thought maybe I could really make it exciting by presenting myself as—really coming out of the closet—presenting myself as the first atheist Jewish gay provost [laughter] in the United States. I toyed with this idea. [Laughter.] I finally decided it was too shocking, and so I gave it up. I really would like this to be as informal as possible; I don’t have any prepared speech. I have here with me a copy of a fragntent of autobiography that I wrote mostly a couple of years ago that has some details in it that might be used later. And what I really intend to do is to talk about my family and about my upbringing, and for a change most of it will be quite positive, nothing really shocking at all. And I think I would like to start by talking about my mother, and about misapprehensions that gentiles (I don’t know what word to use; I mean I’m talking about nan-Jews—maybe I should say non-Jews, maybe that’s better) certain notions that non-Jews are likely to have about the Jews of at least the time and circumstances that I was familiar with. I said this in class, when somebody asked me the other day, that the people I know were very tough— they were not submissive at all. Of course many historical events have occurred since then, most particularly the Holocaust, and so you might get the notion, if you weren’t raised in the circumstances in which I was raised, you might gel the notion that this was a sort of rather sheep-like people who were afraid of almost anything, and so on. But I didn’t have that impression al all when I was growing up. These were tough cbaracters. And my mother was the toughest of all. She in fact is the toughest human being without exception that I have ever known. And I think I’ll try to start talking about her, I mean I’ll slart by trying to talk about her, and try to remember the anecdotes, or whatever anecdotes—and by the way, I really mean this: I would welcome inlerruptions, I mean not hisses and 340

“Ikey, Ikey, What’ll Ya Learn in School Today?” boos, anything like that, but I mean if you have anything to contribule which is analogous it would be very interesting to me. I was raised in a very Orthodox Jewish family, and my parents were born and grew up in the quite large Bessarabian city of Kishinev, which for people who are interested in literary history is interesting, is the place to which Pushkin was exiled in the early nineteenth century. It’s in the province of Bessarabia, it’s in southwest Russia—what is now southwest Russia, what was then southwest Russia, and between World Wars I and II was part of Rumania. The province of Bessarabia was taken over by Rumania between the Wars, but when my parents grew up there it was Russian, and it became Russian again after World War II. And the last great pogrom, which of course Hitler’s activities turned retrospectively into child’s play, occurred in the city of Kishinev in 1903. And my parents were there, and of course they described it to me. They were all of course hiding wherever they could—my parents were hiding in a cellar. And my mother could go out on the street because she didn’t have any obvious Jewish characteristics—she looked very much like a peasant woman. So when they needed to get food or provisions of some kind, she would go out and get them. And they were trapped there for, I’ve forgotten, I think five or six days. But anyway—I don’t remember what the statistics are (once again they don’t matter—everything pales by comparison with what happened later)—but it was partly as a result of that and partly as a result of the feeling about military service that my parents left Russia and came to the United States in 1903, very shortly after the pogrom. And my father (this too I think some of you would know about, at least if not your parents, your grandparents) my father was one of those extremely pious people for whom piety was virtually all of life. And of course Jewish Orthodox piety is special in somewhat the same way in which Muslim piety is—that is, it takes a lot of time. You spend a lot of time during the day in prayer, and so there isn’t much opportunity to do anything like making a living, and my mother, mostly, took that over. My father worked relatively seldom at jobs. One thing that I remember is that he worked as a pants presser in a laundry soon after he came to this country, and I remember that he made seven dollars a week, and I think that was the most he ever made in his life, as a matter of fact. [Laughs.] But he—what was that? QUESTION: Was your father a mystical Jew or was he just simply— MUDRICK: Was he a what Jew? QUESTION: Was he a mystical Jew? MUDRICK: Oh no, no—you mean Hasidic—no, no. Just straight Orthodox. He was a very good-natured man, very mild man. Those of you who know what a matriarchal household is like can imagine what our house was like—it was completely dominated by my mother. In fact you could not notice my father for days at a time. [Laughter.] He would be sitting in a corner reading every word of the Yiddish paper. And I mean he read every word—advertisements, [inaudible]. And it was very interesting to watch him reading, because he read with the 341

Mudrick Transcribed kind of appetite with which some people eat. It was very satisfying for him to read the paper. In fact it was very satisfying for him to do almost anything that he did with great deliberation. Eating [inaudible]. Anyway— QUESTION: Did he read the Vorwaerts or did he read the Freiheit? MUDRICK: No, he read Yiddishe Welt, which was the Philadelphia Jewish paper. No, it wasn’t—the Forward was. But no, no—the Jewish World wasn’t. As a matter of fact it had a back page which was printed in English, and I would read it too, the whole thing—I mean both the English section and the Yiddish section. Anyway, my mother did all sorts of things to get money and, as was true of many immigrants in those days—how they survived I have never been able to figure retrospectively. I have asked my older brothers and sisters, and I know that my two oldest brothers (I’m the youngest of seven children) and my two oldest brothers were out on the street selling papers when they were about nine years old, and as soon as it was possible they were supporting the family. My mother, by the way—her vocation for something like sixty-five years—was a professional matchmaker, a shadkhn. And I still have the last cards she had printed up when she was living in Atlantic City at the age of ninety-four. [Laughter.] These cards promised all sorts of bliss. [Laughter.] I have to tell you something about that. My parents of course never were very fluent in English. My mother picked up words occasionally, and one word she picked up which always delighted my brothers and me especially—she heard somebody say the word “passable” (that is, somebody said, Oh, that’s passable) and she got the impression that it meant extraordinary or very beautiful. And we never disagreed with her, so that this became her adjective of choice. [Laughter.] Whenever she was describing to an English-speaking man over the telephone who was looking for a woman, she said, “This girl, very passable-very passable.” [Laughter.] And I often wondered what these people on the other end thought. [Laughs.] I never found out, though. One thing I should say about my mother, because it’s very interesting how these people survived in this country: my mother was completely illiterate. She did not read or write any language. She spoke fluently—Yiddish, of course, and Russian, and was pretty good in Rumanian and Polish, and of course she learned to speak English, at least well enough to get around. But she conducted this business without being literate in any language—she could neither read nor write. I remember, in her sixties—I was still around the house (she was forty-six when I was born, by the way—I just barely made it [laughter])—in her sixties she went to night school to try to learn to write. And I can still remember her coming home, and just painfully tracing her signature in English. Then she gave it up, it was too much trouble. But it’s important that you understand that about her, because she is the only person I have ever known who was never once defeated by circumstances. I never saw her cry, except in rage—and she was often in a rage, so that’s important. She never cried out of sadness or depression. She never allowed you to say something which indicated your inability to cope with circumstance. So 342

“Ikey, Ikey, What’ll Ya Learn in School Today?” that one of the earliest memories that I have is—this had to be in the house on Gaskill Street, which was a very small street in Southeast Philadelphia. And there was a wood stove, a wood kitchen-stove which she cooked on, and that was the only heat in the house. (It was a very small house, but these were Philadelphia winters—they can go down to zero degrees, so it would get very cold and you would have to bundle up.) And I remember coming down (and I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, because we moved from that house when I was about five or six) I remember running up to the kitchen stove to get warm in the morning. And she was of course already cooking—she’d been up since five or four-thirty or something, bustling around. And I said, “Geez, it’s cold!” And she said, “IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, GO BACK TO BED!” [Laughter.] She wouldn’t allow you to say anything which indicated that circumstances or climate or weather were stronger than you were. You were not allowed to say anything, and she wouldn’t put up with it. And yet she didn’t have other characteristics that some of you probably would associate with that kind of temperament. She shouted like crazy, she got furious: she never laid a hand on me, she never hit me. Neither did my father. My sisters hit me, by the way, and I still hate them for it [laughter]—my older sisters [inaudible]. But my parents never laid a hand on me. Though she would shout and scream and stamp and do everything, she would never hit. As a matter of fact it didn’t even strike me as surprising until years later, and I still don’t really understand it, but she never did. Anyway, I must tell you one anecdote about her. My oldest brother told me this several years ago. I’m sure I heard it before, but he reminded me of it and it’s a wonderfully characteristic story. Somehow all the boys went to college— how, once again I have no idea. I especially can’t understand how the two oldest went (they were twins, by the way). But they went, and my brother Harry (who was the one who told me this story) was going to Temple University Pharmacy School in Philadelphia. This was during the ’twenties, when things were fairly prosperous, but the family never had any money at all. And what they had managed to do was to arrange with the man who was called the bursar in those days, who handled the money, to pay him a week at a time—that is, every week they brought a few dollars in. And a new dean came in of the pharmacy school. (You can always beware of new deans, by the way, or new administrators of any kind: they are invariably worse than the ones who preceded. [Laughter.] This is the cardinal rule of all administration.) Anyway, he discovered this “irregularity.” And so he told my oldest brother that if the whole tuition wasn’t paid immediately he would be thrown out of school. So my brother came home and he told my mother. (And as I said, there was no money.) My mother didn’t tell anybody (and my brother found out about it later from gossip at the university). My mother got on the trolley car and she went to the Pharmacy (how the hell she finds these things I have no idea, how she asks for information and finds where she goes) but she found the place and she went there, and she went into his office. And she reviewed the situation and she said, “You want to throw my son 343

Mudrick Transcribed out of school if I don’t pay?” He said yes. She said, “If you do that, I will find out where you live, and I will take the trolley car there, and I will break every window in your house.” [Laughter.] He reinstated the weekly payment. [Laughter.] Now, the important thing about that story is that she would have a done it, she absolutely would have done it. She didn’t believe in idle threats. I don’t want you to get, by the way, a sentimental notion about her. This was a very tough woman, and almost impossible to live with. I mean, terrible shouting matches . . . And you can imagine what she was like with her daughters-in-law— including my wife, eventually. Because no woman obviously was good enough for any of her sons—[inaudible] without question. Some of the names that I’ve heard in these . . . [Laughs.] I still have a vivid image of one of my sisters-inlaw being pursued up the stairs of the house with my mother shouting various epithets al her like B’styucha! Korveh! and on and on, down me line. I don’t know what the poor woman had done. Nothing, I’m sure, except marry my brother. QUESTION: [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: “Bitch,” “whore.” My mother didn’t take to criticism. [Laughter.] She was a lousy cook, and this irritated me. I remember, for me one of the great discoveries of life was the discovery of steak, which I made while I was in the Army, after I’d been at home for twenty years wondering what this piece of shoe leather on my plate was that my mother was trying to palm off on me, and that my oldest brothers ate with great pleasure. And one of the problems, as those of you who keep kosher know, is that you really can’t have the good steak meat if you’re an Orthodox Jew—you’re not allowed to have any part of the cow’s ass, which is what it amounts to. About the only thing that you can cook that remotely resembles what the WASPs call steak is the rib. QUESTION: [Inaudible] chicken fat [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Yeah. That has been contested in recent years, by the way, that the salt does change, does strongly change. I don’t know. QUESTION: Well, I think some of it comes from cooking, because my mother was the one who cooked, and I often had to take [inaudible]. MUDRICK: They’re pretty good with braised stuff, but they don’t know how to broil or roast, for some reason that I haven’t been able to figure. QUESTION: The reason for that is that you are not allowed to have blood. It wasn’t that they were [inaudible]. MUDRICK: Well . . . sure. No, I understand, I understand. Well, it could have been done medium [laughing], I mean! This was unbelievable [laughter], it was. Yes? QUESTION: Do you have any idea what made your mother so tough? [Inaudible] grandmother? MUDRICK: No. All my grandparents had died by the time I was born, so I never knew any of my grandparents. A couple of them came to this country—my father’s father came to this country. My mother was an orphan, and that’s a long and complicated story. As a matter of fact she was a barmaid in Kishinev. So she’s really rather untypical in many ways.

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“Ikey, Ikey, What’ll Ya Learn in School Today?” The only thing she deferred to my father in was religion, that was it. In every other way he was completely subordinate. And he knew it, and she knew it, and nobody ever argued. And I have no idea how typical this was. It certainly wasn’t as true of the relatives’ families that I knew; that is, the father—I don’t mean, by the way, that my father was a contemptible man—it wasn’t that. I remember he was very smart, and he knew her well, and he had simply decided that life wasn’t worth living in an atmosphere of argument, so he simply submitted. I mean he bowed under the yoke, and he did what he wanted, and life for him was primarily a fulfillment of his religious obligations anyhow. But he was very smart, and he noticed things. And I remember when I was stupid enough to bring my wife back to the house after World War II, I mean thinking I could live there for a while because I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t get a job until [inaudible]. And I remember, about three or four weeks later, after we had to leave and virtually had the cops at the house [laughs] (I’m exaggerating a little, but it felt that way) my father had a very strong [inaudible], he said: “You lived with your mother for twenty years before you went into the Army. What ever possessed you to bring your wife? What could you possibly imagine would happen?” And by the way, he never said things like that reproachfully—he was just very smart. He knew what was what. He could cope with it. But I mean it’s like trying to live in a tornado—there’s just no way to do it. And in fact the only way you could have done it was the way he did it, which was to submit to it. It was very interesting if you could stand off. I always found it fascinating to visit her—I mean for no more than a couple of hours, you couldn’t even stay the night, because then she started owning you again. And there are very odd aspects to this kind of control. For instance she was marvelous with very small children—marvelous, very loving—and never impatient with them. In some respects an absolutely ideal baby sitter. You couldn’t ask for a better babysitter. But as soon as the children reached the age of reason, already they had to submit to her will. And she had this very, very powerful will. But she was extremely interesting. I like what you people are doing so far, it’s helpful to me. I don’t know how much of this—for instance I was astounded yesterday to discover in one of my classes that people don’t know one of the most famous of Jewish jokes (which happened to be referred to in something we were discussing in class), the joke about the herring on the wall. I’ll tell it to you, because it seems to me that Jewish jokes are very special and indicative of Jewish temperament, Jewish life, in many respects. It’s a riddle, and the riddle is: “What’s green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?” And of course the person who’s asked the riddle gives up and says, “I don’t know, what is?” And the person who asks the riddle says, “A herring.” “What do you mean, a herring? A herring isn’t green!” “You can’t paint it green?” [Laughter.] “But a herring doesn’t hang on the wall!” “There’s a law you shouldn’t hang it on the wall?” [Laughter.] “But it doesn’t whistle!” “No, so it doesn’t whistle.” [Laughter.]

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Mudrick Transcribed I mean, you can’t have everything. [Laughter.] The Jews are very practical. That is, they make do. They don’t believe in absolutes, except maybe God. And he’s somebody you argue with—I don’t know whether any of you know about that—that’s a very interesting aspect of at least Orthodox Judaism. I don’t know anything at all, by the way, about Conservative or Reform Judaism. I confess that as a survivor of Orthodox Judaism who’s given up all religion, I have, I think, roughly the same attitude toward Conservative and Reform as maybe Catholics have toward Unitarians. [Laughter.] (But this is probably unjustifiable and wrong . . .) ’Cause those Orthodox Jews certainly worked at it. I mean it does seem to me if you believe in a religion you ought to work at it. And they worked at it! they really worked at it. And they worked at God, and they demanded to know why he was doing these awful things to them. And that’s not just an exaggeration. In the first place, as you—as some of you know anyway, in Orthodox Judaism everybody is his own priest, so to speak. That is, there is no boss—a rabbi is just a learned man who is hired, just as a cantor is hired for the High Holidays. But I mean people do their own praying. And moreover they sometimes contend with each other as to who will finish first—that is, they do it as fast as possible, so this is virtually unintelligible to anybody who doesn’t really know it backwards and forwards. I don’t know, that idea of religion has always struck me as very attractive. I mean if you’re going to have a religion, you might as well believe it. But this business of religions—I began to understand that something was going wrong with Judaism when I saw these huge fancy temples designed by Frank Lloyd Wright going up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I knew that it was all over. [Laughter.] That the good old days were gone. I know I’m raising hackles here. I’m very sorry.a

“The tape ends here. The title which Mudrick gave his talk comes from a story he told later. I’ve asked others who were there about the details, but all I’ve come up with is that the words were a taunt directed at Mudrick when he was a boy. He was walking to school one day when another boy called out to him: “Ikey, Ikey, what’ll ya learn in school today?” a 

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A Commencement Speech College of Creative Studies 4 June 1983

I have never made a speech at these commencements, but I think I may make something like a speech—it depends on how I feel after I’ve recited some statistics. I think it’s important that you parents perhaps and friends, as well as the students, should be aware of some of the achievements of Creative Studies students. I won’t be able to read any kind of list which would be exhaustive, but I think some of the percentages are interesting. We’ve had during the first fifteen years of the College—we’ve just completed the sixteenth year—but through the first fifteen years there were a total of 490 Creative Studies graduates. Of these we’ve managed to keep in touch with 378 (that is, others simply haven’t answered our letters) so the statistics we have apply only to these people, and some of the statistics are very interesting to me and unexpected. For instance, 14 of our graduates are now practicing MD’s, 9 are still in medical school, and 3 are going to medical school in the fall. Thirty-three have received PhD’s, 20 are still in PhD programs, 57 have received master’s degrees, 32 are in master’s programs, 47 are teaching. (We’ve made a separate list of 15 who’ve taught but only at CCS, because this happens to be under a cloud for the moment.) Among the President’s Undergraduate Fellowships granted between ’75 and ’83, 381 were awarded on the whole campus; 54 of these were awarded to CCS students, or 14.17 percent of the total (the College of Creative Studies enrolls 8/10 of 1 percent of the total enrollment on this campus). Among the Regents Scholarships between ’79 and ’82, the records that we have, 191 were awarded, of which 14 were to CCS students, or 7 percent. As far as recognition in various areas is concerned, each year the Yale Summer School of Music and Art selects sixty institutions in the world from which it will accept a single nomination for its Ellen Battell Stoekel Fellowship. Since 1976 the College of Creative Studies—not the College of Letters and Science and its Art Department—has been one of those institutions. From the sixty nominees the Yale faculty selects thirty for the Fellowship, and then we’ve had a number who were chosen to go.

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Mudrick Transcribed In literature, Spectrum, which is the campus-wide literary magazine (I’m going to have to go through some of this hurriedly, and I know some of this well enough so that I don’t have to read it) but the 1983 issue of Spectrum, for instance, all four of the editors are either current students or graduates of the College of Creative Studies, and that record goes back to 1980. Moreover, in the recent past—the last several years—something like a majority of the contributions in the magazine are from Creative Studies students. Moreover, for those of you who think this might be an in-house sort of thing, five times in the past eight years Spectrum has been chosen as one of the country’s best three college literary magazines out of 102 competitors in the annual contest conducted by the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines in New York City. Some of you, especially in mathematics, know about the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, which is the most distinguished honor available to undergraduate math majors, and we are particularly proud of the students who’ve participated and won awards in that competition. The competition includes over two thousand students and three hundred teams each year, representing about 340 colleges and universities in the US and Canada. In 1979 the CCS team of Tim Redmond, John Rose, and Daniel Abellera won First Honorable Mention in the team competition. It was the only team in the entire University of California system to place in the top ten. In past years the CCS team selected each year has placed twelfth, eighteenth, forty-first, and fifty-ninth. Since approximately three hundred teams compete annually, this is an outstanding accomplishment. Gerald Edgar, who graduated in 1970, won a Putnam First two years in a row—one of the half-dozen individuals to do so in the over-forty-year history of the competition. Since 1978 CCS has usually placed at least one student in the top 5 percent of participating students. In math in 1978 the L&S Math Department began giving an award to the outstanding graduating math student at UCSB: 1978, two awards given to CCS students; 1979, to Daniel Abellara. In 1979, through the L&S Mathematics Department, the Raymond L. Wilder Foundation Book Award was established. It’s awarded annually “for academic excellence in mathematics.” Each year this award has gone to a Creative Studies math student from 1979 to 1983. In physics there is something called the Nordsieck Prize, which is awarded to the best graduating physics major at UCSB. In ’75, ’76, ’77, ’78, ’79, and ’82, this award was won by Creative Studies students. I’m also very much interested in the fact that we have probably a higher percentage of Special Action Students than any other college on campus—this means students who don’t qualify academically for admission to the University of California. I’m particularly interested by one (I’ll have to go to other information here for a moment). This is a boy named Mohan Putcha, who was admitted under Special Action to Creative Studies. He completed all his undergraduate work in two years here—I think he took three graduate courses in mathematics as a first-quarter freshman. And he co-authored thirteen articles which appeared 348

A Commencement Speech in referee journals while he was an undergraduate student here. He then went on to graduate work after completing his work here—so he went from high school to the PhD in three and a half years—and he became a full professor at North Carolina State at the age of twenty-nine. That’s Special Action, you understand: he wasn’t qualified for admission to the University. [Laughter.] Another current graduate who is here today, Venkat Gottipaty, in physics, was a Regents Scholar, was on the Dean’s Honor List, received ninety-ninth percentile scores in the MCA test, joined the American Mensa Society in ’82, named Outstanding Student of the Year by the L&S Physics Department for 1983, applied and was accepted to several medical schools, chose Emory University, which offered him a seven-year renewable scholarship in their MD-PhD program. Here are some achievements of CCS graduates and students: Norman Badler, who graduated in math in 1970, is now a professor of computer science at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, has specialized in three-dimensional analysis, has been programming computers in labanotation to record dance movements. He is considered the primary innovator in this field. His work was discussed at length in an article—as a matter of fact it was the cover article—in the May issue of Science, ’82. He serves on the editorial board of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is guest editor for November and has written the introductory article for the issue. Christine Lehner, who was a student of mine in the literature program, has had numerous stories published in various places, and her first novel, called Expecting (which I understand was autobiographical), was published last fall. And so on. Jonah Bornstein in lit, graduating today (I think he is), won first place in the Frank W. Coulter Prize Contest for student poets offered by the Academy of American Poets, UCSB. (First prize was shared with a graduate student in comparative lit.) Of the three honorable-mention designations, two were received by CCS students Eddi Fredrick and Jervey Tervalon. I want to read some individual—people that I’m particularly proud of, interested in. Oh, there’s one—well, (I’II get to that later. John Clark was one of my favorite students, even though he was a chemistry major—by that I simply mean that I don’t usually see science majors, but John Clark was one of those people who took a lot of lit courses. Very, very bright, likable kid. He did his graduate work at Berkeley in chemistry and he got his PhD in ’76. He worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory as a postdoc, he came back to Berkeley as a member of the Chemistry Department, and has been a professor of chemistry at Berkeley since ’81. That is, he became a full professor at thirty-two. I don’t know whether you’re aware of what that sort of thing means in the university, but it means quite a bit. Gerald Edgar, the boy who won two successive Firsts in the Putnam, is now teaching at Ohio State: he is a full professor. Daniel Farkas, who was a friend 349

Mudrick Transcribed and a student at the same time with Gerald Edgar in the program, is now a full professor at VPI. These are people, you understand, in their early thirties: the College has been going only long enough for them to have achieved that advanced age. [Laughter.] One of my favorite students in the College is a man now, I guess—John Amuedo—because I think he taught me a little bit more about the College than I expected to learn, at least that early. This was a boy who started as a physics major, and I was shortly told (the scientists in the College tend to be a little more stiff-necked than the people in the arts) that he wasn’t really a serious student; he was interested in other things, and he wasn’t conscientious. And he came to talk to me, and he’s a very persuasive guy, in fact so persuasive that I thought of him as a kind of con man. He wanted to do all sorts of things, and it all sounded superficially plausible. But I know as well as you do that students never do anything serious [laughter] so I didn’t take him seriously. But luckily we had at that time somebody that it will apparently no longer be possible to have, a young recent graduate who was teaching in the College and who told me that I was wrong about Amuedo, that he was a genius, that he was a kind of computer genius and that he was very much aware of connections between physics and music, and he ought to be encouraged in every way. So very reluctantly I went along. What amuses me most about John is that he has never yet received his degree from Creative Studies because he’s been too busy doing other things. For instance, when the Pompidou Center of the Arts was set up in Paris and Pierre Boulez, who is generally regarded as the outstanding musician and ccrtainly one of the great composers of the century, went over—left the New York Philharmonic and went over to take charge of the music program at Beauxbourg at the Pompidou Center—he invited John, who was then a student in the College, to become his right-hand man in electronic music. And so he went there and was kept there for a second year. He came back to the College from time to time to look in and to take a course. He won all sorts of awards, of course, and he’s now at MIT working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab. He’s also performing with chamber music groups and doing accompaniment in the Boston area. So it goes. Now you may wonder why I’m—here’s a note, a memo that we got recently from Scott Miller. Scott Miller was a biology student (I think Beazya knows him well) and he took a class or two with me too, so I know a little bit about him. He went to Harvard working on a PhD in biology, and here’s a note from him: I don’t have much to report. . . am still a PhD student in biology at Harvard, still working on insects, still at the same addresses; expect to graduate in two to three years. Spent the summer working for the Smithsonian Institution on insects (which I started doing while a CCS student), which included a Beatrice Sweeney. an instructor of biology at CCS.

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A Commencement Speech three-week trip to the People’s Republic of China (hence the delayed reply to the info. request). As I see more and more university programs, I continue to be convinced of the superiority of CCS. Even Harvard, despite its high self-image and equally high price, does not (I think) offer the same undergraduate opportunities in biology that CCS did. Now these are very nice things to hear about and to read to you and I’m very proud of them, and I have never been able to understand why they don’t make a bigger impression around here, I simply have never been able to figure it out. The evidence seems to be very impressive to me—it’s statistically impressive, it’s individually impressive, the students seem to represent the highest kinds of achievement—and I have been genuinely puzzled to try to figure out why there has been so little recognition, and so much . . . I have to call it, so much malicious gossip about the College on campus. Because it seems to me a very serious operation, I’ve always thought so. And I think I’ve worked it out finally for myself in something like this way. When I had the unexampled, the incredible, the miraculous opportunity to set up the College (and it was just the most incredible fluke in history. It’s about like, well, the Santa Barbara baseball team winning the World Series as a professional team) I thought that the one thing that had never been tried, really, was a college in which the students were more important than the teachers. Because I’ve always been puzzled as a teacher to discover that the faculty was considered the university. For instance, if you see any talk about universities in the paper, if you see articles, and you hear for instance how great Berkeley is and how great UCLA is, and ONCE MORE they have been demonstrated to be the greatest institutions in the country, what they tell you about are the teachers; they never tell you about the students. It’s assumed that the students are neutral matter which gets processed, goes through, and they’re simply lucky to be in the vicinity of the teachers. [Laughter.] But who they are you don’t know. Now one of the most interesting things about universities is that they don’t keep records on students—do you know that?—I mean they don’t try to keep in touch with you. For instance, a year and a half ago—something like that— we had the usual pro forma examination of our programs by this group called WASC (that is, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges). And we all had to assemble, and we all had to present them with the usual bull about our programs—that is, how great we are and this and that. And what I presented at that session was a number of statistics, especially about students: what had happened to them, where they had gone, and what they were now doing. And I was publicly congratulated at that meeting by the chairman of that committee, because he said that that was one of the best reports he had ever seen, that it was factual. (It’s very hard to write factual reports about the academic life.) And afterwards he was even more flattering. He said that it was virtually the only time in his experience as a member of those committees that he had ever 351

Mudrick Transcribed been presented with serious information. And we do have a great deal of serious information. I’m sure you know that L&S doesn’t keep in touch with alumni—I was astonished to discover that Engineering doesn’t keep in touch with alumni. I would think that a professional college would be particularly interested in keeping in touch with alumni. In any case, I think what’s involved is that people get fixed in the notion that the students are necessary, I mean for certain financial reasons and maybe public relations, but what really counts is the faculty. And this confusion as to the role of the students—for instance, the notion that there is such a thing as a teacher, a teacher who has authority and who presents the right stuff to classes—well, that’s always seemed absolute nonsense to me. It may be true in the sciences, though I don’t believe it even there, but it’s certainly not true in the arts. There is no right stuff, you start over again every time. And anybody who’s ever done anything in the arts knows that you learn over and over again, that you start from the beginning over and over again. So that as far as I understand it there is no such thing as a teacher, we’re all students, and anybody who has become a teacher has abdicated being a student, and no longer deserves, as a matter of fact, to be in a university. And yet this is very hard to understand, it’s very hard to make this clear to people. I remember, for instance, I had the unusual experience of starting to teach in the same university in which I was an undergraduate. It was separated by four years of being in the army during World War II, but I came back and essentially the same people were there. And I immediately felt the difference in the atmosphere—that is, it was perfectly clear that the students didn’t count, they just didn’t matter. And I’m sure a lot of you know the standard jokes which are made about students: those awful dummies who can’t spell, can’t punctuate— you can imagine the kinds of . . . But I had remembered, you see—and there was this break in the army when I remained a little child anyway—so I could think back on what it was like (this was thirty-six and a half years ago, by the way) I could remember what it was like to be a student. And I remember feeling at the time that most of these people, most of this shabby crew of faculty that I’d had— there were maybe two people whom I would accept, but otherwise I wouldn’t have been caught dead with any of them outside the classroom, and that having grown old, ugly and stupid they were of no special interest to me except insofar as I was accumulating grades and some kind of information. Now all of a sudden these were great men, these were important people, and the students out there were of no special importance. And so what I decided to try to do, subversively, was to set up a college in which the students would be most important, and in which, as a matter of fact, the value of the college would eventually be established (if it were going to be established) by the achievements of the students—not by the achievements of the faculty—and wouldn’t that be nice. I was reminded of this—a number of students have been coming in and lamenting this and that fairly recently, and one said to me that he was speaking 352

A Commencement Speech with a member of the review committee which is going to make some decisions about the College. And the student asked this faculty member what he had heard that was so bad about the College or that was going wrong with it, and the faculty member immediately said to him, “You know, we don’t have anything against the students; we are very much concerned about the qualifications of the faculty.” Which is extremely interesting. In other words students aren’t produced in any way or they have no relation to the faculty, and they don’t tell you anything about the faculty—the faculty has to be judged on its own. So that students apparently are—are what?—they’re produced in some mysterious manner, and if they learn more than other people learn it’s just because they’ve applied themselves in some strange and mysterious way. Well, this whole thing is very baffling to me and I suspect that it all comes under what St. Thomas Aquinas in Roman Catholic theology called invincible ignorance. [Laughter.] That is, when you get into the university, especially if you’ve been in after a few years, what you think about is perquisites. I for instance recall my experience year after year trying to get science teachers to teach in the faculty of the College of Creative Studies. And they’ve said—and I’ve actually heard two people say this directly—“Why should I teach at halftime one course per quarter in the College when I can get paid fulltime teaching one course a year in the science department?” Which is understandable. Why should I get married and do it for nothing when I can stay single and get paid for it? [Laughter.] Nothing matters except personal advancement, and achievement of the students is secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and so on. And so I’m very proud of the achievements of students in the College. I’m also proud of achievements of the faculty, because I think that they do work together. I think the faculty in the College is and always has been among the best students in the College. They study . . . Some of the smartest remarks I’ve ever heard on literary subjects—certainly far superior to almost all that I’ve ever heard from any of my colleagues—have come from students in my classes. And this is not because I’ve prompted them, it’s because it seems to me they’re studying under conditions of freedom which permit them to come up with remarks of this kind. One of the hardest things to understand if you’re a teacher, because you have to depend so heavily on your sense of your own importance, is that the easiest thing in the world to accumulate is information. Teachers, when they make fun of students, almost invariably make fun of their deficiencies of information. Information is nothing. If you’re interested in a subject, information about it comes to you—it leaps at you like iron filings to a magnet—it’s the feeling that you have about the subject. And as far as I understand it this is true of any subject. And it’s certainly true of all the subjects that I know about. It’s true of the arts, I’m sure it’s true in the sciences. The College has attempted to make this effort. I think the effort is on the record successful. I am very proud of the record, and I am proud of all of you. Thank you.

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Genius and Anti-genius 2 April 1986

From a symposium on literature at the College of Creative Studies. The tape is incomplete. MUDRICK: . . . which I was provoked to think about, partly because of the first meeting of my Chaucer class yesterday. It has something to do with—it’s like this, the kind of strangeness and the separateness of genius. And I was thinking of an anecdote, which I don’t believe I’ve ever told (one of the very few anecdotes that I know) that I don’t believe I’ve ever told in a class. It’s about Balanchine. And this must have happened in the early ’seventies, when my wife and I were in the rehearsal hall at the New York State Theatre and Balanchine was rehearsing a revival of one of his greatest masterpieces . . . [trying to remember its name] . . . (boy, I’m really in trouble) . . . The Four Temperaments. (All I could think of was The Four T’s, and I couldn’t remember what the T stood for—the dancers called it The Four T’s.) He was rehearsing it, and Balanchine, I think probably like most geniuses, is not terribly interested in work that he has already done—it just bores him, mostly. And yet, of course, when you’re a choreographer there are special problems about recreating work that you’ve done in the past because it can’t readily be put down. All systems of notation are unsatisfactory or at least very laborious, and even film, which after all is two-dimensional, doesn’t necessarily do the job, and at that time they didn’t have any film. And so he was rehearsing it and getting help from the dancers, who fortunately have marvelous muscle memories, most of them. And they came to a spot where everybody was stuck. Nobody could remember what came next, including Balanchine. And so they thought about it, and he asked somebody who was standing there, a girl who’d danced in it ten years before. No, she didn’t remember it. And then he all of a sudden said, “Well, I’ll invent something new.” And then he turned to us (it was the only time I ever saw him do anything like this) he turned to my wife and me, to whom he had been been introduced a little earlier, and he got a very wicked look in his eye and he hissed (and I mean that was what he did) “Sacrilege!” [Laughs.] And that kind of distance from his own genius, and his awareness of his own genius, and his awareness that a work that he had created existed really outside his control, but at the same time he had infinite power over it—very

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Genius and Anti-genius interesting to me. And I think that’s true of all geniuses—that is, that they are very much aware of what they can do. I think probably the two most interesting kinds of persons to read about (not necessarily to know, I mean especially the latter) is the genius, and what might be called a kind of anti-genius—that is, a person who cannot under any circumstances respond to genius—there’s a kind of faculty. And there are wonderful instances of this. Some of you have heard me read some of these, I love these. One of the most marvelous is in a letter from a contemporary of Schubert’s. Believe it or not, his name was Franz Schubert, and he was a composer, and he lived in Dresden—he was thirty years older than Franz. And one of the most wonderful coincidences in history: Schubert, who then was nineteen years old, sent a copy of his song “The Erl King” to the music publishers Breitkopf & Härtel, who happened also to be the other Schubert’s publishers. That is, Breitkopf & Härtel were not our Schubert’s publishers—he didn’t have a publisher at that time, he was just sending the song unsolicited to Breitkopf & Härtel. And of course they rejected it—and sent it back, believe it or not, to Franz Schubert of Dresden. And this is the letter that he wrote to the publisher [laughing]: I have further to inform you that some ten days ago I received a valued letter from you in which you enclosed the manuscript of Goethe’s ‘Erl King’ alleged to be set by me. With the greatest astonishment I beg to state that this cantata was never composed by me. I shall retain the same in my possession in order to learn, if possible, who sent you that sort of trash in such an impolite manner and also to discover the fellow who has thus misused my name. For the rest, I am greatly obliged to you for so kindly sending me this, and remain with the most perfect respect, Your most grateful friend . . .a Now you see, that’s the only thing that that guy will ever be remembered for [laughing]—absolutely marvelous to go down in history in that way. And it is a kind of anti-genius; I mean you know that at the very mention of genius, and certainly in the presence of genius, he reacts with tremendous anti-magnetic force. [Laughter.] Such people can be used as touchstones. You know that if they react unfavorably to something, it’s good. [Laughter.] You can use them. There’s a wonderful guy who wrote a diary during Mozart’s lifetime and who saw Mozart and heard him perform from the time Mozart was about five years old. His name is Count Zinzendorf [spells the name] and his diary is available. And when he hears Mozart at the age of five (who is certainly the most phenomenal genius in history, no question about it, in any of the arts, and was obviously so from the age of about five or six): Heard a little boy playing harpsichord—something like that—that’s the total mention. Then, maybe ten years SCHUBERT: A Documentary Biography (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946), ed. Otto Deutsch, 76.

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Mudrick Transcribed later or fifteen—well, it goes through: Zinzendorf follows Mozart—he just goes out to the concerts in Vienna, so he hears Mozart from time to time and he always makes a little note. Heard The Marriage of Figaro. Boring. [Laughter.] And so on [laughing]. Just terrific! I mean you can count on him, whatever happens [laughing]. But almost my favorite is one—I don’t know whether this is immediately appreciable, and some of you have heard me read this letter before, but it is a marvelous letter. There was a poet named Rochlitz in Vienna in the early nineteenth century. Schubert was already thirty years old, he was a year from his death, and he was certainly the best-known writer of songs in Vienna at the time. And Rochlitz writes to him saying that he would rather like Schubert to compose music to one of his poems. And he was a well-known poet, by the way. Now you’ve gotta understand something about—how do I explain this? I’ll give you a sort of skeleton of his letter and then you’ll draw your own conclusions, and maybe you’ll think that I’m explaining too much. He starts by saying that he admires Schubert and his compositions, and he would appreciate it if Schubert would set to music one of his poems. And of course you will have complete freedom to do anything you please. And then he tells Schubert what Schubert is supposed to do in setting his poem. Sir.

You know the respect and affection I have for you and your compositions; and Herr Haslinger has transmitted my thanks for your music to my three songs, as well as my desire that you may embellish a larger poem by your art; also your inclination to do so. (I should say by the way that Schubert of course was by far the most prolific song writer in history. He wrote over six hundred songs and he wrote as many as six songs a day. Any poem that showed up—his friends had to write poems so that he’d have something to write songs to. So it wasn’t any special thing that he would write a song to a poem.) Permit me, therefore, to come to this subject at once. The poem I have in mind is ‘The First Sound.’ You will find it in Vol. V of my collected works [laughter]. which Herr Haslinger possesses. I will set down here how I imagine the music for it; but do not by any means think that I wish to dictate in any way (for I have no right to do so); take what I say rather as a mere suggestion for your consideration, and then follow whatever may occur to you as the result of such deliberations—as you may be inspired—whether it accords with my proposal wholly or in part or not at all. And so you think he’s going to make a few general suggestions. 356

Genius and Anti-genius Overture: a single, short, plucked chord, ff [laughter], and then a note sustained as long as possible, < >, for clarinet or hom, with a pause. [Just a general suggestion (laughter) about how you start.] Now a soft opening, darkly intertwined, harmonically rather than melodically—a kind of chaos which only gradually grows clearer and lighter. Whether the overture is to close here or to be followed by an allegro I will not decide; if the latter is chosen, let the allegro be serious, but very forceful and brilliant, yet dying down on a close derived from the first movement. At this point declamation without music up to the words “Wirken gegeben.” Here the orchestra drops in quietly with sustained chords [laughing]; . . . Now, how can anybody do this? You see, one of the most astonishing things about certain kinds of human stupidity is that they are unimaginable. The Dresden-Schubert stupidity is imaginable. You can imagine a person with a kind of anti-taste, who immediately understands that this is a work of genius and responds to it with horror, because a lot of us are like that. But this guy, how can he possibly not know what he’s doing? Really, this is one of the great mysteries of life. There are some things that people do and it absolutely baffles me that they do not understand what they are doing! And this is an educated man! and a wellknown and highly thought-of poet. the words are spoken to these, with only very short interludes between the principal sections of the speech, up to “Erdenrcich.” Here a longer, sombre interlude. A shorter and more gentle one after “Gott” [that is, “God”]. The next sentence, as far as “selbst gefällt,” without any music whatever. For that from “Nun schwingen” to “soll ich sein,” chords with very short interludes at the main sections; now, however, a more developed, gently serene interlude, after which, at the words “Nun schliesset,” &c., everything begins to move more and more in the music and gradually to increase. This grows into free instrumental play after the words “Wiederhall sie nach,” and so forms a developed preparation and introduction for the great chorus, as splendid and brilliant as possible [If only I could do it!]: “Drum Preis dir,” developed as long and as effectively as it may please the composer; but the last two lines, and thus the close of the whole, are given a gentler and milder music, without any change of tempo or key. Composed in this manner by a master of such spirit and feeling as yourself, and spoken by an orator as worthy as your Anschütz, it promises to make a great impression, and indeed one such as anybody, connoisseur or otherwise, must honor and love. However—I repeat—all this is a mere suggestion; the choice and the decision is yours.—For the rest, I am delighted to have come a little closer to you in this manner also and to refresh your memory of me. Should a work result and should I receive it, I would take care that as 357

Mudrick Transcribed finished a perfornance as possible is given at our concerts.—With the greatest respect and devotion, Rochlitz.b Schubert answers the letter, and it’s a wonderful answer (Schubert is a wonderful guy): Sir,

I was much honoured by your valued letter, since it brought me into closer touch with so excellent a man. Your proposal concerning the poem of ‘The First Sound’ I have carefully considered, and it is true that I believe your suggested treatment of it to be capable of making an admirable effect. But as in this way it would be a kind of melodrama . . . (which had a special meaning in German music at that time—that is, a melodrama was essentially a spoken play with musical interludes. Beethoven for instance wrote the Egmont music to Goethe’s play for that purpose) rather than an oratorio or cantata, and the former being no longer favoured . . . —and then, Schubert slips in a parenthesis: “(perhaps with good reason).” [Laughter.] The guy wouldn’t notice it, no doubt. I must openly confess that I should very much prefer a poem that may be treated as an oratorio, not only because an orator like Anschütz is not always to be had, but also because it is my most ardent wish to furnish a purely musical work, without any extraneous matter apart from the elevating idea of a long poem to be set wholly to music. I need hardly say that I recognize in you the poet for such a work and that I should devote all my powers and diligence to composing it in a manner worthy of the poetry. . . . With the greatest respect, Your most devoled Frz. Schubert.c And I do like the editor’s comment [laughs] at the end: “This brought the correspondence between Sehubert and Rochlitz to an end.” [Laughter.] I’m baffled. There’s another kind of genius, which is also very interesting to me, and that’s the kind of genius which I think is rarer, that doesn’t recognize itself as SCHUBERT, 686-8. The bracketed statements are Mudrick’s. SCHUBERT. 688-9. The ellipsis indicates Mudrick’s omission.

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Genius and Anti-genius genius, that doesn’t really know that it’s genius, and this is the kind of genius that’s very easily condescended to. And a very obvious instance of that kind is James Boswell, who more and more strikes me as probably the greatest writer of the eighteenth century. Certainly a very great man, but not really having any idea that he was a great man, because by all the usual standards applied to great men, he wasn’t. He didn’t show up brilliantly in company, and he didn’t work in any of the established forms, and of course the greatest thing that he did (and since the Life of Johnson is essentially a series of extracts from that work, I think it’s fair to say, the greatest work that he ever wrote) wasn’t even available to the public until something like 175 years after Boswell’s death—that is, his journals. But he’s always interesting. There’s a quotation from him, I mean there’s something that he says in one of his journals when he is speaking rather frankly in the presence of his law clerk (he was a lawyer). And his wife is there and she tells him that he ought not to speak so frankly in front of this guy. And Boswell writes in his journal: I have a strange feeling, as if I would have nothing secret about my life. And this of course is almost the principle of his genius. He was really incapable of lying. And to be incapable of lying doesn’t really have very much to do with the desire to tell the truth—that is, it’s a talent. The desire to tell the truth, of course, can be baffled by all sorts of hesitations and personal and moral deficiencies and so on. But Boswell could tell you everything that happened, could speak directly, and so you were much more aware of the existence of a complete personality which is available to you. It’s not like the secret life of some Victorian aristocratic tramp who went to three prostitutes a day and describes the sexual events in detail—that’s not the sort of thing that Boswell gives. He gives things like that too, but that’s not the point. The point is you’re not being given mere external descriptions. You’re being given a state of consciousness, which is fascinating to me (to me). But I also don’t find it hard to understand at all why Boswell is continuously depreciated. And he’s going through, as a matter of fact, a kind of period now in which it’s very common to say that the only reason he has any fame at all is that he happened to be lucky enough to be tolerated by Dr. Johnson and eventually to write Dr. Johnson’s life, and in fact he is a boring and disgusting human being who tells you things about himself that nobody wants to know anyway, and so on. And I’m not exaggerating, by the way. There’s a really notorious article by a Johnsonian scholar (I think he’s at USC now) named Greene which is unbelievable in this respect. I have another wonderful statement by Balanchine which I have to read. It’s not quite apropos, but it’s so wonderful and it seems to me to be in line with what I feel about Boswell. That is, Boswell was almost the first person who ever lived to understand that there might be some value in telling the absolute truth about yourself. He’s the first genuine autobiographer. And that’s a great discovery. Nobody before Boswell, at least nobody before Boswell who had any genius, would have had that kind of idea. And I suppose the justification that I would give for telling this anecdote, apart from the fact that it delights me, is that this couldn’t have been printed say fifty, sixty years ago. 359

Mudrick Transcribed It’s a footnote in the collection of Stravinsky correspondence edited by Robert Craft. Craft was having dinner with Balanchine, who was talking to him (this was well after Stravinsky’s death: very late—1977) and he was talking to Balanchine about Diaghilev. And I should tell you a little bit about Diaghilev, who’s a fascinating man. He is generally regarded as the greatest of all theatrical impresarios, but his impresario activities were devoted exclusively to ballet. That is, he brought the Russian ballet to Western Europe—the Ballets Russes—and had seasons in Paris and in London, and he was responsible for instance for commissioning Stravinsky to do the great ballets with which Stravinsky started his career—The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and many others too. And he was active for something like twenty-five years, and this was a really spectacular career, because not only did he have choreographers like Fokine and Balanchine but he also had people who did decor, I mean people like Matisse, Picasso, Rouault, who did the scenery for these ballets that were being presented in Paris at the time. And he managed to get rich women to contribute the money. But he was an almost impossibly mean man. He treated everybody badly, he would never pay anybody—about two thirds of the second volume of Stravinsky correspondence consists of Stravinsky’s trying to get money from Diaghilev that Diaghilev owes him [laughing]. Now it’s also true that he almost never had any money, he spent it almost immediately. And he was also (and this has to be said because of the anecdote) a homosexual. So this I hope will prepare you for the anecdote. Craft gives a little note from Stravinsky to Diaghilev which says: “Come tomorrow at four with Balanchine.” This is a telegram, January 1, 1928, Nice. And the reason for the meeting is that Stravinsky has just completed his music for the ballet Apollo which he’s going to play for Diaghilev and Balanchine—it’s the first time they’re going to hear it. And this is Craft’s footnote: Stravinsky played Apolloll Musagète at this meeting. Dining with Balanchine, September 18, 1977, the present writer asked him if he had any recollections of the occasion, and he replied as follows: “Igor Fyodorovich read the score at the piano, repeating the tempi over and over for me. Diaghilev later changed them, but, then, he never understood the music. . . . Nobody will believe me, of course, but Diaghilev did not know anything about dancing. His real interest in ballet was sexual. He could not bear the sight of Danilovna . . . —who was the great prima ballerina of the company at that time, one of Balanchine’s wives eventually; also (and this is appropriate) she had a fuller figure than most ballerinas have—. and would say to me, ‘Her tits make me want to vomit.’ Once when I was standing next to him at a rehearsal for Apollo, he said, ‘How 360

Genius and Anti-genius beautiful.’ I agreed, thinking that he was referring to the music, but he quickly corrected me: ‘No, no. I mean Lifar’s ass; it is like a rose.”’d (Serge Lifar was one of his lovers and was the first Apollo.) There is a sense in which Boswell is responsible for that anecdote. I mean because eventually all the barriers come down and it becomes possible to say everything. I’m actually more amused by the notion that Diaghilev didn’t know anything about dancing [laughing]. Which I find perfectly possible to believe, by the way. A man who was associated with Balanchine for fifty years—that is, Kirstein—and was co-director of the New York City Ballet and writes about it all the time, as far as I can tell knows absolutely nothing about dance, though he directed the company, he was the money-raiser, and so on. STUDENT: Is he still? MUDRICK: Yes, he’s still alive. STUDENT: No—I thought he wasn’t associated With them. MUDRICK: Oh no, he’s still director of the company, the New York City Ballet. There was some kind of bridge that had occurred to me. The next piece I’m writing is a piece on Mozart’s letters, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m as concerned about Mozart. And I was reminded of all this by the fact that the writer who seems to me most like Mozart is, of course, Chaucer. Oh, I know— another quotation about genius. Edward FitzGerald, the man who translated Omar Khayyam, remarked about Mozart—this is amazing for something like this to have been said in the nineteenth century, when Mozart really was in eclipse, was regarded as a kind of salon composer. And what FitzGerald said about him was: Mozart is so beautiful that people cannot recognize how powerful he is—something like that. And I was interested, when I was talking to my class yesterday, in making distinctions between what I call beauty and what I call power. And I said that it seemed to me that most people, when they started responding to art, responded to power, and came to beauty through power, and this seemed to me the wrong way though it was probably inevitable, and that power was what I would call the noise of art. It’s for instance the reason why the young are particularly excited, say, by a composer like Beethoven, who’s a very great composer, but a very noisy composer too; whereas Mozart, who makes much less noise, is harder to be immediately impressed by. And I was interested by that—I was actually, of course, making comparisons between Chaucer and Shakespeare, comparisons which seem to me almost perfectly analogous with the comparisons between Mozart and Beethoven. I think that Shakespeare is mostly noise; that is, rhetoric is the noise of poetry, and it’s much easier to be impressed by it than by beauty.

STRAVINSKY: Selected Correspondence, vol. 2 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), ed. Robert Craft, 43. The first ellipsis is Craft’s. d 

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Mudrick Transcribed And finally, before I throw myself at your mercy, and see whether you can start challenging me . . . (I think I can find that comment about Mozart by one of his biographers.) A light on the meaning of this comes from what may be considered as a very odd quarter—namely, Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer has said in The World as Will and Idea that “the fundamental condition of genius is an abnormal predominance of sensibility over the will and reproductive power.” I believe that here we have a clue to that opposition between self-assertion, the will of the individual ego—which is an uncreative thing reproducing only itself—and the selflessness of creative genius, which is in itself a pure love of God.e In other words, what Schopenhauer and Turner are calling will, I’m calling power. And I love that statement-that is, “self—assertion, the will of the individual ego-which is an uncreative thing reproducing only itself—and the selflessness of creative genius, which is in itself a pure love of God. In the case of Mozart his most . . .” And by the way, I think that when you take that definition you realize that Boswell’s preoccupation with what happens to him is not an act of will; it is this act of genius that Schopenhauer and Turner are talking about. In the case of Mozart, his most frightening characteristic is his abnormal or supernormal sensibility. Mozart as a boy burst into tears when he was over-praised. . . . The modesty of men of genius is not ignorance. This has been well noted by the observation of Miguel de Unamuno that there is “a certain characteristic common to all those whom we call geniuses. Each of them has a consciousness of being a man apart.” I think that’s generally true, but I think that a genius like Boswell is the exception. I think there are geniuses who don’t know that they are geniuses, because by all the criteria that the world sets up they can’t call themselves that. Boswell would try to console himself by saying: I am not a genius, but I can appreciate men of genius. (He did say that, by the way.) The modest Mozart calmly informs his father in a letter from Vienna how the Archduke Maximilian had remarked that such a man as he (Mozart) does not come into the world more than once in a hundred years. I am convinced that this remark made about himself did not in the least surprise Mozart because he knew it already and here we have the key to what might seem—and actually did seem to Mozart’s father, Leopold—a baffling change in his nature. W. J. Turner. MOZART (Tudor, 1938), 375-6.

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Genius and Anti-genius “As a boy you were excessively modest and serious,” complains Leopold in a letter to his son, “but now you turn everything to joking; your character seems to have entirely changed.” Actually what had happened was that, after puberty and his contact as an adult with the rest of the world and the prolonged practice of his art among other musicians, Mozart had come to a fuller realization of himself and his powers and now knew himself for what he was. Nothing could depress him, nothing seemed serious to him compared with this overwhelming secret of which he had become conscious that he was born for the happiness of praising God in music. A rose-bush bursting into blossom does not need advice and Mozart, in whom this hidden joyous creativeness now was fully functioning, could not take anything else seriously at all. One of the fascinating facts about the early letters in this volume—and by the way, you should understand that the full title of the volume is The Letters of Mozart and his Family, and most of the early letters are of course by his father, and many of the later letters too. But the father was driven by this desperate need to . . . make hay while the sun shone. I haven’t yet made up my mind what I altogether think about Leopold Mozart, but he’s an ordinary man. He’s a conscientious, decent, talented man, who understands that he has in his custody the most remarkable genius in history. And this of course must be a terrible, terrible responsibility, especially when this is also a five-year-old child. What he did may not be what most of you think ought to have been done, but it was certainly one possible thing to do. That is, he tried to make as much of it as possible by touring all over Western Europe. So that Mozart is practically on the move from the time he is five until the time he’s about fifteen, and they’re on stage coaches, and at inns, and staying in people’s houses . . . He caught all kinds of diseases, by the way, including smallpox, almost died from it, was subject to all sorts of respiratory diseases, so he could have been killed off by it, everywhere was recognized as an incredible phenomenon. And most of the father’s letters, at one point or another, are complaints about how they haven’t made very much money. And it’s not that you blame him—you can understand: imagine having something like that in hand! And of course they were visiting the courts of famous noblemen who were very fond of music; he would sit on the lap of Marie Antoinette; he would be brought into the private quarters of King George III and his wife and spend the full day there and they would be very impressed, and eventually they would condescend to giving him a ring, or maybe three guineas, or something like that; the concerts were constantly postponed by bad weather or somebody dying in the royal family [laughing]: just a terrible series of misadventures and nothing ever really fully goes right, except that everybody understands that this is the most remarkable musical genius in history—they all understand that. And then you get to the letters from Mozart—and very early, some of them (I’ve forgotten when they started—I think one was when he was eight)—and 363

Mudrick Transcribed they are absolutely bubbling with good nature and high spirits. There isn’t any reference to bad weather, or bad accomodations, or not making money. He’s obviously very fond of his sister, who’s at home on this particular trip, and he makes all kinds of jokes, including some of those jokes you all know about, about shining in bed and so on, because you’ve been told about this in the latest great work about genius which was made into a movie. At least I assume you were told that. I haven’t seen the movie, but I heard about it, and I’ve seen stills. Why are you people looking at me like that? I assume some of you saw the movie. Is there anybody here who saw the movie? Yes, okay. STUDENT: There was nothing in it about him shitting in bed, though. MUDRICK: No, I don’t think he did that [laughter], he just suggested to his sister that she might do this for kicks. STUDENT: Oh. STUDENT: In the movie he has his girlfriend—he’s talking to her backwards and he says to her, “Eat my shit,” backwards [inaudible.] MUDRICK: Yeah. But just looking at the guy who played Mozart [shakes his head]— very discouraging. (I saw a picture [inaudible].) Anyway, Mozart was not an idiot. And he did have these incredible high spirits, and Turner makes a wonderful comment about that (which unfortunately I won’t be able to locate, so I’ll have to paraphrase it) but he said: To have the kind of genius that Mozart had must have allowed him to—he lived at a level of high spirits which the rest of us can attain only when we are drunk or in love. He must have lived regularly at that level, consistently at that level. Yes? STUDENT(1): The film does capture, I think, this high spirit, and also the loneliness, in various places, that you talked abou— MUDRICK: Maybe, maybe. I started trying to read the play once and I was so outraged by it— STUDENT(1): I was too. MUDRICK: Yeah. I don’t really know, and— STUDENT(1): There are two or three scenes that are really alienating, I agree, but there are very poetic parts of the film, and indeed in the stage show (I saw it in London and again in New York) where the loneliness is— MUDRICK: And of course the imetltiotl, as I understand it, behind the play is, it seems to me, so vile— STUDENT(1): I agree. MUDRICK: I think we have no reason to be anything but grateful to those geniuses who are all genius and who don’t exercise what I call, in a bad sense, power over us. That is, they offer us something which we have the right to refuse, and which everybody refuses. They’re not like politicians, who impose their wills on us. In fact the greatest artists, as I say, have no will; they’re pure imagination. And to represent these people as deficient in some way is it seems to me a kind of sin against human nature. These are the greatest human beings who have ever lived, and if we don’t respond to what they’ve done, well, that’s tough. There are certainly plenty 364

Genius and Anti-genius of geniuses to whom I don’t respond, I mean there are arts to which I don’t respond—­painting, for instance, is one of them. But certainly in the arts to which I do respond I am nothing but grateful to the persons who have created these works, because they have literally brought something out of nothing. They have made human life more bearable. And how can you be anything but grateful to them, and how can you fail to understand that what they’ve done represents the highest achievement that human beings are capable of? And to present Mozart as a kind of giggling idiot—there’s absolutely no justification for that, none whatever—in the letters, in what you know of his life . . . Of course he was high-spirited, but he was a very serious man, and like all of the greatest geniuses he had finally a kind of tragic imagination. [Searching through a book] I don’t know why I can’t find the things that I want to. This is very good biography, by the way—the only good biography of Mozart is the one by W. J. Turner. STUDENT: Can you give some examples of a tragic imagination? What do you mean exactly? MUDRICK: Well, I have to mention musical works, and maybe that doesn’t—the fortieth symphony is a very obvious one, the G Minor Symphony; the G Minor String Quintet; many parts of Don Giovanni: parts of The Magic Flute; parts of The Marriage of Figaro; parts of almost everything he wrote. There’s a marvelous statement that Turner makes about the ambiguity of the music which I thought I put a piece of paper [searching for the passage] . . . Give me a minute. I’m nervous because they got something on there [indicating the video camera] (I don’t know why). I’ll tell you another anecdote which is relevant. One of the differences between a composer like Mozart and a composer like Beethoven—and this also seems to me to suggest an important difference between a writer like Chaucer and a writer like Shakespeare. You are told all the time that Shakespeare is a universal genius, and that it’s a comprehensive understanding of and sympathy with all the manifestations of human nature. And that is the most absolute bullshit in the world. Shakespeare’s morality is as conventional as Mrs. Grundy’s. Shakespeare’s notion of women, for instance, is so obviously patriarchal and fearful—both—that I still can’t understand why feminists haven’t caught on. It’s perfectly obvious, just as it’s perfectly obvious that Chaucer has no such feelings at all; that is, women are very interesting human beings, different from men in very interesting ways, and very attractive. Shakespeare doesn’t have that attitude at all. I mean if universal means anything, Shakespeare isn’t universal. Oddly enough, this kind of ascription is not usually made to a composer like Beethoven. People say that he’s a kind of male composer, and that’s true, I think that’s true. And I’m always amused by the fact that the one opera that Beethoven wrote (which is very impressive, wonderful work) is about conjugal fidelity. And of course, Beethoven was a bachelor. [Langhter.] And this is about the NOBLEST AND MOST SELFLESS WIFE IN HISTORY, who actually masquerades as a MAN, in order to RESCUE HER HUSBAND FROM THE 365

Mudrick Transcribed DEEPEST DUNGEON OF THE VILEST TYRANT IN ALL THE WORLD, and so on. Well, in the meantime Mozart is writing operas in which a lascivious count is trying to bed down a chambermaid who’s going to marry his manservant, and making his wife feel very bad about this. And of course there’s also a young page who has finally begun to be very excited by sex and falls madly in love with the countess. And Mozart can go all through this with not the slightest trace of voyeurism or pornography. That is, what you are being presented with is human nature indeed—the range of human nature. And there’s not a trace of cynicism. The count is understandable, the countess is understandable and sympathetic, Cherubino is lovable, and Mozart assigns the most beautiful arias to this sexcrazed little boy, who whenever he sees a woman is driven mad because he’s just discovered sex. And then, toward the end of the opera, there’s this wonderful, wonderful scene of reconciliation in which Mozart is writing the most celestial music imaginable, in which the count recognizes that the trick that has been played on him (to make him think that his wife is unfaithful) has demonstrated that he’s a jerk, so he admits it for the moment. But Mozart doesn’t have any notion that the count is going to remain that way; that is, these are moments in human life. And in an opera like Don Giovanni, which of course is about the delight that both men and women take in the male sex impulse—and by the way, it’s extremely interesting that two of the most male figures in the history of music, Beethoven and the conductor Toscanini, could not understand why a genius like Mozart would write an opera on so immoral a subject. Beethoven disapproved of Don Giovanni, and so did Toscanini. And so what they disapprove of is that range of the spectrum of human nature, in which we are delighted by our physical and sexual powers, quite irrespective of any moral commitments or notions of fidelity or anything like that. And that’s universal. I mean it’s not universal to write operas about eternally faithful wives, or plays like Othello or Hamlet, in which women are treated like dirt. And so, will you help me a little, somebody, Anybody have any comment? Yes? STUDENT: Yes, I wanted to ask you about the Hildesheimer biography of Mozart. MUDRICK: I haven’t read it. I was told that it’s bad. STUDENT: I read it when I was in Europe, and when it first came out I saw the play—it was coming to Germany [inaudible.] There were two documents which accused—Hildesheimer says in the first chapter that Mozart in a sense never went beyond the adolescent phase of development emotionally, in addition to the fact that he was politically incompetent— MUDRICK: I will give you two quotes from the so-called authorized biography of Boswell. This is from . . . oh, what’s his name, I can’t remember . . . doesn’t matter. STUDENT: Pottle? MUDRICK: Pottle, yes. Fred Pottle. One is that Boswell is a “weak good man.” The other I’ve driven out of my head—it’s something like that, anyway. You see, if you’re a tenured professor you can make judgments of this kind about mere 366

Genius and Anti-genius geniuses. [Laughter.] Oh! the other one is much better (that’s why it went out of my head): Boswell was “an unfinished soul.” Pottle is a finished heel. [Laughter.] That’s almost as stupid, as a matter of fact, as the poet Rochlitz, because imagine calling somebody else an unfinished soul. What that means is of course that you are very much aware of yourself as a finished soul. [Laughter.] I And he is finished, too! STUDENT(2): You were talking about Mozart, but why couldn’t he have been a giggling . . . MUDRICK: Idiot? STUDENT(2): Idiot. Because it seems to me that most of the great works of genius seem to be done without thinking about them. Or like when you think about them it becomes much harder to do them, like— MUDRICK: No, that means when you think about them [laughter]—let’s make this clear—or, for that matter, when I think about them. (I don’t mean to be nasty [laughing].) STUDENT(2): If a performer who is giving a virtuosity performance starts to think how he’s going to play that thirty-second note, or how he’s going to do this dive off a three-meter board, it messes up— MUDRICK: You know what you’re doing? You’re using the academic notion of thinking, and that’s one of the many, many things wrong with education. Real thinking doesn’t have anything to do with the sort of thing that you’re describing as thinking. Real thinking is an immensely complicated, and I would call it chaotic, activity which consists of all sorts of associations, pre-associations . . . What you’re talking about is the kind— STUDENT(2): Is it conscious? MUDRICK: Part of it is conscious, part of it is unconscious, sometimes it goes down below the surface of consciousness, sometimes it rises, sometimes it dances on the surface, sometimes it sinks, and so on, but it has nothing to do with the kind of thinking that you’re talking about. The kind of thinking that you’re talking about is the kind of thinking that directs people who teach English composition and tell students that the way to learn to write is to learn what a topic sentence is and what a paragraph is. I have been writing now more or less seriously for over forty years. I don’t know what a topic sentence is, and I don’t know what a paragraph is. And I’ve never figured it out, and I don’t think that any serious writer who ever lived knows what a paragraph is. I don’t. If you can explain it to me, I would like to know. And it’s the people who make decisions like that who are responsible for the academic notion of thinking. STUDENT(2): Therefore, couldn’t Mozart have been a giggling idiot? [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Well, you are saying the people who do the kind of thinking that I’m talking about can be giggling idiots, and I am saying that the academics who do that thinking are giggling idiots! [Laughter.] It’s not that they can be, they are! Yes? STUDENT: There’s a part in that movie where—there have been lots of people who have talked about this as their favorite part—where Mozart is playing a piece by Salieri, and then he plays it all the way through and then he says: But you didn’t 367

Mudrick Transcribed get this quite right. Wouldn’t this be a little bit better? And then he improvises on Salieri’s piece of music while Salieri is standing there. That to me is like how they think of him as being an idiot, because the real Mozart would know that you don’t do that to Salieri. MUDRICK: Yes. I don’t know whether that has any historical basis at all. I very much doubt it, because there is no instance that I know of in the biographical material that I’m familiar with of Mozart being mean. He’s not mean, and that’s such an obvious act of meanness. STUDENT: But in the movie they think of him as—I mean he’s really an idiot, he’s completely unaware that Salieri— MUDRICK: Let me read this, and see if you can comment maybe. It is here pertinent to recall what Samuel Johnson had to say of genius because of the Doctor’s colossal common sense and uncommon penetration. Johnson said: “The true genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.” This as far as it goes, is certainly true. The word genius ought not to be applied to gifted men of a minor category in whom their particular talent seems to derive from an absence of other possibly inhibiting qualities—that is, from a minus rather than a plus endowment as human beings. Indeed, this is the deciding factor between talent and genius. The true genius is always a great man in the fullest meaning of the word great. He is a superior man, a man in every respect above the average, a man who includes, comprehends, and surpasses the majority. And as he surpasses them in goodness he can surpass . . . Now, Turner now says something that I would want to make many qualifications about, but I think it’s still interesting, because what he is alluding to is what I was trying to allude to when I was talking about universal. Mozart knows what’s it’s like to be bad, but more importantly he knows what it’s like to be human—that is, in that area within which specific moral judgments are more or less difficult to make. What can you say, for instance, about Don Giovanni when he is trying to seduce Zerlina? Zerlina is an attractive peasant girl, she’s much impressed by the Don, he’s a very attractive man . . . You have no doubt whatever what Beethoven would think about that situation, none whatever. You know that Beethoven would realize this was VERY BAD, and Leonora would come RIDING IN ON HORSEBACK AND STRIKE HIM DOWN WITH HER TWO-EDGED SWORD. Mozart obviously finds this situation extremely interesting, and while, you are watching it or listening to it, you really can’t categorically make up your mind whether this is bad or good. You know that tremendous human energies are involved, you know that possibilities of pleasure are involved, you know that the girl is attracted, you know that the man has the power to give her pleasure, and these things, temporarily at least, make you less of the conventional slob that you are. 368

Genius and Anti-genius Now, if this is not thinking, what the hell is thinking? Is what, say, Beethoven does when he says IT IS BAD FOR A MAN TO SEDUCE A GIRL—is that thinking? That’s not thinking! That’s what you get out of copy books; that has nothing to do with thinking. If thinking is an individual activity, then it’s not something that you get from somebody else, or from a set of platitudes which are printed on the blackboard. We all know perfectly well that many, many human situations-in fact you can say that every single very important human situation is morally ambiguous. And the greatest geniuses understand this. Yes? STUDENT: Donna Elvira does come sweeping in at that moment, and the thing that’s interesting about her is that she— MUDRICK: She’s also in love with him. STUDENT: Yeah, she can’t decide— MUDRICK: She comes sweeping in because she wants him for herself. STUDENT: Right. She doesn’t really represent the moral force against him because she keeps following [inaudible] over and over again. MUDRICK: Of course, and all he has to do is to say a word. By the way, for those of you who think Mozart is a giggling idiot, I would strongly recommend that you listen carefully to the orchestral accompaniment to the “Catalogue” aria in Don Giovanni when Leporello, who is Don Giovanni’s servant, is telling Elvira about Don Giovanni’s conquests—304 in Gernany, 1003 in Spain—and the orchestra is giggling and chuckling all the time while this is going on, and there is no question that that’s what’s happening. The orchestra’s having a great time, much amused by this notion of all these women—dark and light, young and old, tall and short, and so on [laughing]. What do you make of that? That’s not thinking—it’s not thinking to make the orchestra laugh. Nobody else makes the orchestra laugh, and makes it laugh so skillfully. This doesn’t take thinking though. Any giggling idiot can invent this, is that right? Any musicians here? STUDENT(2): M-hm. MUDRICK: Okay, and you could have invented this if Mozart hadn’t done it. STUDENT(2): [Laughs.] You’re trying to compare me with Mozart? No no no . . . MUDRICK: You mean you’re not even a giggling idiot. [Laughter.] No really, I don’t understand that. Why would you even say that? As a musician! Do you think for instance that something like the G Minor Symphony could have been created by a giggling idiot? STUDENT(2): I don’t think it takes thought to create the G Minor Symphony, it takes feeling. MUDRICK: You see, this is another notion. In other words, feeling is one thing and thought is another. STUDENT(2): Of course it’s a combination of the two, but it doesn’t take Western psychoanalytic thought. I don’t think— MUDRICK: And you have the notion of thought as something which is taught in university classrooms—thought is what happens behind the lectern in a university lecture hall. Well, that’s the last thing that goes on behind the lectern in a university lecture hall! [Laughter.] And if the academic tradition has committed a 369

Mudrick Transcribed sin worse than the sin of describing thought in that way, I can’t think of it. What we call thought, or what I call thought, and what I would say is going on say in Mozart’s mind when he’s creating, is of course an exhibition of the full powers of human consciousness. And how you can separate feeling and imagination and memory and desire and rational thinking, how you can separate any of these things from any other, and how you can say that the creation of the greatest works of art in the history of man could be accomplished without the operation of all these powers operating simultaneously and at the highest level, is beyond me. I don’t understand how you can even begin to say that. I don’t even think one of your teachers would say that! And thar’s how bad I think it is. I mean even they would pause on the brink, and not say anything that blasphemous. [Laughs.] What you’re doing—you’re doing dirt on human nature. STUDENT(2): No . . . I didn’t mean to. [Laughter.] MUDRICK: I know you didn’t! I know you didn’t, and that’s why I’m asking you to reconsider and repent. [Laughter.] STUDENT(2): [Inaudible.] MUDRICK: If you want to talk about lining up a series of platitudes which are going to please a teacher on a term paper, if you want to call that thought, that’s okay. But I don’t think that’s what any serious human being would call thought. If thought is anything it’s some kind of creation, and Mozart operating in a—I mean you as a musician should understand how much thought goes into musical form. Now it may be something that most musicians have to practice very laboriously, but the fact that it all could occur simultaneously in Mozart’s consciousness indicates that his genius (I don’t want to use the word power because I think that’s better reserved for something less important) that his genius is operating at a speed which is simply unimaginable; it’s operating at a speed and with a coherence that is unimaginable. In fact I would think that musicians would be the ones who would be most astounded by the nature of genius. Because if you take composers like Haydn and Mozart and Schubert, who wrote music so rapidly that it’s inconceivable to anybody else—I mean, any one of these three composers wrote music at a speed greater than anybody can copy music. And they were creating this. And that indeed is almost unimaginable. This is the exercise of energies that we almost can’t conceive, that we can only admire, that we can only be in awe of. Music, it seems to me, is that one of the arts in which genius is most unadulteratedly exercised. And I do think it’s the greatest of the arts. STUDENT(2): Chess, math and music. MUDRICK: Well, certainly music has mathematical components, and that was one of the reasons I wondered why you could think of music as not involving even the kind of logical and rational thinking that you’re talking about. The fact that Mozart did it so fast is fust an indication of his supreme genius. STUDET(2): True, but when he wrote his first symphony he was eight years old. I don’t think that had a lot to do with rational thought. Of course that was part of the whole process, but he wasn’t thinking—of course he thought about how he was 370

Genius and Anti-genius going to write it, but when he wrote it I think he was writing out rather a feeling that came from— MUDRICK: No, you’re trying, you’re trying, but you’re still ignoring . . . What you can’t imagine is that it’s possible for people to learn something so fast that time is no longer in question. There’s a slory—unfortunately it’s apparently apocryphal but I’ll tell it anyway, because if it happened with anybody it would have happened with Mozart. There’s a story that Mozart is supposed to have said to somebody that he can hear a complete work in his head at once, any one of his works. Now that’s of course absolutely inconceivable to all of us, because anything that exists in time we hear in time, and maybe we can hear it in a kind of accelerated way, in bits and pieces, but Mozart is alleged to have said that. Certainly if anybody had that experience, Mozart did. But also, all you are saying is that when Mozart was about—I think he did his first symphony at six, by the way, maybe seven. But anyway— STUDENT(2): Eight. MUDRICK: All right, eight. . . . Let me look [laughter as he looks up the correct year]. STUDENT(2): [Inaudible]. MUDRICK: It’s not okay. [Inaudible] gotta find out. STUDENT(2): Well, if he could hear a whole symphony in his head I certainly don’t think that takes rational [inaudible] thought. Quite the contrary— MUDRICK: You’re right: eight—May 16. No, what you’re simply refusing to acknowledge is the possibility that Mozart’s rational understanding of symphonic forms as they existed at the time was so quick that it can’t even be thought of temporally. If you want to think of more modest talents, I am very much in awe of a specific talent which certain kinds of very skillful handymen—automechanics— have, and what I call it is the power to see exploded diagrams. I have no talent of that kind at all. And I do think that people are probably born with it. I mean you can see how something would be if it blows apart, and you can also put it together again, and you won’t misplace a single screw or nut or bolt, you can just put it together again. And there are people who have that talent, and it’s a remarkable talent. I think, at the highest possible level Mozart had that talent about the forms of music. As soon as he heard—you know there’s that famous story about Mozart hearing the Miserere—it was protected by the Papal Chamberlain and so on: he listened to it once and then he wrote it down, note for note. That also happens more often in music than anywhere else—there are musicians with phenomenal memories. Toscanini had a phenomenal memory, and Mozart did too, and it doesn’t seem to me hard to understand. I mean it’s impossible to understand, but it’s easy to believe, from what we know about Mozart, that when he was five years old he listened to a piece of music, he was immediately aware of the exploded diagram, he knew how that was put together, he knew that there was a first theme and a second theme and a repeat and so on, and all this occurred to him more or less instantaneously. And the fact that people like you and me have to laboriously study this in a wretched classroom for three and a half years 371

Mudrick Transcribed before we understand the first phrase—it’s just tough titty for us. [Laughter.] But don’t say that it’s not thinking! It’s just thinking in the twinkling of an eye. Yes? STUDENT: So do you think genius is a physical mutation, or just, like extra goodness in the womb? [Laughter.] MUDRICK: Yes, I do think it’s a kind of mutation. I think that what happens is that what we think of as human—all the powers, all the energies, all the abilities (I wish to hell there were another word than powers; I don’t like it because it’s a bad word in other connotations)—if there were a further evolution of the human race, [inaudible] human beings would become—something like that. Their abilities would develop in this way. We would all have the talent for exploded diagrams, we would all be able to compose interesting symphonies at the age of eight, we would all write verse like Chaucer. When I was reading the opening stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde yesterday in class, I was struck again—I look at that, I don’t understand how this guy rhymed eight thousand lines and more in that way. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a single forced rhyme in eight thousand lines. The poem reads exactly like a very lively animated conversation in colloquial diction between the most interesting people in the world, and it goes on for eight thousand lines in one of the most complicated stanzaic patterns invented in English. Then you try to read somebody like Spenser, and you understand that . . . There, it’s like, what, it’s like walking through molasses. Here, you never have the sense of being impeded in any way. How can you achieve that kind of control? How can you do all these things at once? You would think that he would get cross-eyed just looking at the page trying to remember what the stanza—and trying to have everybody say what he’s supposed to say. I don’t know how any rhyming poet, or poet who writes in meter, has the nerve to try it after reading say something like Troilus and Criseyde. It would all seem hopeless and pointless after that, I would think. Since I don’t have to worry about things like that, luckily, I can say that. But surely you don’t want to make the mistake of separating out a quality or a talent or an ability that you call thinking, and allotting that to us, and allotting everything else to geniuses. That’s a terrible notion, and so spiteful. And so wrong. People aren’t grateful. And it’s a pity. For instance I have often thought that the two most tragic events in the history of mankind (and this will sound very silly to you) were the early deaths of Mozart and Schubert. I have no idea what difference would have been made in the history of the world if—Mozart was essentially a contemporary of Beethoven: he was fourteen years older than Beethoven. Schubert was essentially a contemporary, believe it or not, of Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Verdi! Suppose they had lived long lives and had influenced these other composers at the time and had been influenced by them, as say for instance Haydn and Mozart were influenced by each other. It’s inconceivable. Because, of course, whether you like this music or not, the music you listen to is all derived from that. All the junk music that you listen to is essentially the music in the Western Viennese tradition. You’re all listening to tunes 372

Genius and Anti-genius that are eventually derivatives from the tunes that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and the rest of the nineteenth century— STUDENT(2): Which are derivatives of what was written before. MUDRICK: No, they aren’t, that’s not true, because the classical tradition which begins with Haydn—something new is going on. And for instance the interest in folk music, the interest in dramatic music in development of various kinds—I’m thinking of things like what Charles Rosen is trying to prove in The Classical Style, which is that something drastic does happen after the baroque period. STUDENT(2): But it’s still an evolution. MUDRICK: It’s more than evolution, it’s almost revolution. All revolutions are partly evolutionary, but it’s also a revolution. In any case what I’m saying is that the history of Western music would have been changed in so many drastic ways— already Western music has had enormous influence on Western culture, even among people who never listen to it and think that they’re totally uninterested in it. So what would have happened if it had been screwed up to an almost indefinitely higher level of achievement? One of the most interesting things about genius, at least the highest genius, is that it gets better and better and better. So that for instance a composer like Verdi simply does better and better and better as he gets older. And Beethoven does better and better and better as he gets older. And so does Mozart. STUDENT(2): Explain Bach. Bach did most of his best work, what is considered by critics his best work, while he was in his late twenties or early thirties. MUDRICK: I’m not sure that that’s true, but I have to admit that for me Bach (I hesitate to say this) is not for me one of the very greatest composers, so I’m not much interested. I mean I’m perfectly willing to agree, that’s fine. It’s certainly true that the music of Bach that I’m most interested in is relatively early, I mean the important organ works, which I much prefer to the late works. So he doesn’t seem to be an exception. So if you imagine that, say, every year Mozart’s works were getting better and better and better and he dies at thirty-five, what would he have done at thirty-eight? what would he have done at forty-five? what would he have done at sixty? Schubert has a burst of activity in his last year in which he—I mean in his last two months he composes what, as far as I’m concerned, are the three greatest piano sonatas ever written. He also composed large parts of a symphony which has just been reconstituted, pretty well and which I find extremely interesting, composed the greatest string quintet, at least next to Mozart, ever written, and many, many, many other things. So that you can’t imagine when he had time to eat [inaudible] sleep. What would he have done if he had lived another ten years? And the stuff is unimaginably great. Yes? STUDENT: When did he die? What year— MUDRICK: 1828—Schubert. STUDENT: [Inaudible] lived [inaudible] twentieth century. MUDRICK: No, not quite. Verdi did. I think that gratitude is very important. For one thing, from history you get the wrong idea of great men. You get the idea that the great men are the 373

Mudrick Transcribed politicians. There are great men who are politicians, but most of them are simply spectacular murderers—the Napoleons and the Alexanders, and of course the Hitlers and the Stalins and so on. There are a few geniuses who happen to be politicians. One of them is a man who is my favorite politician, that is, William of Orange, the father of his country in Holland. A very, very great man and probably as great a man as a politician can be and still be a politician. But when you think of the geniuses in the arts, especially those arts that you respond to, you should be extremely grateful to those people. And you shouldn’t allow them to be talked down, or you shouldn’t allow yourself to make snide remarks about They were human too or They were stupid like me. No, they weren’t! [Laughter.] Yes? STUDENT: You were talking about beauty and power in art and I’m not sure I understand the distinction. MUDRICK: All right. I think that’s a distinction that one gets more interested in as one gets older, at least it’s been true for me. I know when I was young, power was for me almost a sign of beauty. Also I call power now by a nasty name, noise. By noise I don’t really mean meaningless sound, although that’s one of the meanings of the word noise; I mean superficially impressive aspects of art. And the most obvious instance in music of course is sheer volume. This is not to say that there isn’t a lot of loud music that is great, of course there is. I think as you get older you are less and less impressed by the noise in music and more and more impressed by other things. There are other things that happen too. I think that if you really love classical music you find yourself responding more and more to slow movements rather than to fast movements, to quiet movements than to loud movements, to meditative and contemplative and maybe tragic movements rather than exultant movements—things like that. And I certainly don’t think that it’s necessary for the young to start responding immediately to such things over and above the power. I think there is an evolution of taste as one grows up. [Looks at his watch.] I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was so late. STUDENT: So what’s beauty? [Laughter.] MUDRICK: I [inaudible] think of beauty as something that strikes you when you don’t expect to be struck, and when there are no external reasons for being struck— when there isn’t great volume, when there isn’t obvious technical skill, when there’s a kind of economy of meanings that might be superficially deceptive. You are taken unawares by it, something like that. Power, it’s a little bit like: Now wait until they hit this fortissimo, you’ll really be . . . I must tell you this story, true story, about this. When I was much younger, when I was about your age, I imagined that you could get people to like music by making them listen to it. This was just after the war, and I had this friend whom I’d met in the Army and we were going to Berkeley (a very nice guy— had no interest in music at all). And I got a recording of the Beethoven Ninth, and I had this old lousy phonograph (I mean, as well as you could do in those days—this was 1946). And I insisted that he sit down, I was going to play it for 374

Genius and Anti-genius him (we were sharing a little apartment in Berkeley). So he sat there. And it was around twilight (this is important for the story). And so I put it on, I played it as loud as I dared. It was very, very loud, it could have been heard two blocks away, I’m sure—this was a little Berkeley neighborhood. I’m surprised that they didn’t call the cops when I played it for him. And of course those of you who know the work know how much noise there is in the last movement of that work, I mean there’s a tremendous chorus, SINGING away fortissimo, most of the time, BANGING away . . . And of course I remember feeling a kind of smugness while I was listening to this: obviously nobody could fail to be tremendously impressed by this as the music mounted and mounted and mounted and mounted. And finally—you know there’s that very odd experience that you have—there are different kinds of sounds, so that even though one sound is very loud it doesn’t necessarily block out all other sounds which are much softer—there are certain kinds of sounds which remain. And I realized that there was a sound that I was hearing (this was at the highest volume in the last movement of the Beethoven Ninth—everything going and so on) and suddenly I realized it was a sound that I thought I recognized and I was horrified. I turned around, he was sound asleep and snoring. [Laughter.] That was the last time I tried to impress anybody in quite that way. Another thing that I feel about art—I really wanted to talk about this, I didn’t really allow myself the opportunity, I’m sorry it’s so late. If I have any advice to young people who start out by having some interest in the arts, it’s that you should try as hard as possible, as early as possible, to have as much experience of arts that interest you at all as you can. You’ve got to find a way of falling in love with the arts, because this is an experience which if it doesn’t happen in youth it’s never going to happen. You will simply not—I don’t know why, I really don’t know why. I know there is one exception for me: I fell in love with ballet at a relatively advanced age. But that was because it was one particular choreographer and one particular group of dancers, and the choreographer happened to be the greatest in history and I had the luck to have personal connections with the group, and so on, so it was very special. But I know that if you don’t make this effort it won’t come to you, and if you make the effort and it does come to you it will be unmistakable, because it is almost indistinguishable from the feeling of romantic love. It’s not appreciation. All that nonsense like appreciation, and this-is-good and that-is-bad . . . The excitement is so tremendous—I can remember, for instance, waiting for a performance by Toscanini of the Eroica over the radio, say, and not being able to stop trembling while waiting for it, I mean trembling with nervous excitement, with pleasure, with what I think can only be described as a kind of sexual pleasure, though it’s not directly that. And if you’re interested in having experiences which will last you for a lifetime in the arts, you’ve got to do your damnedest to find your way to that kind of experience. How you do it I do not know. If you don’t do it you’re wasting your time in the arts and the only thing that will ever 375

Mudrick Transcribed happen is that you will have topics for cocktail party conversation and it won’t be of any—forget it. If you don’t have that experience, forget it. You’re wasting your time. I know that people don’t like statements like this, and it’s of course just my opinion. But I don’t know what I would have done, I mean my life—certainly my life would have been . . . Just as the life of Western civilization would have been very different if Mozart and Schubert had lived, so my life would have been categorically different if I hadn’t had these experiences of music and literature when I was your age and younger. And they were worth having. And they continue to be available, and it’s wonderful. They’re among the few experiences in life that can remain more or less pristine—and can even develop. They can develop for instance from a love of power to a love of beauty, and I think that’s very important. Does it seem to you—I’ll just bring this up and then I’ll let you go—I’ll ask this question. I knew a number of men my age who were interested in music as I was when I was growing up, and almost invariably these men, if they were married or if they had girlfriends, would discover to their consternation that even when their girlfriends were fond of music, they never liked the music played at the volume at which the men liked the music played. Does that seem to you true? Well, it’s very interesting to me. It’s been invariable in my experience, absolutely invariable. And I of course have all kinds of explanations which I won’t bore you with. I think it’s interesting. I think the nicest thing that can be said about it is that women are really less interested in power than beauty—unless they’re masochists. And so they’re less likely to be interested in spectacular effects than men are. Okay. If anybody wants to stick around for a little while, I mean to ask me some questions or something, you’re welcome, but I better let the rest of you go.

376

Appendix

List of Publications Title Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery “Chaucer and What We Make of Him” “The Double-Artist and the Injured Party” “Not Quite a Renaissance” “The Professor and the Poet” “The Widows of Thornton and Jordan County” “Rugby, Fastidy, and a Live Tradition” “To Purify the Dialect of the Tribe”

Journal/Publisher 1952 Princeton UP

Subject/Category

1953 Hudson Review 6:124-30 Shenandoah 4 SummerAutumn, 54-65 Hudson Review 4:456-60 1954 Shenandoah 5 Summer, 30-40 Shenandoah 6 Winter, 73-78 Hudson Review 6:626-33 Shenandoah 5 Summer, 77-82

“Conrad and the Terms of Hudson Review 7:419-26 Modern Criticism” 1955 “Humanity is the Hudson Review 7:610-19 Principle” “Restoration Comedy and English Stage Comedy Later” ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., Columbia UP, 98-125

377

Wyndham Lewis The Victorian Sage by John Holloway fiction books by Peter Taylor and Shelby Foote fiction review (8)* Purity of Diction in English Verse by Donald Davie

fiction review (9)

Mudrick Transcribed

Title “Genji and the Age of Marvels” “The Broken Image of Magnanimity” “A Trip to Europe”

“The Listener and Mr. Haggin” “Chaucer’s Nightingales” “The Artist’s Conscience and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus”’ “The Life of Reason” “Cocteau’s Poem of Childhood” “The Two Voices of Mr. Eliot” “The Problems of the Artist” “Mickicwicz and the Last Epic” “Is Fiction Human?” “Conrad and the Secret Sharers” “The Originality of Conrad” “Chaucer as Librettist” “The Originality of The Rainbow” “Art for Whose Sake?” “Mr. Haggin’s Toscanini”

Journal/Publisher Hudson Review 8:327-45 1956 Hudson Review 9:126-33 Prairie Schooner 30 Summer, 150-56 1957 Shenandoah 8 Spring, 59-70 Hudson Review 10:88-95 Nineteenth-Century Fiction 11:288-97

Subject/Category Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Milton fiction

B. H. Haggin

Hudson Review 10:275-81 Santayana Spectrum 1:25-33 Les Enfants Terribles 1958 Hudson Review, 10:599-605 Quarterly Review of Literature 9:194-208 Spectrum 2:83-95

T. S. Eliot fiction

Hudson Review 9:294-301 fiction review (7) Virginia Quarterly Review 34:630-33 1959 Hudson Review 11:545-53 Philological Quarterly 38:21-29 Spectrum 3:3-28

Hudson Review 12:141-47 fiction review (12) Hudson Review 12:315-30 Haggin’s Conversations with Toscanini 1960 “A Warning to Optimists” Hudson Review 13:308-15 fiction review (12)

378

Appendix

Title

Journal/Publisher 1961 Yale Review 50:.202-12

“Character and Event in Fiction” “Twelve Original Essays Nineteenth-Century on Great English Novels” Fiction 15:361-64 “Something to Say” Hudson Review 14:284-94 1962 “Five Characters in Hudson Review 14:630-34 Search of an Author” “Colette and Strether” Hudson Review 15:110-13 “The English Teacher: The CEA Crisic 24:8-12 Fact or Fiction?” “The Confidant” Yale Review 52:90-101 “The Possibility of Hudson Review 15:439-50 Criticism”

“Colette and Minne” “Esther” “Mencken Redivivus?” “introduction” to The Castle of Otranto “Jane Austen” “Colette, Claudine, and Willy” “The Overwrought Urn”

Subject/Category essay a book by Charles Shapiro fiction review (14) The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis a biography of Colette

Fiction books by Harvey Swados, Alfred Kazin, Kenneth Rexroth, Randall Jarrell, and John Holloway

1963 Spectrum 6:136-50 Trace 49 Summer, 117-47 fiction Hudson Review 16:471-75 Acid Test by John Simon Collier Books, 7-12 The Castle of Otranto Collier’s Encyclopedia 3:238-41 Hudson Review 16:559-72 1964 New York Review of Books 1(10):8

William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country by Cleanth Brooks The Sense of Life by Arthur Mizener Two by Two by David Garnett and Jubb by Keith Waterhouse G. B. Shaw

“From Trollope to Updike” “The and Now”

New York Review of Books 1(11):5-6 New York Review of Books 2(3): 14-17

“Pshaw!”

New York Review of Books 2(4):7-8 Hudson Review 17:110-23 fiction review (14)

“Man Alive”

379

Mudrick Transcribed

Title “News from Nowhere”

Journal/Publisher New York Review of Books 2(11): 19-20

“The Holy Family”

Hudson Review 17:294-303

“Afterword” to Jane Austen “Afterword” to Jane Austen “Mailer and Styron: Guests of the Establishment” “Censorship: Hollywood and the Law”

Signet Books, 371-81

Subject/Category David Storey, Radcliffe: Frederic Raphael, Lindmann; Charles Haldeman, The Sun’s Attendant by Charles Haldeman Norman Podhoretz, Doings and Undoings; Diana Trilling, Claremont Essays Mansfield Park

Signet Books, 241-54

Persuasion

“A Farewell to Spring and Paris” “Three Stanford Poets” “All That Prose” “Afterword” to Charles Dickens “The Modern and How It Grew”

Hudson Review 17:346-66 Spectrum 7:138-46

Morris L. Ernst and Alan U. Schwartz, Censorship: The Search for the Obscene; Murray Schumach, The Face on the Cutting Room Floor

1965 Hudson Review 17:572-79 Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast Lugano Review 1(1):83-94 poetry by Ivor Winters, Edgar Bowers, and J. V. Cunningham Hudson Review 18:110-23 fiction review (17) Signet Books, 884-94 Martin Chuzzlewit

Hudson Review 18:313-20 The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. “Conrad: The Reputation Lugano Review 1(2)73-83 and the Work” 1966 “Writers and Politicians” Hudson Review books by Philip Rahv, 18:595-600 F. W. Dupee, and Conor Cruise O’Brien 380

Appendix

Title “Cleopatra” “Evelyn, Get the Horseradish” “Who Killed Herzog? or, Three American Novelists”

“Mars or Venus”

“A Shocker” “One Bear Too Many” “Sarraute, Duras, Burroughs, Barthelme, and a Postscript” “The Great Lover” “Face to Face with Their Own Limits”

“Prometheus at Work and Play”

“I.A.’s Way”

Journal/Publisher Subject/Category Hudson Review 19: 81-91 fiction Hudson Review 19:305-18 fiction review (14) Denver Quarterly 1 Spring, 61-97

Malamud, Bellow and Roth

Conrad: A Collection of Prentice Hall Critical Essays 1967 Hudson Review 19:653-58 Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative; Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression Book Week April 16:6, 17 Don’t Never Forget by Brigid Brophy Hudson Review 20:335-40 Tolstoy Hudson Review 20:473-86 fiction review (18) 1968 Hudson Review 20:681-86 Casanova Hudson Review 21:189-96 Toward a New Christianity ed. Thomas J. J. Altizer; Fred J. Denbeaux. The Premature Death of Protestantism; Radical Tlieology: Phase Two, ed. C. W. Christian and Glenn R. Witting; Richard C. Debold and Russell C. Leaf. LSD, Man and Society; Peter Laurie, Drugs Hudson Review 21:391-98 Dean E. Wooldridge, Mechanical Man; Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine; James D. Watson. The Double Helix Book World September I. A. Richards, So Much 15, 21 Nearer 381

Mudrick Transcribed

Title “Must we Burn Mme. de Beauvoir?” “A Certain Lack of Attention” “Political Animals” “The End of the World or Else”

Journal/Publisher Subject/Category 1969 Hudson Review 21:751-63 fiction review (14)

Engl. Language Notes a biography of Conrad 6:223-35 Hudson Review 22:333-43 Orwell and Herzen Hudson Review 22:551-60 books by Carl Kaysen, Bruno Bettelheim, Miloran Djilas, C. P. Snow, and R. Buckminster Fuller 1970 “Studying the Time” Art News 69(1):47-62 Harold Rosenberg On Culture and Literature Horizon Press collected writings “The Ogre at the Feast of Hudson Review 23:278-92 Samuel Johnson Life” 1971 “Rumors of Mighty Hudson Review 23:767-71 Will They Ever Finish Victories” Bruckner Boulevard? by Ada Louise Huxtable “Scrupulous Hudson Review fiction review (11) Permutations and Occult 24:185-200 Resemblances” “Leavis, Dickens, and the Hudson Review 24:346-54 Dickens the Novelist Last Days” by F. R. Leavis “Paracriticism: Its Cause Hudson Review 24:519-25 The Dismemberment of and Cure” Orpheus by Ihab Hassan and Liberations, ed. Hassan 1972 “Bearding Conrad” Hudson Review 24:711-15 Conrad’s Eastern World and Conrad’s Western World by Norman Sherry “Fiction and Truth” Hudson Review 25:142-56 fiction review (14) “Here They Are” Hudson Review 25:338-49 Ande Manners, Poor Cousins; Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto; Portal to America, ed. Allan Schoener “Can You Forgive Him?” Hudson Review 25:487-96 Trollope

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Appendix

Title

Journal/Publisher Subject/Category 1973 “Saint-Simon’s Kingdom” Hudson Review 25:675-84 “The Asp and the Entrails: Hudson Review 26:219-24 The Renaissance Discovery An Entertanment” of Time by Ricardo J. Quinones “Twenty-three Stone-Deaf Hudson Review 26:369-87 books about Shakespeare Theologians” “Old Pros with News Hudson Review 26:545-61 fiction review (17) from Nowhere” 1974 “Looking for Kellermann; The Theory of the Novel essay or, Fiction and The Facts ed. John Halperin Oxford of Life” UP, 271-93 “Boyish Charmer and Hudson Review 27:33-54 Chekhov Last Mad Genius” “Last Tango in Panoply” Hudson Review 27:303-07 Richard Ellmann, Golden Codgers “Lawrence” Hudson Review 27:424-42 1975 “The Man in the Hudson Review 27:589-96 Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Machine” Archipelago “The Emperor of China” Hudson Review 28:113-18 The Emperor of China: Self Portrait of K’ang-hsi by Jonathan D. Spence “Poe and the Twentieth Arrow 1(1):27 Century” “The Offending Member” Hudson Review 28:271-78 Boswell “Jane Austen’s Drawing Jane Austen: Bicentenary Room” Essays ed. John Halperin Cambridge UP, 247-61 “Ithyphallic or Ithynot?” Hudson Review 28:465-67 Comedy: The Irrational Vision by Morton Gurewitch 1976 “Pushkin in Translation” Hudson Review 28:537-53 “Chicken Little and the Hudson Review 29:139-45 F. R. Leavis, The Living Two Nose-Jobs” Principle; Frederick Crews, Out of My System; John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility

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Mudrick Transcribed

Title “Agèd Eagles and Dirty Old Men” “Mad Dogs and Anglo Shrinks” “Su Cosa Mi Cosa; or, Busy Busy Busy” The Man in the Machine “The Ugly Duck” “The Entertainer” “The Blind Men and the Elephant” “Adorable Ideas and Absent Plenitudes”

“I Don’t Care What Mama Don’t Allow” “Issues and Answers; or, If You’ve Tried It Don’t Knock It” “Portnoy’s Bachelor Uncle” “Father Knows Best” Books Are Not Life But Then What Is? “Bring Me Another Five and Don’t Spare the Duck Sauce” “The Sexiest Man in the World” “Love, Careless Love”

“Paoli’s Boswell”

Journal/Publisher Subject/Category Hudson Review Bertrand Russell 29:293-3O0 Hudson Review 29:471-75 The Mind’s Fate by Robert Coles 1977 Hudson Review 29:605-14 Samuel Pepys Horizon Press collected writings Hudson Review 30:131-37 The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen Hudson Review 30:210-78 Boswell Hudson Review 30:426-36 Chaucer 1978 Hudson Review 30:587-95 The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato; Roland Barthes, S/Z; Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics Hudson Review 31:187-95 Kleist’s stories Hudson Review 31:356-64 Edmund Wilson Hudson Review 31:501-16 Kafka 1979 Hudson Review 31:649-62 Tolstoy Oxford UP collected writings Hudson Review 32:123-34 Traditional Chinese Stories, ed. Y. W. Ma and S. M. Lau Hudson Review 32:269-80 The Tale of Genji Hudson Review 32:429-40 The Lais of Marie de France 1980 Hudson Review 33:111-18 Boswell 384

Appendix

Title “Boswell’s Johnson” “The Unsung Hero” “The Publicity Hound” “Life Direct and the Indifferential Calculus” “Solzhenitsyn versus the Last Revolutionary” “A No-Good SelfRighteous Bragging Boasting Chckenshit Character” Nobody Here But Us Chickens

Journal/Publisher Hudson Review 33:279-87 Hudson Review 33:331-57 1981 Hudson Review 33:565-74 Hudson Review 34:125-34

Subject/Category Johnson William of Orange

Solzhenitsyn Lawrence, Flaubert, and Joyce Hudson Review 34:195-17 Trotsky Hudson Review 34:441-55 Hemingway’s letters

Ticknor and Fields

collected writings

1982 “Truth, Justice, and Other Hudson Review 34:525-48 Voltaire Spice for the Immature” “The Muslims Are Hudson Review 35:130-38 V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Coming! The Muslims Believers Are Coming!” “Prophet and Loss” Hudson Review 35:290-97 F. Scott Fitzgerald “Bloom, Bloom, Go Out Harper’s, August, 65-70 Harold Bloom the Room!” “Tales of Waste and Woe” Hudson Review 35:460-70 Journals of Sylvia Plath; Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson 1983 “The Contents of Case Hudson Review 35:581-94 P. T. Barnum No. 794” “The Gracehoper and the Harper’s, January, 57-63 Cyril Connell Aunts” “Susie Creamcheese Harper’s. February, 62-65 Susan Sontag Makes Love Not War” “Apollo and Terpsichore” Harper’s, April, 57-63 George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell “Murches of the World, Hudson Review 36:187-98 William H. Sewell, Work Unite! You Have Nothing and Revolution in France; to Lose But Your Praties” Patrick Joyce, Society and Politics “The Recording Angel Hudson Review 36:378-88 Kleist’s letters Tunes Out” 385

Mudrick Transcribed

Title “Lives of the Saints” “Dark Dark Dark” “String Hoppers and Feary Fathers” “The Man of Feeling” “The Man of Sentiment” “The Last Great Composer” “The Public Servant” “One of a Kind” “Tall Stories and Short Hairs” “The Age of Innocents” “The King and His Queens”

Journal/Publisher Harper’s, July, 60-64 Harper’s, November, 60-63 Hudson Review 36:568-76

Subject/Category Gandhi and Tolstoy Conrad’s letters autobiographies from Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Iran

1984 Hudson Review 36:755-65 Trollope’s short stories Hudson Review 37:105-14 Rousseau Hudson Review 37:221-38 Stravinsky Hudson Review 37:376-92 1985 Hudson Review 37:595-615 Hudson Review 38:133-139

John Evelyn Swift

Richard Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative Hudson Review 38:247-55 Studs Terkel, The Good War Hudson Review 38:520-28 Balanchine

1986 Hudson Review 38:648-658 “Better Late Than Never” Hudson Review 39:141-48 “He Wouldn’t Babysit for Hudson Review 39:517-25 Mozart” 1987 “Eminent Victorian Goes Hudson Review 39:657-66 Too Far West” “The Dim Lamp”

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the Paris Review interviews Leopoldo Alas, La Regenta Mozart and his father

Trollope’s North America

The Return of Marvin Mudrick During my first semester at the College of Creative Studies (CCS), I wrote about Marvin Mudrick in a university magazine. Twenty years later, the magazine asked me to write another article about him. My posting of that second article on my blog started the correspondence that led to the creation of this book series. One of Marvin’s daughters, Ellen Mudrick, came across the blog post and wrote to me. She then introduced me to her sister and mother, and soon I had been connected, or reconnected, with a group of former students who were digitizing some of his books. In this collection, you’ll hear from some of them, as well as from two other people who knew Marvin well. The introductions they have written are personal. As James Raimes, the editor who worked with Mudrick on Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? (Oxford University Press, 1979) and Nobody Here But Us Chickens (Ticknor and Fields, 1981), put it in an email, “We all want to connect again with the man and his mind.” Over the years, Raimes found himself rereading Mudrick. After his retirement, he wrote a memoir, and browsing the web, found me. “Marvin Mudrick is the hero of my memoir,” he emailed. In his introductions to Mudrick Transcribed and Nobody Here But Us Chickens, Raimes relates his admiration of Mudrick and his difficulties as champion of the idiosyncratic author. One of my fellow students at CCS was Jervey Tervalon, who wrote stories about growing up in an African American neighborhood in Los Angeles. Encouraged by Mudrick, he published his first novel a few years later. Now an award-winning novelist, poet, and dramatist who teaches at CCS, Tervalon exemplifies the effect that Mudrick had on his students. It feels exactly right to have him introduce, in his vivid and very personal way, Books Are Not Life But Then What Is? Kia Penso, another former student, wrote the introduction to On Culture and Literature. She explains that it’s the book where he drew the line between himself and the litcrit profession, and where he discussed ideas about the nature of literary experience that were a turning point for him, making it a launch pad for the later books. It also includes essays that critics nowadays are most likely to cite, including those on Norman Podhoretz and on Diana Trilling. William Pritchard, author, poetry critic, and Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College, who wrote the introduction to The Man in the Machine, knew Marvin Mudrick through the Hudson Review, where they both published for many years. When I contacted him, he turned out to have an office at the college adjacent to that of Allen Guttmann, with whom I worked on many projects, so we may literally have crossed paths unwittingly. Similarly, a great admirer and friend of Mudrick, Pauline Kael, the New Yorker film critic, turned out to have lived up the 387

Mudrick Transcribed street from the Berkshire Publishing’s office in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; and another former student lives just around the corner. Marvin Mudrick has never really been so far away. I wrote the introduction to Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, Mudrick’s first book, because no one else in our working group seemed to know much about it. For me, it was life changing, and I was delighted to find that it remains enjoyable and enlightening, and subversive. The final book in this collection, Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks, exists only because of the diligence and ingenuity of another student, Lance Kaplan. Kaplan first started to record Mudrick’s Writing Narrative Prose class to send to his brother, a former student. After Mudrick’s untimely death in October of 1986, Kaplan began to transcribe and edit his recordings as well as recordings made by other students over the years. Transcribe and edit are accurate but inadequate words to describe the creation of this extraordinary book. A professional court reporter and editor couldn’t have done it. It required someone who knew Mudrick’s voice and temperament through and through—to paraphrase Boswell, someone permeated by the Mudrickian ether. The book is a kind of miracle of attention. It’s also entertaining, freakishly smart and full of love—of life, books, music, and people. Previously published only in a limited, private edition, it may well be the gem of the collection. Other people have been essential to this project. Marvin Mudrick’s daughter Janie Mudrick has taken the lead in coordinating details with Berkshire Publishing and I’ve been able to get to know her through phone calls and Facebook. Marvin’s wife, Jeanne Little Mudrick, put a great deal of time into preparing and proofreading typescripts of several of the books. It’s a great pleasure to put the new editions into her hands. We also thank Lee Mudrick, Ann Mudrick White, and Ellen Mudrick for their support and advice. We also thank Kate Johnston, Bob Blaisdell, author of the memoir Mr. Mudrick Said, Sheila Oviatt Ham, who originally put Mudrick’s essays into my hands, Derek Attridge of the University of York, and Kia Penso, who wrote the introduction to On Culture and Literature, for their review of the introductory material, and Robert Dugan, dean of libraries at the University of West Florida, for so kindly digitizing several of the books. One thing that is clear in all six books, as it was clear in every encounter with Marvin, is that he rejoiced in writing and writers, and that he counted on us students to read with the same intense interest and enthusiasm as he did. He assigned more books each week than any human being could possibly manage, but because of that we read an immense amount. And reading a book was always more fun when there was the prospect of hearing what he would have to say about it. While Mudrick excelled at criticism and at pricking holes in literary pretension, he didn’t do it casually. Roger Sale, in a review of On Culture and Literature, explains: When Mudrick is not writing he must be reading; there simply are not enough hours in the day for anything else. Not long ago the man whose office is next to mine, David Wagoner, had his fifth novel reviewed by Mudrick 388

The Return of Marvin Mudrick in The Hudson Review. Mudrick had not liked the novel very much, but, not content with that, he had gone back and read Wagoner’s first four before describing his opinion of the fifth. Wagoner was understandably not very happy at Mudrick’s dislike of his novels, but more than that he was dumbfounded by Mudrick’s procedures. I could only tell him that this was just like Mudrick, and also that I too knew no one else who would read five novels by a man in order to be able to level against one in just the terms he wanted. (On Not Being Good Enough, 1979) In republishing Mudrick’s books, our aim is to invite modern readers to the classroom we remember, to his English department office where we would hang out in the afternoon, and to the conversations that he would have with the colleagues he most admired and trusted. You will hear his voice, and not only in the volume Mudrick Transcribed, which consists of extraordinarily entertaining transcripts from his classes. As his colleagues at CCS, John Ridland, Alan Stephens, and Logan Speirs, wrote: “The voice in all of his writing reproduces his own living voice in an almost uncanny way. That voice is cantankerous, loving, aggressive, spiteful, charming; it abounds with energy and fierce humor.” I can still hear that voice, and see him at a table at the front of a classroom, his socked and sandaled feet flexing up and down as he sifts through the pile of papers dropped there by students as we walked into the room. Besides that, he was in his office and ready to talk to us every single afternoon, and we felt that we could talk to him about anything. It was impossible not to feel awed by his brilliance, and he was as tolerant of adoration as he was of our various waywardness. We came to him even when we had no assignment to discuss. We would take a seat and join in a conversation, or just listen, perhaps waiting for the others to leave so we could ask a confidential question. He was, in his own unassuming way, entirely welcoming. We are publishing Marvin Mudrick’s six books to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the College of Creative Studies, which he created and led. The collection is a celebration of the man we knew and loved and admired as well as a fresh contribution to literary criticism and literary conversation. We hope that his essays will draw you to wonderful writing from all over the world and from different centuries (oh, how he loved Chaucer!), and that you’ll be coming to new appreciation of writers you might otherwise have missed. Happy reading. Karen CHRISTENSEN College of Creative Studies ’81 CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group

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BERKSHIRE CLASSICS The Marvin Mudrick Collection Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (1952) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by Karen Christensen On Culture and Literature (1970) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by Kia Penso The Man in the Machine (1977) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by William Pritchard Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? (1979) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by Jervey Tervalon Nobody Here But Us Chickens (1981) by Marvin Mudrick, with a new introduction by James Raimes Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks (1986), edited by Lance Kaplan, with a new introduction by James Raimes

Find out more about this series and Berkshire Publishing Group’s revival of selected authors at http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/classics/

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About Marvin Mudrick Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986) was a literary critic, English professor, and founder of the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), which is known as a “graduate school for undergraduates” with programs in math, biology, physics, and computer science as well as the arts. Mudrick wrote extensively for the Hudson Review and published five collections of essays. He also wrote for the New York Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine. Known for his distinctive critical voice and his willingness to tackle histories as well as fiction, he had many admirers, and more than a few detractors. In addition to literature, he loved and occasionally wrote about classical music and ballet.

Marvin Mudrick was born on 17 July 1921 in Philadelphia. He received his AB degree from Temple University in 1942 and joined the army. At the end of the War, en route to California from the Philippines, he discovered Jane Austen. He would go on to write his first book about her novels. After receiving a PhD in English from UC Berkeley, he joined the English faculty at the newly established UCSB in 1949 and remained there until his death in October 1986. In 1967, he founded the College of Creative Studies (CCS) and became its first provost. Although he was deeply suspicious of the word “teacher,” he was a brilliant one, in the classroom and also through the stream of books and essays he produced while continuing the almost superhuman task of running the College, teaching several courses, and maintaining close contact with its students past and present. From the first, he conceived of the College as a necessary addition to campus life, fulfilling the special needs of a portion of its students, never as a body which competed with the university or opposed its fundamental purposes. Mudrick was the author of five books: Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery; On Culture and Literature; The Man in the Machine; Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?; and Nobody Here But Us Chickens, as well as the posthumously published collection of classroom recordings, Mudrick Transcribed. His later books are collections of critical essays of a particular kind that he developed during his long association with the Hudson Review. The first of them appeared in the spring of 1953.

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Mudrick Transcribed Thereafter, they were produced in astonishing quantities and on an astonishing variety of subjects. The 103rd appeared posthumously in the winter issue of 1987. As a writer, Mudrick never confined himself to the works he was ostensibly reviewing, but saw these as opportunities to learn more about the authors’ achievements and the way they lived their lives. It was life that engrossed him. He saw art as the medium through which we stand most completely revealed as ourselves. He was on the alert to intercept evidence of an artist’s nature from any clue that the work provided. The essays he wrote, now published again as Berkshire Classics, use layer upon layer of quotations, which he selected in a particular way. His quotations are always unexpected, yet always come to be recognized as important moments of truth, like telltale changes of expression on a face that is being watched with relentless attention. Character portraits of a special kind are Marvin Mudrick’s medium and embody his critical method. Through them he reminds his readers that no artistic statement can be separated from the human being who has made it. Often he pursues what he perceives as personality defects with a cruel and relentless wit, hunting down particular words and actions, and using these against the subject with devastating effect. At other times, he joyfully pursues evidence of personal heroism, of a mind which has dared to be true to itself. Mudrick’s writing voice reproduced his own living voice in an almost uncanny way. Cantankerous, loving, aggressive, spiteful, charming: his voice abounds with energy and fierce humor. His very funny wordplay remains, along with his gift for parody as well as his enormous love and need for the arts, as though his own life depended on them. In the preface to one of his books, Marvin Mudrick described the theoretical choices that guided him in life and literature: High spirits over low, energy over apathy, wit over dullness, jokes over homilies, good humor over jokes, good nature over bad, feeling over sentiment, truth over poetry, consciousness over explanations, tragedy over pathos, comedy over tragedy, entertainment over art, private over public, generosity over meanness, charity over murder, love over charity, irreplaceable over interchangeable, divergence over concurrence, principle over interest, people over principle. Remembering Mudrick, and his continuing presence within his work, it is tempting to quote from Hamlet, the dramatic hero who aggravated him most: “He was a man, take him for all in all / I shall not look upon his like again.” This essay by John Ridland, Alan Stephens, and Logan Speirs, who were professors at the University of California, Santa Barbara and taught in the College of ­Creative Studies, has been lightly edited and updated.

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About James Raimes James Raimes was a publisher and is now an amateur gardener. He joined Oxford University Press (OUP) in London in the mid-1960s, moved to OUP’s Clarendon Press office in Oxford, then to its New York office, where he worked as an acquiring editor in the arts until 1980. In a highly prestigious literary list, his favorite author was the anti-academic academic Marvin Mudrick. After seven years of work at three small commercial imprints, two of which rather quickly imploded and in one of which he again published Marvin Mudrick, he returned to academic publishing at Columbia University Press, where he became the Assistant Director and oversaw the publication in print and electronic form of several very large reference works, including The Columbia Encyclopedia. He received the LMP Award honoring individual excellence in reference publishing. Raimes wrote Gardening at Ginger about learning to garden in Chatham, New York where he spends his summers with his wife. He and Ann are British-born American citizens, spending most of the year in their other home in Brooklyn, where their two married daughters live nearby.

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Index Abelard and Heloise, 23–24, 267 Adams, John, 88 Addison, Joseph, 58–59 Aeschylus, 121 Africa, 122 Alas, Leopoldo, 304 Allen, Woody, 161 ambition, 242, 245 American Revolution, 47, 88 annihilation, 50, 117–118 anthropology, cultural, 95–96 Aristophanes, 121 Aristotle, 58 art, 167–168, 170–171, 173, 211, 228, 234, 236, 238, 241, 258, 287–305, 312, 323–326, 330, 336, 361, 370; response to, 211, 228, 234, 236, 238, 287–305, 361, 374–375 Asia, 88–89, 97 atheists, 91 Athenian civilization, 121, 124 Austen, Jane, 3, 99–100, 223, 235, 244, 288, 294, 299 authority in fiction, 211–213, 217–218 Aztecs, 95 Bach, J. S., 234, 373 Balanchine, George, 167–168, 237, 289, 354, 359–361; The Four Temperaments, 354; The Nutcracker, 289 ballet, 287, 289 Barthes, Roland, 238 Beauclerk, Topham, 17 beauty, 190, 361; power versus, 361, 374, 376 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 81, 210, 234, 258, 260, 281–282, 287, 291, 294, 296, 300, 301, 302, 358, 361, 365–366, 368–369,

372–373, 374, 375; Eroica Symphony, 81, 295, 375; Ninth Symphony, 305; “Waldstein” Sonata, 258, 302 belief, religious, 90–91, 114, 287 Bernheimer, Martin, 288 biography, 51, 53 Black Plague, 89 Bloom, Harold, 285–286 books, 2, 23–25, 27–28; making notes in, 271–272 Boswell, James, 11–12, 14, 16–22, 24, 26–29, 31, 35–36, 41–42, 44–45, 47–54, 60–62, 67–69, 72–76, 82–83, 85, 90, 94–95, 99, 102, 108–114, 117–120, 240, 242, 251, 267–269, 271–272, 274–280, 282–285, 309, 359, 361, 362, 366–367; Boswell in Extremes, 109, 114; Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 26, 265, 269, 273, 284; Life of Johnson, 10–11, 14, 17, 24–26, 40, 62, 74, 75, 82, 85, 87, 99, 108, 264–266, 267, 269–277, 359; London Journal, 18, 36, 265, 272, 273, 276 Breitkopf & Härtel, 355 Buddha, 93 Burke, Edmund, 17, 108–113, 123–124, 283–284 Burney, Dr. C., 75 Burroughs, William, 41 Byron, Lord, Don Juan, 99 campus intellectuals, 98–99, 102 cant, 53, 56, 58–59, 102 Cantor, Eddie, 291 Catholicism, 116 Chaucer, 17, 20, 23, 26, 37, 62–63, 183, 296–297, 301, 325, 354, 361, 365, 372; Troilus and Criseyde, 11, 183, 264, 295, 296, 298, 372

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Mudrick Transcribed Chekhov, Anton, 309 children’s literature, 4, 16, 137 cheerfulness, 44 Child, Julia, 154 China, 88, 92–93, 122–123 Chopin, Frederic, 37; Military Polonaise, 37 Christianity, 92–95, 102, 113, 118 classrooms, 5-7, 153 clothes, shopping for, 151 cocktail parties, 6, 95, 97, 107, 376 Colbert, Claudette, 107 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41, 242 College of Creative Studies, 1–9, 240, 287, 306, 312, 328, 335, 338, 347–353, 354, 387, 389 College of Letters and Science, 3. 135, 147, 331–333, 336, 337, 338, 347, 348, 349, 352; general education requirement, 1–2, 331; foreign language requirement, 331 Columbo, Russ, 255, 290 confession, 18 Conrad, Joseph, 335 Constantinople, 100–101 conversation, 60–61 conviction, 91, 96, 101–102, 115–116, 120, 226, 279–280, 282, 318; religious, 51, 102 cowardice, 90, 97–98 Crabbe, George, 41 Craft, Robert, 16, 75, 360–361 criticism, 201–202, 223–225, 227, 230–231, 236–238, 249, 284, 332, 335; criteria in, 230–232, 236–237 Cromwell, Oliver, 281 Crosby, Bing, 255, 290 Cryovac wrapping, 207 custom, Hume’s notion of, 123–124 D’Amboise, Jacques, 289 Darwin, Charles, 91 deadlines, 26 Declaration of Independence, 88 deconstructionism, 236, 237–238 decorum, 17 Defoe, Daniel, 84 Deist, 88 Dennis, John, 57, 58–59 depression, 41–42, 45

Depression, the, 245–246, 254 De Quincy, Thomas, 41 Derrida, Jacques, 238 Diaghilev, Sergei, 360–361 Dickens, Charles, 226, 241, 242 Donne, John, 63 Donoghue, Denis, 244, 245 Dostoevsky, Fydor, 15–16 Downey, Bill, 319 drinking, 12–13 Dryden, John, 62, 63 Duke of Chandos, 73 Dumpsters, 207 Dunne, Irene, 107 Eastern civilization, 88–90, 92–93, 121–122, 124 eating, 26, 154–155 education, 250, 293–294, 313; university, 323, 328–331, 337–339 Edwards, Oliver, 44 eighteenth century, 15, 20, 41–42, 62, 69, 81–82, 84–85, 87–88, 91, 93–94, 97, 99, 113, 120, 265, 267; English prose of, 62, 82 Ehrenpreis, Irwin, 244, 245 Eliot, George, 280 Eliot, T. S., 226–227 Ellmann, Richard, 244–245 Enlightenment, 15, 21, 88, 94 England, 116 English papers, 264–265, 297–298, 303 English professors, 223, 242, 251, 267, 334 entertainment, 9, 14, 167–168, 171, 173; popular, 241 enthusiasm, 293–294 ethnic jokes, 317–318, 320 Europe, 87 fast food, American, 154–155 Faulkner, William, 241 female beauty, 190 Feynman, Richard, 330–331 fiction, authority in, 211–213; eighteenthcentury, 240–241; ethnicity in, 152, 206; symbolism in, 216; writing of, 133–136, 167, 174–175, 177, 195, 216, 218 Fielding, Henry, 84, 241

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Index FitzGerald, Edward, 361 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 303–304 food, 154–155, 205, 207 footnotes, 63 Forbes, Sir William, 13–14 France, 116 French language, 103–104, 297 French Revolution, 15, 84, 123 Freudianism, 42, 78, 126–127 friendship, 28–31, 52, 107–108 Frye, Northrop, The Anatomy of Criticism, 231 Garrick, David, 20 gatherings, 52, 96, 108 Gebrauchsmusik, 37, 40 generalizations, 229–230 genius, 354–376 Gershwin, George, 290 Gibbon, Edward, 20–23, 82, 90, 91, 93–102, 105–106, 108; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 21, 63, 81–82, 85, 87, 266 Gogol, Nikolai, “The Nose,” 63 Goldsmith, Oliver, 17 grades, letter, 3, 314–315, 318 Gray, Thomas, 69 great persons, 120–121, 278–285, 374 Greek civilization, 87–88, 90–92, 121 Greene, Donald, 359 grotto, 67 Haggin, B. H., 224–226, 233, 235, 261– 262, 289 Hailes, Lord, 19 Halifax, Lord, 64–66 Hemingway, Ernest, 6, 71 handwriting, 12 Harper’s, 246 Hawkins, John, Life of Samuel Johnson, 40–42, 85 Haydn, Josef, 35, 76, 292, 370, 372, 273 Hazlitt, William, 268 Heloise and Abelard, 23–24, 267 hierarchy, social, 48 Hillary, Sir Edmund, 87 Hindemith, Paul, 37

history, 22, 87–88, 93–94, 97–98, 167 Hitler, 70–71, 73, 89, 97, 341 Homer, Iliad, 63, 89–90; Odyssey, 89–90 Honorius, 97 Housman, A. E., 274 Hudson Review, 66, 225, 249 Huguenots, 116 Hume, David, 84, 86, 93, 103–104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114–120, 123–124, 126, 128, 129, 283; An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 10, 84, 124 humility, 279 identity, Hume’s notion of, 125 India, 92–93, 121–123 intelligence, 4, 306–307, 311, 313 Iran, 92 irony, modern, 99–101 Irving, John, The World According to Garp, 169 Japan, 305 Jefferson, Thomas, 88 Jenyns, Soame, 48 Jesus, 279 Johnson, Samuel, 11–29, 31, 32–36, 39–42, 44–56, 58–70, 72–78, 80, 82, 85, 87–88, 90–91, 94–95, 98–100, 102, 108–113, 117, 118–121, 240, 242, 251, 264–286, 298, 309, 359; The False Alarm, 54; The Idler, 48; letters, 76; Life of Johnson, 11, 14, 17, 24, 25, 26, 40, 62, 74, 75, 82, 85, 87, 99, 108, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269, 272–277, 359; Life of Pope, 54, 59; Life of Savage, 75; Lives of the Poets, 47, 54–55, 58, 61, 68–69, 72, 74, 78, 80, 99, 285–286; Notes to Shakespeare, 61; Preface to Shakespeare, 61; The Rambler, 60–61; Rasselas, 274; Taxation No Tyranny, 54 jokes, 133, 226, 238, 248, 317–318, 340, 352; ethnic, 317–318, 320 Judaism, Orthodox, 346; Reform, 346 Julian, Emperor, 106 Julius Caesar, 97 kabuki, 289 Kafka, Franz, 24; The Metamorphosis, 172 Kenner, Hugh, 15

397

Mudrick Transcribed Kent, Allegra, 289 Kirstein, Lincoln, 361 kindness, 132–133 Kishinev, 244 knowledge versus information, 236, 251 Kosinski, Jerzy, 245, 248 Lacan, Jacques, 238 Laing, Ronald, 42 Lascaux Cave, 291 Lawrence, D. H., “Samson and Delilah,” 306 Leavis, F. R., 224, 226 lectures, 22–23, 251 letter grades, 3, 135, 309 liberty, Hume’s notion of, 115–116 libraries, 9 Lifar, Serge, 361 Life of Johnson, 11, 14, 17, 24, 25, 26, 40, 62, 74, 75, 82, 85, 87, 99, 108, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269, 272–277, 359 Literary Club, 21, 108 literary criticism, 223–224, 230, 231, 236–238 literature, 103 Lombard, Carol, 107 love, romantic, 28–31, 52–53, 287–290, 305, 375 Lucky Market, 207 Malherbe, Francois de, 297 Marchmont, Earl of, 72 Mason, Life of Gray, 16 materialism, 107 McDonald’s, 154–155 mercantile situations, men and women and, 150 metaphor, 302–303 Middle Ages, 15, 23–24, 94, 334 Milton, J., 54, 63, 69, 84, 85, 120, 303; Paradise Lost, 84 modern intellectuals, 95–96 modern irony, 99, 101 Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 201 motive, 115, 127 Motley, John, 86 Mount Everest, 81, 84, 87 movies, 107

Mozart, Leopold, 366–373 Mozart, Wolfgang, 34–35, 37–39, 210–211, 227–228, 234, 281–282, 292, 296, 297, 300–303, 305, 307, 355–356, 361–373, 376; Clarinet Concerto, 34; Don Giovanni, 300–301, 365–366, 368–369; The Magic Flute, 365; The Marriage of Figaro, 234, 300, 356, 365; Piano Concerto in A (K. 488), 35, 305; Piano Concerto K. 503, 227, 237; String Quintet in G minor, 365: Symphony in G minor, 365, 369 MTV, 202–203 Muppets, 173 Murasaki, Lady, The Tale of Genji, 66 murder, 115 music, 28, 32–42, 252–263, 282, 288–291, 302–303; pop, 36–38, 81, 290, 294, 307; physicality of, 258, 263, 366; repetition in, 257–258 necessity, Hume’s notion of, 115–116, 128 Newton, Bishop T., 54, 68 novice writing, 184 nuns, 100–102 Oates, Joyce Carol, 245–246, 248 obsessions, 26–27 opera, 300–301 opium, 40–42 office hours, 9, 278 Oxford, Earl of, 59, 64 painting, 274, 287–288, 293, 300 parties, 6, 46, 95, 96, 107 Pascal, Blaise, 84 paragraphs, 249–250, 367 paraphrase, 224 passion, eighteenth-century idea of, 58 patriotism, 21 Paul, Jean, 232, 235 Pericles, 121 Persia, 92 personal identity, Hume’s notion of, 124–125 philosophy, Hume’s use of the word, 104–105, 124 physical beauty, 190

398

Index Piggy, Miss, 173 pizza, 154 Plato, 90 police, 189 politicians, 281, 374 polonaises, 37 pornography, 135–136 pop music, 37, 290, 294 Pope, Alexander, 54–77, 295, 298; Of the Characters of Women, 63; The Dunciad, 71; Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard, 58; Essay on Criticism, 63; Essay on Man, 63; letters, 76; The Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis, 58–59 Pottle, Frederick, 366–367 Pound, Ezra, 167 Prescott, William, 86 private life, 46, 50 professional information, 32 prose, eighteenth-century English, 62 Pryor, Richard, 171 puns, 238 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 283 quoting, 223–225 reading, 2, 11–16, 22–26, 54–55, 264–265, 270–274, 276–277 religions, 90, 114, 116 religious conviction, 51 Repo Man, 38 reviewers, 242 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 12, 17, 20, 108, 284 Richardson, Samuel, 84, 241 Rosen, Charles, 373 romantic love, 305 Rome, 96, 113 Rosenberg, Harold, 224–232, 235–236 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15, 120 Safeway Market, 158 SAT scores, 312–313 Savage, Richard, 20 savages, 22 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 18 St. Vitus’ dance, 20 Saturday Night Live, 173 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 362

Schubert, Franz, 281–282, 292, 355–358, 370, 372–373, 376 science fiction, 135 Scientific American, 103 Scrutiny, 224 seminars, student-conducted, 329–330 sentimentality, 99, 173 sexual experience, writing about, 136 sexual intercourse, 18 Shakespeare, 27, 54, 63, 68, 70, 83, 107, 226, 267, 274, 294, 296, 298–304, 325, 334, 361, 365; Antony and Cleopatra, 83, 302; Cymbeline, 301; Hamlet, 366; King Lear, 296, 302; Macbeth, 107; Hamlet, 366 Sheridan, Richard, 108–109 Shirer, William L., The Decline and Fall of the Third Reich, 70 slavery, 47–48 smart alecks, 98 Smollett, Tobias, 84 social hierarchy, 48 social sciences, 330 Spaeth, Sigmund, 291 Spectrum, 15, 348 Spenser, Edmund, 372 Stamitz, Karl, 76 steak, 344 Stendhal, 81 Stephens, Alan, 248 Sterne, Laurence, 84, 226; Tristam Shandy, 241 Stravinsky, Igor, 16, 75, 360–361 structuralism, 236, 238, 332 student-conducted seminars, 329–330 stupidity, 357 supermarkets, 158, 168 Sweeney, Beatrice, 350 Swift, Jonathan, 59, 63–64, 66, 69, 77–79, 244, 298 symbolism, 216, 218 talk, 59 teaching, 247 Temple, Rev. W. J., 17–18 tennis, 60–61 Ten Commandments, 18 Thackeray, Willaim, 280

399

Mudrick Transcribed Theobald, Lewis, 70 Theodora, Empress, 82–83, 116 thinking, 247, 305, 274–277 Thrale, Hester Lynch, 48 titles for stories, 137 toleration, religious, 116 Tolstoy, Leo, 15–16, 134, 139, 242 Tommy, 83 tone-deafness, 32 Toscanini, Arturo, 81, 261–263, 295–296, 301, 366, 371, 375 Tovey, Sir Donald Frances, 224–225, 227–228, 232, 235 Trilling, Lionel, 224, 226–227 Trollope, Anthony, 241–245, 280 Turner, W. J., 362, 364 university professors, 334, 337, 338 University of Vienna, 23–24, 334–335 Ussher, Archbishop, 91

Valens, Emperor, 97 Van Gogh, Vincent, 43–44, 293 Vermeeer, Jan, 287, 293 Visigoths, 97 vivisection, 47–48 Voltaire, 15, 93, 104, 116, 120, 235, 297 war, 115 Washington, George, 88 Weiss, Max, 4, 330 Western civilization, 90, 92, 96, 121, 122, 376 White, Shawn, 308, 388 Wilkes, J., 17 William of Orange, 374 Wilson, Edmund, 224, 226, 286 Wolfe, Thomas, 274 World War II, 23, 24 writing, 26–24 Wycherley, William, 56 Yiddish, 103–104

400

BERKSHIRE CLASSICS “A one-man commando squad and independent operator, Marvin Mudrick was the most maverick literary critic of his time and ours—ferocious, funny, and fearlessly honest.” —James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

Mudrick Transcribed

“I can’t imagine a better book on how an inspired teacher’s mind works; Mudrick’s easy rhythms make you aware of how he arrives at the humor that shoots up, geyser after geyser. You know at once why his students would be swept along by his words—he’s thinking on his feet, getting high on his thoughts.” —Pauline Kael, New Yorker Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks exists only because of the diligence and ingenuity of a student, Lance Kaplan, who recorded some of Marvin Mudrick’s classes on cassette tapes. After Mudrick’s untimely death in 1986, Kaplan began to transcribe and edit the recordings. “Transcribe” and “edit” are, however, inadequate words to describe the creation of this extraordinary book, which is a kind of miracle of attention. It is entertaining, freakishly smart, and full of love—a love of life, books, music, and people. The transcriptions include a class on eighteenth-century English prose, a class on the writing of narrative prose, two interviews about the College of Creative Studies, and talks on literary criticism, artistic response, genius, and the craft of teaching. The only volume that has never been commercially published, this may well be the gem of the Berkshire Classics Mudrick collection.

Mudrick Transcribed

classes and talks Edited by Lance Kaplan, with a new introduction by James Raimes

Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986) was a prominent literary critic and founded the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This book was republished to coincide with the College’s 50th anniversary.

BERKSHIRE CLASSICS

MUDRICK

Literature, Modern—History and criticism LCCN 2017015058 | Paperback ISBN 9781614720713 | Ebook ISBN 9781614728702 LCC PN85. M776 2017 | DDC 801/.95—dc23

Mudrick Transcribed CLASSES AND TALKS Edited by Lance Kaplan Introduction by James Raimes

Marvin Mudrick