SLSL Intro "Baxter Hathaway"

[Dave Monroe]

"I was taking a writing semester run by Baxter
Hathaway.  Having returned that semester after some
time off, he was an unknown quantity, and terrified
me.  The course had been going on for some time, and I
hadn't handed in a thing.  'Come on,' people advised
me, 'he's a nice guy.  Don't worry about it.'  Were
they kidding, or what?" (SL, "Intro," p. 17)

Edgar Rosenberg, "Baxter Hathaway: Founder of Epoch
and Cornell's Creative Writing Program," Cornell Arts
& Sciences Newsletter, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Fall 1998) ...

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.... 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" .... Baxter
would zero in on specifics ... 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.... 
And if he tolerated lack of economy, he distinguished
between inflation and BS, which he called "cosmic
talk"-a mantra I've long appropriated in desecrating
student papers. 

[...]

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 twenties. 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
... among the most long-lived and widely honored
little magazines in the country-a little magazine
whose only danger lies in becoming a big magazine if
we don't watch out. 

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/newsletr/fall98/baxter.htm

EPOCH was founded in 1947 by Baxter Hathaway, who had
been brought to Cornell the year before with a mandate
to establish a creative writing program at the
University.... In the 1950s and 1960s, EPOCH brought
to light the first published fiction of Thomas
Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Stanley Elkin, along with
early stories by Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates.

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/epoch.htm

http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March97/Epoch.html

Pynchon, Thomas.  "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna."
   Epoch, Vol. IX, No. 4 (Spring 1959): 195-213.

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_mortality.html

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/vienna.html

Just knocking off a few quick ones here, so ...

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