An excerpt from Afterword: Nine Summers at the Bennington Writing Workshops

Let me continue with a pair of scenes from the workshop years—one involving the naturalist and essayist Annie Dillard, the other the novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison. Both were visitors, not workshop staff, and both were animated personalities as well as major artists; they merit more than passing mention here. ​ The first arrived by plane on July 24, 1985. Annie had a home in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, where she now lives full-time. I had known her first husband, the novelist R.W. Dillard, and would later come to know and admire her last, the biographer Robert Richardson. But she was married then to Gary Clevidence, an anthropologist, and they had an infant daughter, Cody Rose. The drive from Wellfleet to Bennington is not a short one, and Gary—who had to be elsewhere—could provide no help with it, so Annie decided to fly. She commandeered a private plane to come to us with Rosie, and also bought—grand gesture!—a crate of lobsters packed in seaweed and, if memory serves, ears of corn.

​The writer stood at the height of recent fame: a fine-featured blonde who loved to dance and poured herself into a strapless blue dress in order to read to the large assembled crowd. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) had received the Pulitzer Prize; it would be the first of many ruminations on the nature of the universe and the place in it of Homo Sapiens, our species. Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) would follow in short order; she was planning to read passages from each. Our visitor knew an astonishing amount about rivers and rain and matters geological and how and why we are both prayerful and predatory creatures. Her prose is both spell-binding and well spelled.

But she was a new mother and unaccustomed to the role.An expert on cloud formations and cicada, she was, to put it mildly, neurasthenic as to Rosie: the pitfalls and pratfalls awaiting her girl. A bundle of nerves, Annie required reassurance: our dog was gentle with children, our cat would not be troublesome, our house had a fire alarm. We lived at most a quarter of a mile from Tishman Hall, the planned site of her reading, and would drive her to and back from it so she would be, for that hour, in easy reach of her child. She’d arrived with a portable crib.

​Francesca and Andrea, our daughters—then eleven and seven—were commandeered as babysitters. Annie delivered the lobsters and corn and her infant to our house, then nursed Rosie and put her to sleep. She changed into the shining tight-fitting gown referred to above—a cross between Helen Morgan and Marlene Dietrich who needed no accompanist or piano to perform. All this took time, and I was getting nervous about the announced reading schedule, so hurried her into the car.

​We were halfway up the hill to Tishman, not two minutes from our home. She paled and pounded the seat and pulled at my arm and told me to turn back.

​“What for?” I asked,

​“It’s important!” ​ “You’ve got your books, don’t you? We’re late.”

​“But your daughters!”

​“What about them?” asked Elena.

​“Do they know the Heimlich maneuver?”

​“I don’t think so. Rosie’s sleeping…”

​“What if she wakes up? And chokes?”​

​“She won’t,” I said.

​“But what if she does?”

“Not likely…” said Elena.

“But it could happen, couldn’t it?”

I made no answer.

“Turn back.”

“Why?”

“I have to teach Cesca the Heimlich maneuver!”

​We turned back, and she did. Both our daughters learned the procedure from the writer’s impassioned example, then convinced her they could manage it. We drove again to Tishman, where the reading began and ended to applause. Then we hurried back and cooked and ate the lobsters, while Rosie continued to sleep.

Ralph Ellison had been a trustee of Bennington College, a friend of Stanley Edgar Hyman’s, who had made him welcome in the early years. He knew the Malamuds also, and knew the campus well. Ralph and his wife Fanny drove from their nearby home in the Berkshires and arrived without parental anxiety but with familiar—almost familial—ease.

I had encountered him at trustee meetings and knew him a little and admired him a lot. Invisible Man (1952) stays central to our culture and is a seminal text. But by July 6, 1983, when he came to visit, the world was waiting rather more for the publication of his long anticipated new novel-in-progress, Juneteenth. He would die eleven years later, in 1994, and the unfinished fiction would not be finally published until 1999. It was from those pages he had agreed to read.

​We had a quick drink at our house, then drove—with the Ellisons and Malamuds—to a local restaurant for an early meal. Yoshi’s, on Rte. 9 outside of town, was, as the name suggests, Japanese in its cuisine and ambience, with curtained-off rooms where one sat on the floor. The private rooms had a carved-out space beneath low tables for customers who did not want to sit cross-legged and could let down their legs. Our daughters loved to hide there while still young enough to fit, but lately they had grown too large and were in any case not part of that evening’s party, so we six sat at table in the central dining room and the western mode.

​Ralph ordered a scotch, then a second, then third as the meal wore on. I myself drank saké and Elena and the Malamuds shared a bottle of white wine. I was impressed by Ellison’s capacity, as well as his conversational ease while he continued to drink. Our honored guest was affability itself, and he and his gregarious wife were relaxed: no pre-performance jitters or concern about the time. By the time we drove to Tishman Hall we were, again, some minutes late—though the tardiness had nothing to do with a pause for the Heimlich maneuver.

We entered to applause.

​The auditorium was full. The night was hot. There were young people from the summer writing program and middle-aged and older folk from Bennington come to hear our speaker. There were mosquitoes too. When Ellison began to read, you could hear a pin drop while the mosquitoes buzzed.

​His voice was low. I won’t say he mumbled exactly, but his subdued articulation made it hard to hear. He introduced the passage with a certain amount of improvisational verve, but once he started in to read he did so as though by rote. I wondered if the several drinks had taken their collective toll, or if he felt bone-tired, or simply had grown bored.

​Some writers read their work less well than it deserves. Others do so rather better than the prose or the poetry merits, and their performance on the stage improves upon the page. Rare is the writer, or so I believe, who reads the work without intervention, so the language announces itself and seems neither buffed up nor pale. Ralph Ellison belonged, alas, to this first category, and what he read was flat-out dull.

The first forty minutes felt long. There was palpable impatience if not boredom in the room, but the performer appeared not to notice or, if he noticed, care. His blazer was impeccable; his shirt bore no traces of sweat. At the time when most readings might end he paused to wipe his face and have a drink of water, and some in the audience fled.

​Then Ellison commenced a second unit of the book, and his energy increased. So did my interest. There were the beginnings of intonation in the dialogue and flair in the descriptive prose; this was the sort of thing we’d come for and even in the nighttime heat you felt cold command in the hall.

​But it was hot. And there were mosquitoes and the high school kids in ranked rows were coming up on curfew and, at the end of an hour, filed out. I thought to myself, well, they’ve listened to Ralph Ellison, and even if they won’t remember Juneteenth they’ll remember that they heard him read from it. This was not nothing, and though the reading was forgettable the occasion might mean much.

Then he introduced a third selection from a later chapter. The Malamuds departed; so did the majority of those who had come to applaud. We were well into the second hour of his performance, and most writers would have stopped a goodly while before. I don’t remember, honestly, what the following hour took as its topic, or which selections from his novel-in-progress he chose, but Ellison kicked into gear. From reverse he went to neutral, then into first, then second and third and then fourth. Next he shifted to high speed. It was—I’ve seen and heard this once or twice but never so compellingly—as though the speaker accessed his own inimitable voice and drew on a reserve of energy that had been missing before. He fairly sang the lyrics and made the word-jumble into verbal jazz; he shifted intonation with each character in the dialogues, he did a little stutter-step while sounding out the beat.

​We were enthralled. Very few of us remained in the hall, but those who stayed were putty in Ellison’s raised palm. By the time he completed his reading—two hours after it started—I knew I’d witnessed mastery: a man at the top of his game. When he started he was weary; when he finished he was jumping up and down. In my time I must have given a hundred and listened to a thousand readings, more or less. But I’ve never heard a better, or more memorable; this was the real thing.