They lied to you, he said to me once, they never told you how good you were. You need to send this to the New Yorker. I came to him Freshman year at Marlboro College and sat down in his office. The Ulysses seminar required instructor approval. I talked to him about Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and what it had ignited in me. I talked to him about wanting to read the best, most challenging novel ever written. I talked to him about wanting to write fiction that changed the game and needing to see how it was done. He was my faculty adviser and he trusted me. He was surprised I was a Freshman, surprised Id come from public school and told me that I was made of better stuff than people including the ones in my head let on. He could skeletonize a text like a school of pirahnas and he showed me how as we followed Bloom through Dublin. He taught a class called Limits of the Novel and though he, the Postmodernist and I, the mystic did not always see eye to eye, I respected the Hell out of him. By the end of Limits of the Novel, I had an idea my head that there were, in fact, none. That the novel was infinite and we were conduits for something big and unstoppable. He told me to submit to the New Yorker, he believed in my fiction that much. He told me I was better than everybody told me and I was better than I knew. I took this to heart because he was not a man who blew smoke up anyones ass. He was an agent of reason, and therefore, a thing of light. He told me I was good enough and that sticks with you. I told him I wanted to write moral fiction. He said I was too young and smart and talented to be moral and to go out and have some fun. He never got to see that I took his advice. Goodbye, Birje. You were great.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 06:04:34 +0000
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