Arts & Sciences

Baxter Hathaway, the founding father of Epoch, to whom these lines are intended to be a small tribute, happened to be also one of the finest teacher I've ever known; and in my last years as an undergraduate at Cornell I took every writing course he taught. To explain what makes a teacher a fine teacher is like explaining the details of a sunset. Baxter occasionally had me over to his study on Wyckoff Avenue to talk about my stories; and he spent more time with a student in conference than any student deserved. At that, conferences with Baxter could be excruciating trials of patience. Baxter sat there, leafed through your story, kept humming like a spinning-top or a dental drill, and then, after an eternity of this, he'd point his finger at a word and allow, "well, this doesn't really work"-and you knew to a T not only why the word didn't work but why the story didn't. Baxter would zero in on specifics- phrases, visual investiture, Elements of Style-the stuff writers need to learn and in a pinch can even be ta ught- instead of parading generalities, though occasionally he would come up with a refreshing heterodoxy: for example, we're so used to browbeating students into exorcising from their vocabulary every expendable modifier that it's a relief to hear Baxter's teacherly words to a classmate: "You've been taught all along to be economical in your writing; I'll teach you how not to be economical."

In class Baxter couldn't spend twenty minutes in silence and humming; but the classes, too, were doggedly low-key. Even so, in airing student manuscripts, Baxter invariably had the last word. I recall his auditioning one of my sto-ries-and the class had nothing good to say about it. Too much description. Not enough description. Why did I have a dog in the story? Didn't I get that story straight out of Dubliners? Baxter didn't answer the students' objections (which were asinine); instead he squirmed some, re-read a single exceedingly long sentence from the story, and said, "Well, I would have to say that anybody who can write a sentence like this" and his voice trailed off into the Empyrian. He anyhow started his sentences with some such cautionary "I would have to say" And if he tolerated lack of economy, he distin-guished between inflation and BS, which he called "cosmic talk"-a mantra I've long appropriated in desecrating student papers.

As I've suggested, Baxter, an infallible judge of style, was fairly sparse on substantive comments. If they were sparse, they were also absolutely on target. Let me foist my ego on you once more. In my junior year, Baxter ran a story of mine (my first and virtually last published fiction) in the second issue of Epoch. The thing was no more than an anecdote of war, five or six pages, very closely based on the experienced actuality. About a year after I was drafted, in the winter of '44, while we were cooling our heels in the Ardennes, it dawned on the army brass that I could speak German (my family had come over from Germany in 1940 and by the time I was drafted I still spoke the worst kind of Remedial English) and they transferred me from the rear end of a bazooka to interrogating German POWs. For weeks we sat on our butts, waiting for one to come along. Finally Battalion Headquarters got a phone call to say that Company K had just cap-tured a Kraut and they'd send him right down. Speechless excitement in th e officers' dugout. I don't think they'd ever seen a German in their lives except Erich von Stroheim and the heavy in Casablanca. The battalion CO staged a necessarily improvised dress-rehearsal with me: how do you say son-of-a-bitch in German; well, tell that Kraut that I'm whatever an s.o.b. is in German and that we'll shoot him if he doesn't answer our questions. The POW was brought in, flanked by two conceited sergeants with submachine guns: a runny-nosed 16-year-old thing of threads and patches. Strictly speaking, he hadn't been captured but lost his way and drifted into the American lines; and besides he wasn't German but Austrian. Wrenching disappointment among the brass. Within five minutes also enormous sympathy for this underfed waif and increasing exaspera-tion with my asking him anything. The Officer of Ammunition & Supplies brought him B-rations and a pair of boots; the Officer of Intelligence & Reconnaissance tried out his basic German on him. The thing ended with the Battalion CO having his pic ture taken with his arm around the Enemy before they shipped him off in a jeep to Regimental Headquarters. End of story. Baxter, as I said, published it, but afterwards he told me that I'd com-pletely missed out on the real core of the situation. What he meant was that I'd omitted the one feature which would have lifted the thing from an almost pointless anecdote to an adequate story: the perversity, or absurdity, inherent in my situation, in which a German soldier and a recent German ref. turned G.l. confront each other. That had never occurred to me. Despite my rotten English, I came on in the story as a fully accredited Yank and gave myself a completely neutral Anglophone name. Baxter was right, of course: it just hadn't occurred to me.

That about brings me up to date. Baxter cashed in his ticket to the stall of night after a bout of emphysema in March 1984; so we had him with us for nearly 40 years. His genius for discovering (or fostering) budding geniuses is, of course, on record in Epoch: largely writers born in the thirties, Philip Roth (1933), DeLillo ('36), Pynchon ('37), Joyce Carol Oates (38), writers then in their twenties, often their early twen-ties. By the time he died, he had published 11 books, ranging from a novel he'd written at27 to books on transformational syntax, Renaissance criticism, and stylistics; he had established, ex nihilio, one of the most durable programs in creative writing and the most durable and prestigious base within the department, gotten us three or four of the best poets and novelists in the country and founded a magazine that not only launched or all but launched most of the best-known American novelists but is now, with Michael Koch as its brilliantly savvy editor, among the most long-lived and widel y honored little magazines in the country-a little magazine whose only danger lies in becoming a big magazine if we don't watch out.

Edgar Rosenberg '49 is professor of English and comparative literature. Norton has just released his latest book, a critical edition ofDickens's Great Expectations. As this newsletter goes to press, we learn to our sorrow that Baxter's widow, Sherry, the virtual co-founder of Epoch (it was Sherry who gave Epoch its title) and for many years a mainstay of Ithaca House (the publishing and distribution center for modern books, especially by local authors), died in Ithaca on October 22. Sherry was 85.