Ancient History

and a gentle admonition

I was two years out of the Iowa Workshop, with only the thesis done (it was called A FORMER CATHOLIC, mostly because I knew it would cause my parents to read it, and that would be SOMEbody. Faculty were coasting that year at Iowa. I'd heard Jack Leggett The Director of the whole shebang say to a prospective faculty member, "It's an easy gig, really." And when I'd asked him to write me a recommendation he had said "You write it and I'll sign it." (I was tempted to write NOT SINCE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND JESUS, but didn't; my pal Richard McCann offered to do it, and did.)
My father did read the thesis and I overheard him telling my grandmother not to, because it was full of bad language and mental illness. Well, she was devout. And one of the stories was about a suicide and another was about a priest who develops a kleptomania about women's undergarments. I never used any of it. Now, I consider that it was apprentice work.
So, two years after graduating from Iowa with my MFA, I was an adjunct at three different colleges—composition 101 and 102, and surveys of literature, a total of eight courses a week: 3 at George Mason University, 3 at Northern Virginia Community college and 2 at George Washington University. Nights, after an evening class at whichever campus, I would take a couple of hours working on a novel (first novel), and until early morning hours at home and all weekends I was frantically writing stories at the rate of two or three a week and sending them out, because I had been told that if I could publish one in a national magazine (or a 'slicky’ as one prof called it back then: meaning The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers et al) I could be hired as an assistant professor.

There were only 21 writing programs in the country back then (there are upwards of 400 now) and Iowa was the most famous, but even with an MFA from Iowa, you could not be hired full time unless you had a PHD in some aspect of the study of literature; if you said you were a writer, even with an MFA, you needed national publication--the PHD, ladies and gentlemen, was the minimum requirement at all the universities. (Sometime I'll write about the struggle to get the universities to accept the MFA as a terminal degree, and the exponential—healthy development for the culture!—proliferation of the Writing Programs, mostly through the continuing and growing influence of AWP, which was created by my old dear friends Verlin (RV) Cassill and George Garrett, one summer evening over drinks in Cassill's basement, in 1970 or so.)

Moreover, along with teaching all those courses I was working odd jobs, whatever I could find: I was with Poets in the Schools, where, as ‘the poet man,’ I would visit elementary school class rooms and give poetry writing excersizes to the fourth and fifth graders. I had a job with Fairfax County Recreation, where I wore a yellow badge with the words in red Hi! I’m Richard Bausch! And I’d open a high school gym and then a closet full of basketballs, for people coming to play, and I’d sit on the bottom bleacher seat reading while the pickup games and shoot arounds went on (and then I would spend an hour by myself after it was closing time, shooting baskets). I delivered phone books. I had a job writing Living History scenes for the Bicentennial about life on the C&O Canal (and, as if assigned to a circle in Dante's Hell, I had to ACT these dreadful scenes I’d produced: 'Plenny o' supplies laid by anyhow, eh, Lucy?' I ended up creating another character, a brother to the main dud--that's dud, not dude--and I wrote a couple of songs for him to sing, so that I could fill a good bit of the scene with that, me playing guitar and singing the songs as the brother.)
It was a time of controlled desperation, to say the very least. I was a husband and father, with two children--a toddler and an infant--and we were living in a run down old hunter's cabin with a landlord who'd say "I'll get right to'er," about the furnace and we ended up breaking furniture apart to burn in the fireplace while we waited for him to "get to'er.'"

Anyway, at Northern Virginia Community College one mid-January night, late, after teaching all day and then working on a first novel (it was called THE SINGERS, and I never used any of it), I was walking down the hallway to the cafeteria to pour a coffee for myself, and a colleague came by, walking in the other direction. We spoke a little about the day, the cold, our classes, and then he said, "How's that little novel you've been working on?"
It stung me. So much so that I could only mumble that it was 'coming along,' or some such vague, hangdog expression. He smiled, as if there was no need for any further explanation or comment, and walked away.
Later, two hours later, after midnight, I went out into the cold, into that frozen, moonless winter night under the parking lot lamps, my car the only one there, making its small shadow of itself, and I looked up at the stars as I walked over, thinking of a William Carlos Williams poem about the smallest stars lending their light, and through the vanishing trace of my own breathing, I said, aloud, not shouting, but as if simply speaking to the night itself: "I AM a writer, God damn it. I AM. And one day you bastards are gonna know it."
A month later, when I was being told by one of the full professors at George Mason, that I would not be seriously considered for the assistant professor slot in creative writing, and that the top candidate had “very encouraging rejections from the slickies.” I said to him, “Well, let me tell you something, man, I’m gonna be IN the slickies, ALL of them. It’s only a matter of time.”
Pure bravado. Desperate utterances, almost at the level of a child sticking out his chest. But there was a kind of stubborn determination in them too, and I've come to believe that they may have been among the important things that kept me going through what were going to be several very difficult years ahead.
When it came time to work, each night, I would pace, near sick with fear, before I'd sit down to try it, try putting something down, anything. I don't know why I was so nerve-wracked about it, now, when I think back on it all, since NOTHING in one day's work EVER comes remotely near to defining ANYTHING about what we're all trying to do.
So, here I'll say something about which we often need reminding: that the difficulties are no indication of anything AT ALL. It's hard. Naturally. It confuses. Naturally. You feel uninspired and flat. Of course. You look at a line and it starts to dissolve into all the other possibilities. And you get worried. What if it's like this tomorrow? And what if it is ALWAYS like this. And? And? And? THIS is what frightens us? The very territory? The deepest nature of the thing itself?
Of course it's terribly hard because it's coming into being and that's always difficult. Welcome to the territory. The province of creation. Who ever said it would be easy? We're taking the trouble and the repeated failings in order to make it LOOK easy, as if it had just been sighed out in a single casual breath.

So, I'm grateful for those little stinging remarks about the little novel. I've been saying to my students since then, "If you quit, you prove the naysayers to be right, you actually deed victory to all those who believe you're merely indulging in a pipe dream. Steady on, friends. The whole thing is a lovely adventure. Steady on.