What Is What Was

What Is What Was, Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany," is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.

In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky peak, of James and Dante as travel writers, a Lucretian look at today's cosmology, American fiction in detail and depth, a "thought experiment" for Clarence Thomas, a salvation scheme for Ross Perot, a semi-confession of the writer.

The book contains but isn't philosophy, criticism, opinion, reportage, or autobiography (although the author says it is as much of this as he plans to write). There is a recurrent theme, the ways in which actuality is made and remade in description, argument and narration, fictional and nonfictional, but above all, What Is What Was is a provocative entertainment by a writer who, as Philip Roth once said, "knows as much as anyone writing American prose about family mischief, intellectual shenanigans, love blunders—and about writing American prose."

Richard Stern is the Helen Regenstein Emeritus Professor of English and of the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the author of nineteen words of fiction and nonfiction. His novels include A Father's Words and Golk, both published by the University of Chicago Press, and, most recently, Pacific Tremors.

Preface

I.

Others Seen through Me

With Auden

Remembering Pound

Ralph Ellison

Studs: WFMT, April 7, 1995

A Very Few Memories of Don Justice

The Venetian Sculptress

Ray West and the Iowa Writers' Workshop

My Ex, the Moral Philosopher

II.

Places

Where the Chips Fall

Wimbledon, 1992

James, the Traveler

Going and Coming: On Celati's Adventures in Africa

An Indiana Library

My Chicago

The Chicago Writer's City

Books and Chicago, Chicago and Books

A Glance at Bellow in Chicago, 1993

Chicago, in the Depths of Feeling

III.

The Is of Was

Over the Hill

On Atlas on Bellow

Bertrand Russell

Misunderstanding Carnap

W. C. Fields

Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

Jung

The Outsider Inside

Benjamin's Way

Almonds

IV.

Miscellaneous Commentaries and Opinions

Warriors of the Open, 1996

Tears, Idle Tears, I Now Know What They Mean

King of a Rainy Country

Logging Expiation

Montaigne in Illinois

Ozick on Kafka, Frank, and Ozick

Jane Jacobs's Ideas

Our Regenstein

Chipping at the Schools

From Van Meegeren to Van Blederen

Dark Energy, Dark Matter, and the Waves of Genesis

Eliminating the National Debt

His Good Name

Letter to the Editor, New York Times

To Go with an Old Necklace...

Statement for the Meeting of the University of Chicago Senate on April 29, 1986

A Few Words from Someone Who's Written a Few Too Many

V.

On Fiction

A Few Things American Fiction Says

Malamud's Stories

His Other Life

Austin Wright

Vidal in Conclusion

Updike's Brushstroke

Fictionally De-Cubaed

Rupert Thompson

Call It Recall

Killing Chic

VI.

On Friends, Here and Gone

For John Wallace

The Ones Who Do Things for Us (Alane Rollings)

Edward Levi

Arthur Heiserman

Imre Horner

Misremembering Montale

Words about Hugh

For Ernest Sirluck

For Leon Forrest

VII.

On Myself

An Old Writer Looks at Himself

Monologue

Acknowledgments