The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

by Denis Johnson

go sit before your desk without a pen, without paper, without words even. Reach into your heart and pull out your own Colonel Parker from inside you, open your jaws, gnash him down, let him be pulped in your guts and ejected as shit—that’s right, erupt!—and bring that to me smeared on a page!” And from the first word to the last of this monolog the young and talented Marcus Ahearn would have been staring at my face, his doll’s eyes shining, although at that moment, exercised as I was, I couldn’t have noticed. In all likelihood this was the day I slammed the classroom’s door behind me, sailed down the hall to the office of the Director of Columbia University’s Program in Creative Writing, a nice, nice man, and said to him, “Fuck you. And your program. And these students. It’s a crime to encourage them. I quit.” And

the others were congenital mediocrities, that our writing program amounted to an academic Ponzi scheme, a literary racket…After I ran out of words he cleared his throat, assured me he could appreciate the torsion and doubt I labored under, praised my candor, my valor, even, and got me to promise I wouldn’t leave these young people in the lurch but would finish out the semester, which consisted, after all, of only three more class meetings.