Final Fridays by John Barth Page A

well—when you’re young, you can full-time it on several fronts at once. Then my children grew up and (just as my late friend and I had foretold) my academic workload eased off, so that for several years I taught only one semester out of two, and for a few years after that only one graduate-level seminar every second semester. More lately, for the first time since kindergarten I’ve been out of the classroom altogether. To my total unsurprise, in these progressively time-richer circumstances my literary output has remained almost exactly what it was 40 years ago, when I was teaching four sections of freshman composition, six days a week, and helping to raise three small children, and moonlighting in a dance band on weekends for extra cash. Back then I stole time to write, and my larceny was sufficiently grand that I was able to go straight later on. Now that I have all the writing-time I want—in a day, in a week, in a year, if never in a lifetime—I find that although I enjoy generating sentences and stories as much as ever, I don’t spend any more time at it than I did when I wished that I had a lot more time to spend. One’s musely metabolism, evidently, is what it is almost regardless of circumstances, and so I infer that what used to delay the completion of my novels was not university teaching after all; it was (and it remains) living that part of life that doesn’t consist of writing fiction—the part of life without which, in my case anyhow, there wouldn’t be any fiction to write, even though that fiction seldom has to do directly with its author’s biographical experience.

    Does that, too, go without saying, I wonder? In any case, there it is: said.
    Â 
    SO MUCH FOR those profoundly routine questions, which I seem to find routinely profound. Of the non-routine sort I shall instance just one, and then ask myself one myself, and then we’re done. Now and then, in the post-reading or post-lectorial Q&A, someone will come up with something at least as perceptive, and on occasion as unsettling, as anything that my most attentive critics have laid on me. It was an anonymous member of some audience a quarter-century ago who in the Q&A observed that my books thus far (of which there were back then only six) tended to come in pairs, the second member of each pair a sort of complement or corrective to the first. Inasmuch as the questioner understood me to be one half of a pair of opposite-sex twins, she wondered how programmatic on my part might be this metaphor of more-or-less-paired books, and what I took to be its significance.
    Well, I was floored; I had never until that moment noticed what now seemed evident, even conspicuous—the more so since the theme of twinship itself comes up in a couple of those books. Moreover, although I’ve never regarded my twin sister and me as complements other than anatomically, and certainly not as reciprocal correctives, 11 I was so intrigued, even charmed by the unintended metaphor that I resolved perversely to defy it. And so I did in Book #7 (a monster novel called LETTERS ), to which the slender novel that followed it had only the most tenuous connection; and Book #9, a collection of essays, was surely no twin to either of those—so there. But then Book #10, I noticed after writing it, can fairly be regarded as dizygotic not to Book #9 but to Book #8, and Books #11 and #12 to each other,
and Book #13 (a second essay-collection) to the aforementioned Book #9, and Book #14 (a story-series) as trizygotic to Book #5 on the one hand and to Book #15 (another story-series, currently in progress) on the other, and so it would appear that only that gargantuan Mittelpunkt , Book #7, remains (so far) untwinned—although, come to think of it, it contains within its intrications sequels to all six of its predecessors....
    Make of all this, too, what you will; I myself have come to shrug my shoulders—first the left, and then,