Giving Teaching A Go Leslie Rice ----------------------------------- Homewood News and Information When the Writing Seminars landed Julian Barnes as a visiting professor for the current academic year, they had staged a marvelous coup. For years, university after university had tried to woo the famous British fiction writer with no success. For Hopkins, all it took to convince Barnes to visit was a simple phone call. "I've been interested in teaching and interested in spending a few months in the States," says Barnes. "Over the last few years, I've received a number of rather formal letters from universities. But I suppose I rather liked Johns Hopkins' approach the best. Last year, [Writing Seminars professor] Jean McGarry simply rang me up, we started chatting, and she asked me to come to Baltimore. I liked the informality of it." Barnes, one of England's most distinguished living novelists, is settled now in an airy West University Parkway apartment on loan from history professor Richard Goldthwaite, who is spending the year in Florence. And twice this week, Baltimore will get a chance to meet the author of Flaubert's Parrot, Before She Met Me and most recently, Letters From London. On Tuesday, Oct. 24, at 8 p.m. Barnes will give a reading in Mudd Hall Auditorium at Homewood sponsored by the Writing Seminars. On Thursday, Oct. 26, at 5:30 p.m., he will present the 1995 George B. Udvarhelyi Lecture in the Turner Auditorium on the East Baltimore campus. For the Udvarhelyi lecture, "Cigarettes, Syphilis and Genius," Barnes plans to debunk the popular notion that all truly great artists are at least a little bit deranged. "In this century, I think there has been a false approach to artistic pathology where neurosis is used as an explanation of genius," he says. "My view is that if in fact a sick or neurotic person succeeds, they succeed despite their neurosis rather than because of it." Barnes says he's attempting to soak in Baltimore culture. He has eaten crab cakes, traveled to the Chesapeake Bay and has even been to Camden Yards, twice. On one occasion, this very British citizen brought along Writing Seminars professor Mark Strand, who although having lived in Baltimore for more than a year, had never been to the ball park. Although enjoying the Baltimore scene, Barnes says he has no plans to set his next novel here. In fact, his current work-in-progress is set in England. "If anything the distance has given me a deeper perspective of my own country," Barnes says. "But I never start with setting, I never say 'I'm going to write the North Dakota novel.' " Location is, however, the common thread of his latest work, a collection of short stories, Cross Channel, which is scheduled to be published in England in January and in the United States in April. In the collection, all the stories are somehow related to France. In one, an 18th-century soldier of fortune finds himself in France, another is about a winegrower, another about a railway builder. This fascination with France is not at all uncommon in Barnes' works. In fact, in his seven novels nearly all his main characters visit France. "France is the country of my heart," he explains. "England is the country of my birth." Although Writing Seminars chairman John Irwin says his department would love Barnes to stay on longer than a year, Barnes has no such plans. "Next year I turn 50, and I've decided to spend the entire year doing only the things I love doing, which is writing, of course, and traveling," he says. "I'm rather stretching the normal birthday celebration into a yearlong affair. Of course I rather tentatively told a friend about the plan recently, and she wanted to know how exactly it would be different from any other year." In the not-quite two months since Barnes began teaching at Homewood, his easy charm and intelligent criticism have made him a favorite among students. "That has been a delightful surprise," says Irwin. "We knew that Julian Barnes is one of the best writers around. His writing is funny, smart and elegant. But we didn't know what he'd be like with students. The fact is, he couldn't be a nicer person, and the students like him very much. They tell me he's a wonderful teacher." Hopkins senior Mrinalini Kamath has been reading Barnes' books since she was introduced to Flaubert's Parrot in a freshman writing class. When she learned Barnes was coming to Hopkins, she was among the many Writing Seminars students who clamored to get in his class. "I really admire his writing," Kamath says. "I really think I could learn a lot from him. His criticism is very good. Also, he has a very witty and dry sense of humor which makes class fun." In Barnes' class, one student's work is critiqued and analyzed for an entire period. That student is not allowed to say a word until the end of class. "It helps students learn how easy it is to misread your work, how one word can throw an entire paragraph," says Barnes. "And it forces you to attempt to understand why five out of 10 people believe your egg cup is a symbol when in fact it's just an egg cup. "On the first day of class, I told my students that when criticizing, be precise, sympathetic and humane," he added. "So far, no blood has been shed. But then it's still early on in the semester." SIDEBAR ----------------------------------------------------------------- Literarily speaking, it's turning out to be a great year for Hopkins. Writing Seminars professor Stephen Dixon learned last week that his novel Interstate is one of five finalists in the fiction category of the National Book Awards, often called the "Oscars" of the literary world. The novel tells of one man's struggle to fathom and deal with the loss of his young daughter who is killed in a senseless drive-by shooting. Dixon's previous book, Frog, was a National Book Award finalist in 1991. Madison Smartt Bell, who left the department just last year after six years as a visiting professor, was also nominated in the fiction category for All Souls' Rising, a historical novel set in Haiti. And yet another writer with a close Hopkins connection received an NBA nomination--86-year-old poet Josephine Jacobson for her latest collection, In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems. Jacobson was a close friend of Writing Seminars founder Elliott Coleman and was awarded an honorary degree from Hopkins in 1993. "It's very rare to have three people with such close links to one university nominated for National Book Awards," said Writing Seminars chair John Irwin. "But when you think about how many extremely talented individuals are part of the Writing Seminars, I suppose it's not all that extraordinary." -----------------------------------------------------------------