Making Everything Clear
Carlos Baker is the author of three novels, a collection of poems, and now this collection of stories, but he is far better known as the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton and as the author of Hemingway: The Writer as Artist and Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. Another Dartmouth-linked writer once remarked that his object in living was to unite his avocation and his vocation as his two eyes made one in sight; but someone who is a writer and also a teacher, critic, and scholar is doomed to being wall-eyed.
A writer addresses himself to the complexity of existence, and he attempts to outsmart the limitations of language, plot, character, and setting in order to evoke a piece of that complexity. He is concerned not to be clear but to be inelusive. Teachers, critics, and scholars have quite different fish to fry. Where the writer addresses himself to his equals, the teacher addresses people who need help; his concern is to explicate and clarify the writer's inclusiveness. The teacher unfolds the writer's complex cabbages; he shines the light of reason into his moleholes; he replays his chords note by note. It is a tough habit to break when the teacher turns writer.
In this collection's title story Baker's narrator recalls various mundane and disconnected incidents. But the story ends,
All the dogs in that other town were following Ben Blue with the parings in his pocket and all the girls were following Phil Paradis with his rabbit's foot, and down here all the people in cars were heading for the Oyster House with the secret formula stews. Talismans, he thought. Could you make something of that?
Yes, and Baker did. Then, in that paragraph, he made everything intelligible, bringing the meaningful details together and explicitly labeling them. There's a sea serpent in the collection too, and a ghost; but everything is clear. Baker is a fine teacher.
THE TALISMANSAND OTHER STORIESBy Carlos Baker '32Scribner's, 1976. 183 pp. $7.95
Professor of English at the University ofConnecticut, Mr. O'Hara frequently reviewsbooks for this and other journals.
