By R. Gatwood.
My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I have come to accept this with the help of writer Daniel W. Foster and violinist Friedrich “Fritz” Kreisler, the latter of whom (in 1905, hoping to draw attention to his concerts) composed a piece he fraudulently attributed to the legendary Gaetano Pugnani.[1],[2] And but here’s the thing: It’s amazing. It’s a fraud and it’s a soaringly beautiful piece of music. You might even say genuinely beautiful, if you’re in the mood for a paradox, which I’m going to have to insist you be, because the thing about paradoxes is they’re all about the tension of bothness—good and bad, true and false, existing and non-existing, etc., etc.—and the story you’re reading is about Daniel W. Foster, who is emphatically both. Good and bad. True and false. Existing and, now, not.
I first met Dan—no, back up—I first encountered Dan when I was a nineteen-year-old college dropout. A friend shoved his 1,082-page second novel The Terrible Master into my hands and ordered me: “Read this.” I read it. Have you ever thought about the cliché “My mind was blown”? Blown like a fuse, like a lightbulb. The cliché cartoon incandescent lightbulb detonated over my head in a confetti shower of glass and tittles of smoking filament. My frequent interregna to consult first a pocket dictionary, then a massive unabridged OED, did not break the spell. I had never read anything so intellectually explosive. Moreover, I felt the author understood me in a way my staid, Sisypheanly patient parents[3] and cynical, pot-smoking friends[4] never could.
So of course I had to read everything he’d ever written[5] and of course, when I learned he taught at Klemm University in Illinois, I had to apply to their creative writing program. I didn’t have much hope. My writing had always wowed my teachers and won me accolades, e.g. a local literary society’s high school student contest (first prize and hon. mention) and a generous scholarship to my first college, the one I’d dropped out of, but secretly—I knew with marrow-deep incontrovertibility—I was a fraud. Everything I wrote was calculated to make people think I was smart and deep-souled and good, and now that I’m telling you this I’m sure you can detect some of that same calculation in what you’re reading now, w/r/t which I beg your indulgence. The person who had written my teacher-dazzling, morally passionate essays and stories was also the person who had jilted his high school girlfriend for the infraction of not wanting to have sex yet, and had screwed up his first job so badly that he lied and told everybody he’d quit, and had cheated on a trigonometry test. The point is I had always succeeded in scamming people into thinking I was smart, deep-souled, etc., and when I applied to Klemm University I was desperately hoping two contradictory things: first, that I would successfully scam the entire faculty the way I’d scammed everyone else, compelling them to accept me and load me with further accolades; and second, that they (specifically, Professor Daniel W. Foster, himself heavily accoladed) would see me for what I really was, a fraud.
Because here’s the thing (I’ll just briefly rehash what Dan had to say on this topic[6]): When you’re a fraud, nobody really sees you, and not being seen causes intense pain. My double-bind or paradox was as follows:
1. If Professor Foster, on the admissions board, saw through my fraudulence, the university would reject me, and I would never get the chance to meet and learn at the feet of and be seen by the most insightful writer I’d ever read.
2. Conversely, if Professor Foster did not see through me, and embraced me as a young writer of immense promise—smart, deep-souled, a good and valuable person—the university would accept me and I would have to go on suffering the intense pain of fraudulence, along with the realization that the most insightful writer I’d ever read was incapable of penetrating my façade. In which case how insightful could he be, really? And but how could anybody ever truly see me, if he didn’t?
So my application to Klemm was actually sort of insane, and even brave, in that I was basically hoping for possibility 3:
3. Professor Foster would simultaneously see through my fraudulence and, with his characteristic compassion, recognize some potential in me that even I wasn’t aware of, and get the university to accept me so he could take me under his wing and mold me into the authentic person I was both longing and terrified to be.
In other words, I was staking everything on Daniel W. Foster being the smart, deep-souled, good person I knew from his writing. And what’s amazing is how much my mundane real-life experience with Klemm and Dan mirrored possibility 3, only, of course, mundanely and undramatically and with disquieting complications, the way a lot of important real-life experiences unfold.
If you read the third footnote in the praeludium, you’ll know that of course my mom did drive me the six hours to what had become my dream school, thanklessly or not. I positioned my copy of The Terrible Master casually on my dorm room’s bookshelf, the duct tape not quite concealing the iconic blue and gold of the broken spine,[7] so that any girls who came by would have a chance, if they’d been initiated into Fosterdom, to recognize it, and to recognize me as someone who’d read it.[8] Within days I was putting on jeans not quite as shabby as the ones DWF wore in photographs (I was aiming for cool but not trying too hard), gathering up my cherished cahier and messenger bag, and strolling into DWF’s classroom ten minutes early.
I was expecting the other students to be in awe of our accoladed instructor, maybe asking him to autograph their Terrible Masters, which I imagined would be unread and shamefully pristine.[9] Instead the people who trickled in and sat around the table seemed relaxed and chatty, and I felt a creeping dread that I’d come to the wrong room.
“Is this Intermediate Short Fiction Writing?” I asked the bored-looking guy next to me.
He affirmed, with a crack of his gum, that it was.
I almost blurted out, With Daniel W. Foster?, but I caught myself.
“Is the professor any good?” one of my soon-to-be classmates sotto voce’d to another. I will leave it to the reader to imagine my reaction.
“He’s a hardass. But really really nice,” the other student sotto voce’d back. “He’ll like, talk to you about your story for hours.”
“Morning, folks,” came a Midwestern drawl from the front of the room. “Welcome to Short Fiction. If you’re new here, call me Dan. Everyone please actually read the syllabus, because I do not want to have to repeat this shit, okay?”
I didn’t chuckle with everyone else when he said that, being stunned silent by the transformation of my distant idol into this guy—scruffy-haired and -faced, built like the former tennis player he was, T-shirted and shabby-jeaned, in other words exactly like his photos except 3-D and ambulatory—passing out copies of the syllabus. I studied the three stapled-together sheets to regain my composure. The top of the first page enjoined us to “Please be literate. Please be on time. Please be kind.” Professor Foster sat at the table alongside us and started talking about what a bitch traffic had been that morning. I was not perceptive enough to observe that he was shy.
So it began. After a few minutes I found it was my turn to introduce myself to the class. I’m still not sure what I said. Probably mumbled something about being a recent dropout or, worse, said I’d been writing my whole life. But as I emerged from the fog I discovered I was laughing, along with the rest of the class, at one of Professor Foster’s self-deprecating jokes about grammar nuts.[10] Then we were being adjured to read not only two different writing manuals from cover to cover but also Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo and Donald Barthelme[11] and dozens of other people I’d never heard of—if you picture us staggering out of class under piles of Xeroxed stories and reading lists, you’ll get the right if hyperbolic idea. Our first assignment was to write one thousand words on a work of prose fiction that had made us feel something. “Anything. Happy, sad, flatulent.”
The first thousand words I submitted for DWF[12]’s judgment came back buried in green ink. He told the class he used green instead of red because he thought it was less intimidating; I could not have been more intimidated if he’d used blood. My essay was not on anything by DWF, of course. Nor was it on anything comparable, since I’d never read anything comparable. Honestly, I’d consumed more TV than books in my nineteen years of life, as DWF always claimed he had in his own youth, which reluctant televisual influence was part of why his writing spoke to me. I ultimately picked something I’d read in high school, a Hemingway story about a little boy who thinks he’s dying (‘A Day’s Wait,’ if you happen to be interested). I wrote that I liked the little boy’s bravery and his utterly believable about-face when he learns he’s going to live. Professor Foster inserted green commas, circled solecisms, slashed through whole sentences of what I came to realize was filler and dreck, etc., and wrote at the end: “But what did you FEEL?” Later I understood that if I’d said I’d kept turning the pages of Jurassic Park to find out how the worst people would get eaten by dinosaurs, I would have garnered more approval.[13]
The syllabus, besides functioning as a syllabus, also served as an introduction to Dan as a teacher and a person. The small print on the third page all but begged us to reconsider taking the course. Dan was frank to the point of adamancy about the fact that while his title was Professor of English, he didn’t have a PhD or any training in pedagogy and was still figuring out how to even teach a class. This lack of credentials didn’t give him any qualms, he warned us and we soon learned firsthand, about imposing his exacting standards of writing on the students who had fallen into his care. He had strong opinions on syntax, grammar, and sentence- and paragraph- and scene-level flow; also, of course, on breathless polysyndeton, fragmentation and nonlinearity as achieved by footnotes and endnotes and parenthetical asides, and strategically deployed erudition; et a whole lot of cetera. My attempts to mimic Dan’s favillating[14] prose earned me furious green strikethroughs and once, in the margin, “Knock it off!” Another time: “Stop being CLEVER!”—something he must have told himself when he was fighting his own outsized brain.[15]
That first semester, I struggled to hold my own against the peers from whom I’d hoped to stand out. I was pretty full of myself, I realize now. In the workshops my classmates, some of them smarter and most of them cooler than me, ripped my ego into mangled, twitching pieces; then Dan, having delivered a gentle coup de grâce, suggested I start over from the thing that had originally inspired me to write. I acquired the habit of sloshing some of my roommate’s Tito’s into a Slurpee before workshops. My consolations were: 1) having Dan’s spotlight- or laser-like attention focused on me for forty minutes at a time; 2) the soupçons of encouragement he continually offered, even when the quality of my work was at its nadir; and 3) seeing others suffer the same ordeals. (Plus sometimes Dan brought cookies.)
If Dan’s writing had blown my mind totally, his teaching blew a whole series of smaller cerebral fuses or bulbs, one after the other. Towards the end of Intermediate Short Fiction Writing, I met with Dan one on one to discuss my final story. In his kind and unassuming way he demolished my prose, my feeble mimicry, my naïve ideas. Then he pointed a nicotine-stained finger at one line and said, “This is your juice. Give me more of this.” I left feeling humbled, exhilarated, seen.
I signed up for every class he taught. “Most of you are not skilled readers,” Dan told us the following semester in Introduction to Contemporary Fiction. “That’s okay. You will be more skilled readers by the time you leave this class. But skill is not the most important quality in a reader.” He paused, looking around the table, and his voice got deeper, like it always did when he felt he was risking sentimentality. “The most important quality is the ability to love.”
Two years and seven months later, in the aftermath, we—his former students—gathered and reflected on his earnestness as a teacher, and how it contrasted with and illumined the excruciatingly hyperaware meta-irony of his best-known writing. “He was always trying to get at something deeper,” one student said. “In writing and in life.”
I did not speak. I was numb. I listened to the reverential murmurs of my old classmates as though from a distance, hearing their pain and love and insight—yes, all those things—and at the same time thinking how hollow and trite they sounded:[16] “Nobody knew how much he was suffering.” “He cared about every single one of his students.” “I’ll never forget him.”
One of the first things that penetrated my numbness was a remark from one of my less well-regarded ex-classmates, a woman who’d clashed with Dan because she was not very smart, and wrote a little clumsily, and was way too stubborn to change her down-to-earth storytelling style to please a famous professor, etc. I had always sort of admired her spirit, but I’d looked down on her, as had my other classmates, and was relieved when she dropped out. Anyway, we ran into each other and she said:
“Did you see what Margaret Laurie wrote about Dan? You know, Dan Foster.”
I knew of Margaret Laurie not because she was an acclaimed memoirist but because she had reportedly dated Dan shortly before he’d started writing what would become The Terrible Master and launch him to literary stardom. “What did she say?” I think I was premonitorily on the defensive.
“Hoo boy.” My ex-classmate made a face. “You’re gonna have to read it.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said, knowing as I said it that I sounded hostile, and knowing she was probably going to avoid me or badmouth me because of it. There are a lot of people I wish I’d treated better.
The Margaret Laurie news trickled into my favorite Daniel W. Foster fan site and mailing list in reluctant hints and bursts of emotion and a two-paragraph excerpt from a Laurie essay. One fan wrote, “I think everybody should read this.” Another said, “Airing one’s deceased ex’s dirty laundry is among the most despicable things a non-fiction writer can do.” Another: “We can’t canonize the guy just because he’s dead.” And: “Is this true? It can’t be true.” There ensued what used to be called flame wars. Strained conversations between longtime friends. I broke down and pirated a scanned copy of Laurie’s essay collection and skimmed for any mention of Dan. The mentions were not oblique.[17]
I had a whole semester left before I could graduate. I struggled to pay attention for more than two consecutive minutes to the adjunct who took over the course titled Experimental and Just Plain Unconventional Fiction.[18] She was probably a good teacher. I think. I don’t know. I lived under a dark anhedonic cloud that manifested in my lying totally still in my dorm until my roommate asked what the hell was wrong with me, and sullen outbursts at a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend who absolutely did not deserve my bullshit, and things I’m even less proud of.
The dark anhedonic cloud didn’t last. Not the way it must have lasted for Dan. One cold morning I left my dorm to attend a critical theory class I was barely getting a C+ in. My legs flexed and warmed from walking uphill. The sun broke out to shine through the naked varicolored branches of the campus sycamores, and a crow cawed as it glided by on fuliginous-fingered wings, and for the first time since Dan’s death, I couldn’t help feeling happy.
What I remembered then about Dan was a moment at his apartment. At the end of my first year at Klemm he had a very casual thing where he invited his latest students to come over and hang out.[19] We heard him talking in a baby voice to his two (rescue, highly neurotic) dogs as he shut them in the bedroom (he proceeded to check on them every twenty minutes or so, with more muffled baby talk and, to my amazement, kissy noises). The walls that weren’t lined with bookshelves were plastered with unframed posters, one for Terminator, one for David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and a couple for obscure band lineups from local bars. I spotted a modest wooden cross half hidden between a bookshelf and a back corner, as though its owner were both embarrassed by it and determined to have it on display. The furniture was sprinkled with dog hair, redolent of cigarettes, and comfortably worn. One of the girls poured wine; no inquiries were made as to anyone’s age.[20]
“Anyone want some music? CDs over there,” said Dan, indicating a pair of those towers of little plastic compact disc cases that I guess nobody has anymore.[21] Dan’s music collection was heavy on ’70s–’80s rock, film soundtracks, classical piano and strings. I, totally ignorant of classical music but hoping to seem sophisticated, pulled out something called The Kreisler Album. “Mm,” Dan said approvingly through a mouthful of crudité.
I remember how, when the first track started on the Denon stereo, volume louder than I’d expected, the room hushed. The violin (I didn’t even recognize it as a violin in that moment) strode confidently through the opening notes and then—and then soared. How can you describe music in language. I didn’t know then that the piece was a fraud. All I knew was the chill that hit me as the violinist traversed those peaks and valleys of sound. And even as the music ceased to soar and shifted into more subdued, pensive ups and downs, and I turned down the volume and the party chatter recrudesced, I was moved by the feeling that I had received yet another gift beyond what any creative writing major could reasonably expect from even a really good or great teacher. It hadn’t taken a single word.
___________________
[1] Who had been dead since 1798 and couldn’t contradict him. Plus you have to wonder if Pugnani would have been flattered, imitation being the sincerest, etc.
[2] Since hearing this piece I’ve become a fan of Kreisler but not, ironically, of Pugnani, so I actually don’t know if the fraud was at all convincing. For very different reasons, I don’t know if the literary homage you’re now reading is at all convincing either.
[3] Like a lot of adolescents, I had no idea what a pain in the ass I was and, when my mom offered to make the six-hour drive to drop me off at my dream school, with no guarantee that I wouldn’t drop out again, I don’t think I thanked her or felt indebted or even really recognized that she was doing it because she loved me. I was uninterested in the complex forces that made my parents staid and Sisypheanly patient, and it wasn’t until after I had read Dan’s later work, where he talks* about the empathy-draining pain of quotidian adult life, that it occurred to me how moving and admirable they were as human beings.
* Dan used uses the present tense for all artists living and dead, saying, “They’re still alive because they still speak to us.”
[4] Not that I wasn’t cynical and pot-smoking; I was, and if I sometimes hated said friends, even the one to whom I was indebted for handing me The Terrible Master, I was and am aware that it was mostly a kind of self-hatred turned outwards. I could here retread Dan’s thesis about the relationship between contemporary life and cynicism and substance abuse and despair, but you’ve all read it, so let it suffice to say that today I have way more compassion for my younger self and his friends than I did at age nineteen, when I first had my mind blown, etc.
[5] I even got hold of what was at the time a rare find, that first touching undergrad story from before he started inserting the “W.” to distinguish himself from a then more famous Daniel Foster.
[6] A recurring theme in Dan’s fiction, which I related to without recognizing that of course it reflected something in himself, is the feeling of being fraudulent. This despite or because of the accolades he received, like the Man Booker Prize, the MacArthur Genius Grant, etc. etc.
[7] The publisher had designed the paperback without taking into account the heft of the 1,082 pages, and if you actually read the whole thing* the spine invariably broke and became a duct-taped monument to your readerly dedication.
*Also a lot of readers reportedly hurled it at a wall either before or after the controversial, brazenly ambiguous, multiple-theory-spawning ending, which wall-hurling did the tome’s structural integrity no favors.
[8] In retrospect I had no idea how to make a girl like me.
[9] You might be wondering how to reconcile my conviction that I was a fraud with my daydream of being a more genuine DWF devotee than my fellow students. I’m going to choose the short answer for once and just say that nineteen-year-olds are deranged.
[10] At least 40% of Dan’s wit was self-deprecating, and this was something we all loved about him until it ended up being something that hurt.
[11] I realize on reflection that there are no women in this brief list. That’s not entirely fair to Dan, whose lists of recommended writers were around 30% women, by which I mean he was trying, probably. Lydia Davis and Virginia Woolf were on there. A few writers of color too. I’m mostly listing the ones who stand out in my mind, so you can blame some of the gender and racial bias on yours truly and not on Dan, whose own biases I don’t want to get into here.
[12] Two and a half weeks went by before I managed to call him Dan the way the rest of the class did. I thank my atheistical stars he didn’t go by Danny—choking out the diminutive probably would have induced a hernia.
[13] Michael Crichton and similar disposable pop lit turned out to be much more Dan’s speed than Hemingway, whom he regarded as towering but emotionally constipated and, worse, a stifling influence on generations of would-be belletristic prose writers.
[14] A DWF word I have never found in any dictionary, probably derived from the Latin “favilla,” denoting sparks or embers, or just possibly the Italian “favillare,” meaning to sparkle.
[15] Dan never explicitly called attention to my obvious mimicry of him, whether out of kindness or pained embarrassment I don’t know. He merely lectured the class, in his soft drawl, about the dangers of mimicry in general: “You know, you can’t spend your whole writing career pretending to be someone else. A self of your own is one of the best things you can have. In writing and in life.” (In retrospect this might not have been addressed directly to me, the way a lot of his words, intra- and extrafictional, weren’t addressed to me even if they felt like they were.) I avoided his eyes and nodded and resolved to do better but succumbed, always, to a nigh physical compulsion to mimic Dan. Maybe it felt good to fail at fraudulence for once, the way it sometimes feels good to make a fool of yourself in front of someone you love.
[16] In other words, I experienced the bothness Dan used to talk about when discussing irony vs. sincerity, fakeness vs. authenticity, being a spectator vs. being a participant, etc. Two unrelated analytical essays I handed in to him, which of course I still cherish, bear the scrawled green words “Why not both?” in the margins.
[17] The real twist of the screw was that she’s a really exemplary and large-hearted writer, or at least that’s the impression I got from skimming, and I sincerely wish her both professional and personal success, but I gleaned said impression of her while smothered in a miasma of loathing for the woman, which is another example of bothness.
[18] Dan named his own courses and sometimes it showed.
[19] This was before he moved in with the avant-garde artist who would expeditiously become his wife and then his widow.
[20] Dan didn’t drink anything himself, and insisted one of us take home the last two inches of wine, for reasons we inferred from the recurring themes of substance abuse in his fiction.
[21] The world has moved on. Now all my CDs are playlists, the Daniel W. Foster fan site I loved has gone quiet but still commemorates the day of his death with a movingly blank blog post every year, and Dan’s old students are scattered across myriad regions and professions and grad schools, most of us out of touch with each other—all these things being inevitable, in the end.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
R. Gatwood is the emergent consciousness of a spectacularly inefficient library shelving system.
