Homage to Hemingway by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes [Barnes, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

3. The Maestro in the Midwest

The only view was of classrooms and other offices, though if you pressed close to the window you could see discouraged grass below and sky above. From the start, he had declined to take his expected position at the head of the three metal tables that had been loosely bolted together. He would place the student whose work was being discussed at its head, and the principal critic, or responder, at its foot. He himself would sit a third of the way along one side. His positioning was designed to say: I am not the arbiter of truth, because there is no final truth in literary judgement. Of course, I am your professor, and have published several novels whereas you have only had stuff in campus magazines, but this doesn’t necessarily make me your best critic. It may well be that the most useful assessor of your work will be found among your classmates.

This wasn’t false modesty. He liked his students, all of them, and believed the feeling reciprocated; he’d also been surprised how each, regardless of ability, wrote with an individual voice. But everyone’s critical sympathies only ran so far. Take Gun-boy, as he thought of him, who turned in nothing but Gen-X stories set in a rough part of Chicago, and who, when he didn’t like someone else’s work, would shape his hand into a revolver and ‘shoot’ them, adding the gesture of the gun’s recoil for emphasis. No, he would never be Gun-boy’s best reader.

It had been a good idea to come to this Midwestern campus, to remind himself of the normality and ordinariness of America. From a distance, the temptation was always to see it as a country which every so often went mad on power, and gave itself over to the violent outbursts of a steroid abuser. Here, away from the places and politicians which gave it that bad name, life was much like life everywhere else. People worried about the usual small things which to them were big things. As in his fiction. And here he was treated like a welcome guest, not a pariah, not a failure, but someone with his own life who had perhaps seen a few things they hadn’t. Occasionally, there was a certain gulf in understanding: yesterday, he’d been sitting up at a lunch counter when his neighbour asked genially, ‘So what language do they speak in Europe, then?’ But such details would be useful for his American novel.

If he ever wrote it. No, of course he would write it. The question was: would anyone ever publish it? He had taken this job partly to escape the shame of having his last novel, A Kind of Pause, turned down by twelve publishers. And yet, he knew it wasn’t a bad book. Everyone said it was as good as all his others – and therein lay the problem. His sales had been flatlining for years; he was white and middle-aged, with no other identity – smug TV panellist, for instance – to lift his profile.

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