Martin Bauman: or, A Sure Thing - Softcover

David Leavitt's first collection of stories, Family Dancing, was published when he was just twenty-three and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize. The Lost Language of Cranes was made into a BBC film, and While England Sleeps was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. With Mark Mitchell, he coedited The Penguin Book of Short Stories, Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, and cowrote Italian Pleasures. Leavitt is a recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He divides his time between Italy and Florida.

Flint"s First Principle
I first met Stanley Flint in the winter of 1980, when I was nineteen.
He was between editorial greatnesses then, just fired by the famous
magazine but not yet hired by the famous publisher. To earn his keep
he traveled from university to university, offering his famous
Seminar on the Writing of Fiction, which took place one night a week
and lasted for four hours. Wild rumors circulated about this seminar.
It was said that at the beginning of the term he made his students
write down their deepest, darkest, dirtiest secrets and then read
them aloud one by one. It was said that he asked if they would be
willing to give up a limb in order to write a line as good as the
opening of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was said that
he carried a pistol and shot it off every time a student read what he
considered to be a formidable sentence.
As the former fiction editor of Broadway magazine, Flint was
already notorious in those days, though his notoriety was of an oddly
secondary variety, the result of his having published, during his
tenure there, the first stories of some writers who had gone on to
become great - so great, in fact, that their blazing aureoles shone
backwards, as it were, illuminating the face of Flint the Discoverer,
Flint the Seer, who had had the acumen not only to recognize genius
in its rawest form, but to pluck it from the heap, nurture it, refine
it. Soon he had such a reputation that it was claimed he needed only
to make a phone call and a writer would have a publishing contract,
just like that - until the editor in chief of Broadway, either from
jealousy or because Flint had had an affair with his secretary (it
depended who you asked), fired him. Much media uproar followed but no
job offers, and Flint went to work as a teacher, in which role he
cultivated an aura of mystic authority; for instance, he was supposed
to have gotten one of his students a six-figure advance on the basis
of a single paragraph, which was probably the real reason why three
hundred people had applied for the fifteen places in his class.
I remember vividly the room in which that seminar took place.
Located just off the informal library of one of the dormitories, it
was oblong and narrow, with wheezing radiators and shelves full of
books too obscure or valueless even to bother cataloguing. On the
chalkboard - left over from an Italian class that had met earlier in
the day - the conjugation of the verb mangiare was written in a tidy
hand. Because I had arrived twenty minutes early the first evening,
only one other person was seated at the battered oak table, a girl
with circular glasses and tight blond braids, her attention
scowlingly focused on some German worksheets. Not wanting to appear
idle in the presence of such industry, I busied myself arranging my
coat and scarves over the back of a chair (it was January), then,
pulling a book at random from one of the shelves, sat down and
started to read it. The book was called Dawn to Sunset, and it had
been published in 1904. On the title page its author had written the
following inscription: "Con molto affetto, from one who spent his
formative years "neath thy Ivied walls, James Egbert Hillman, "89.
Sorrento."
"Florence!" the first chapter began.
Flinging open the curtains, Dick Dandridge stared wonderingly at the
piazza in morning light. Such a buzz of activity! It was market day,
and at little stalls old women in black dresses were selling apples
and potatoes. Two horses with caps on their ears pulled a wine cart
past the picturesque medieval church. Italy, Dick thought,
remembering, for a moment, his mother weeping as his ship set sail
from New York, and then his adventures in London, in Paris, at the
customs house in Chiasso. He could not wait to get out into it, and
pulling his nightshirt over his head, he called out to his friend
Thornley, "Get up, slug-a-bed! We"ve Florence to see!"
A Hispanic girl with bangs and acne on her forehead now came
in and took a seat; then a pair of boys, in avid conversation; then a
boy with a withered arm whom I recognized from a class on modern
poetry the semester before. We saluted each other vaguely. The girl
with the braids and the big glasses put away her worksheets.
A conversation started. Over the voices of Dick Dandridge and
his friend Thornley, one of the pair of boys said, "I wasn"t on the
list, but I"m hoping he"ll let me in anyway." (At this last remark I
smiled privately. Though only a sophomore, I was on the list.) The
boy who had said this, I observed, was handsome, older than I, with
wire-rimmed spectacles and a two-days" growth of beard; it pleased me
to think that Stanley Flint had preferred my submission to his. And
meanwhile every seat but one had been taken; students were sitting on
the floor, sitting on their backpacks, leaning against the shelves.
Then Stanley Flint himself strode through the door, and all
conversation ceased. There was no mistaking him. Tall and limping,
with wild dark hair and a careful, gray-edged beard, he carried a
whiff of New York into the room, a scent of steam rising through
subway grates which made me shudder with longing. Bearing a wine-
colored leather briefcase with brass locks, dressed in a gray suit,
striped tie, and fawn trench coat that, as he sat down, he took off
and flung dramatically over the back of his chair, he seemed the
embodiment of all things remote and glamorous, an urban adulthood to
which I aspired but had not the slightest idea how to reach. Even his
polished cane, even his limp - like everything about Flint, its
origins were a source of speculation and wild stories - spoke to me
of worldliness and glamour and the illicit.
He did not greet us. Instead, opening his briefcase, he took
out a yellow legal pad, a red pencil, and a copy of the list of
students he had accepted for the seminar. "Which one of you is
Lopez?" he asked, scanning the list. "You?" (He was looking at the
girl with bangs and bad skin.)
"No, I"m Joyce Mittman," the girl said.
"Then you must be Lopez." (This time he addressed her
neighbor, another Hispanic girl, her hair cut short like a swimmer"s.)
"No, I"m Acosta," the neighbor said.
A low murmur of laughter now circulated - one in which
Flint"s raspy baritone did not take part. Looking up, he settled his
gaze on a tall, elegant young woman in a cowl-neck sweater who was
standing in the corner. She was the only other Hispanic in the room.
"Then you must be Lopez," he said triumphantly.
The girl did not smile. "Did you get my note?" she asked.
"Did you bring the story?" he answered.
She nodded.
"Over here, over here." Flint tapped the table.
Extracting some pages from her backpack, Lopez walked to the
front of the room and handed them over. Flint put on a pair of
tortoiseshell half-glasses. He read.
After less than half a minute, he put the pages down.
"No, no, I"m sorry," he said, giving them back to her. "This
is crap. You will never be a writer. Please leave."
"But you"ve only -"
"Please leave."
Lopez wheezed. A sort of rictus seemed to have seized her -
and not only her, but me, the other students, the room itself. In the
high tension of the moment, no one moved or made a sound, except for
Flint, who scribbled blithely on his legal pad. "Is something wrong?"
he asked.
The question broke the spell, unpalsied poor Lopez, who
stuffed the crumpled pages into her backpack and made for the door,
slamming it behind her as she went.
"In case you were wondering what happened," Flint said,
continuing to scribble, "Miss Lopez sent me a note requesting that I
look at her story tonight, as she had missed the submission deadline.
I agreed to do so. Unfortunately I did not think the story to be
worthy." Gazing up from his pad, he counted with his index
finger. "And now I see that there are twenty - twenty-two people in
this room. As I recall I selected only fifteen students for the
class. I would appreciate it if those of you whose names were not on
the list would please leave now, quietly, and without creating a
spectacle of the sort that we have just witnessed from Miss Lopez."
Several people bolted. Again Flint counted. Nineteen of us
remained.
"I should tell you now," Flint said, "that the stories you
submitted, to a one, were shit, though those written by the fifteen
of you whom I selected at least showed conviction - a wisp of truth
here or there. As for the rest, you are courageous to have stuck it
out, I"ll give you that, and as courage is the one virtue every
fiction writer must possess in spades, I shall let you stay - that
is, if you still feel inclined after I tell you what I expect of you."
Then he stood and began to speak. He spoke for two hours.
So began life with Stanley Flint. I"m sorry to say I don"t
remember much of what he said that evening, though I do retain a
general impression of being stirred, even awed; he was a marvelous
raconteur, and could keep us rapt all evening with his monologues,
which often ranged far afield from the topic at hand. Indeed, today I
regret that unlike the girl with the braids - her name, I soon
learned, was Baylor - I never took notes during class. Otherwise I"d
have before me a detailed record of what Flint had to tell us those
nights, rather than merely the memory of a vague effulgence out of
the haze of which an aphorism occasionally emerges, fresh and entire.
For instance: "The greatest sin you can commit as a writer is to put
yourself in a position of moral superiority to your characters."
(Though I have never ceased to trumpet this rule, I have often broken
it.) Or: "People forgive genius everything except success."
Or: "Remember that when you ask someone to read a story you"ve
written, you"re asking that person to give you a piece of his life.
Minutes - hours - of his life." (The gist of this idea was expressed
by "Flint"s first principle," of which Flint"s first principle was
exemplary: "Get on with it!")
It was all a great change from the only other writing class
I"d ever taken, a summer poetry workshop sponsored by the Seattle
junior college - a remnant of sixties idealism, all pine trees and
octagons - where my mother had once gone to hear lectures on Proust.
Of this workshop (the word in itself is revealing) I was the only
male member. Our teacher, a young woman whose watery blond hair
reached nearly to her knees, imparted to the proceedings the mildewy
perfume of group therapy, at once confessional and pious. Often class
was held outdoors, on a lawn spattered with pine needles, which is
perhaps why my memory has subsequently condensed that entire series
of afternoons into the singular image of one of my classmates, a
heavy girl with red spectacle-welts on her nose, standing before us
in the sunlight and reading a poem of which only one line -"the
yellow flows from me, a river"- remains, the words themselves flowing
from her sad mouth in a repetitive drone, like a river without source
or end.
Flint"s seminar, to say the least, had a different rhythm. It
worked like this: at the beginning of each session a student would be
asked to read aloud from his or her work. The student would then read
one sentence. If Flint liked the sentence, the student would be
allowed to continue; if he did not, however - and this was much more
common - the student would be cut off, shut up, sent to the corner. A
torrent of eloquence would follow, the ineffectuality of this slight
undergraduate effort providing an occasion for Flint to hold forth
dazzlingly, and about anything at all. His most common complaint was
that the sentence amounted to "baby talk" or "throat-clearing"- this
latter accusation almost invariably followed by the
invocation "Remember Flint"s first principle!" and from us, the
responsorial chant, "Get on with it!"
Soon we understood that Flint loathed "boyfriend stories,"
stories in which the protagonist was a writer, stories set in
restaurants or cocktail lounges. To cocktail lounges he showed a
particular aversion: any story set in a cocktail lounge would provoke
from him a wail of lamentation, delivered in a voice both stentorian
and grave, a sermon-izer"s voice, for the truth was, there was
something deeply ministerial about Flint. Meanwhile the student whose
timid words had provoked this outpouring would have no choice but to
sit and percolate, humiliated, occasionally letting out little gasps
of self-defense, which Flint would immediately quash. An atmosphere
of hyperventilation ensued. The windows steamed. Those Flint had
maligned stared at him, choking on the sentences in which, a moment
earlier, they had taken such pride, and which he was now shoving back
down their throats.
Yet when, on occasion, he did like a sentence - or even more
rarely, when he allowed a student to move from the first sentence to
the second, or from the second to the third - it was as if a window
had been thrown open, admitting a breath of air into the churning
humidity of that room, and yet a breath that would cool the face of
the chosen student only, bathing him or her in the delightful breeze
of laudation, while outside its influence the rest of us sweltered,
wiping our noses, mopping our brows. Sometimes he even let his
favorites - of whom Baylor, the girl with the braids, soon became the
exemplar - read a story all the way to the end. On these occasions
the extravagance of Flint"s praise more than matched the barbarity of
his deprecation. Not content merely to pay homage, he would seem
actually to bow down before the author, assuming the humble posture
of a supplicant. "I"m honored," he"d say, "I"m moved," while the
student in question glanced away, embarrassed. We all knew that his
adulation, at such moments, was over the top - a reflection, perhaps,
of the depth to which his passions ran, or else part of a strategy
intended to make us feel as if his approval were something on which
our very lives depended.
Still, he was nothing if not consistent. Whether delivering
tirade or paean, he never wavered from his literary ethos, at the
core of which lay the belief that all human experiences, no matter
how different they might seem on the surface, shared a common
grounding. This theme ("Flint"s second principle") he trumpeted at
every opportunity. To perceive something one had gone through as
particular or special, he kept telling us, was to commit not merely
an error, but a sin against art. On the other hand, by admitting the
commonality that binds us all, not only might we win from readers the
precious tremor of empathy that precedes faith, we might also near,
as we could from no other direction, that mercurial yet unwavering
goal: the truth.
In retrospect, I wonder at my ability not only to survive,
but to thrive under such circumstances. Twenty years later I"m more
sensitive rather than less, more cowardly, less likely to consider
the ordeal of Flint"s criticism worth enduring. I feel sympathetic
toward poor Lopez in a way that I didn"t then. Also, so many people
have studied with Flint since 1980 that by now his detractors far ...