The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “Cease!” commanded Number One, and fetched the table such a clap of the cane that Ebenezer’s notebook jumped. “I’God, Captain Slye, did e’er ye hear such claptrap?”

  “Nor such impertinence, Captain Scurry,” answered the other, “that not content to meddle in our business, the knave would have’t all his own.”

  “Nay, gentlemen, you mistake me!” Ebenezer cried.

  “Prithee close thy mouth and sit,” said Captain Scurry, pointing with his stick to the poet’s chair. Then to his companion he declared, “Ye must excuse me while I put a ball ’twixt this ninny’s eyes.”

  “ ’Twill be my pleasure,” the other replied, “and then we’ll drink in peace.” Both pistols now were aimed at Ebenezer.

  “No guest of mine shall stoop to such trifles,” said the first. Ebenezer, standing behind his chair, looked again to the door through which Burlingame and the serving maid had passed.

  “My sentiments exactly,” growled Captain Slye, “but pray recall who’s host, or ’tis two pistols I shall fire.”

  “ ’Fore God, good Captains!” Ebenezer croaked, but legs and sphincters both betrayed him; unable to say on, he sank with wondrous odor to his knees and buried his face in the seat of his chair. At that instant the rear door opened.

  “Stay, here’s the barmaid!” cried Captain Scurry. “Fetch me two beers, lass, while I jettison this stinkard!”

  “Beers be damned!” roared Captain Slye, who had a view of the entrance door. “Yonder goes our Laureate, I swear, along the street!”

  “I’faith let’s at him, then,” said the other, “ere he once more slips his mooring!”

  Turning their backs on beer and poet alike they hurried out to the street, from which came shortly the sound of pistols and a retreating clamor of curses. But Ebenezer heard them not, for at mention of their quarry he swooned upon the tavern flags.

  9

  Further Sea-Poetry, Composed in the Stables of the King o’ the Seas

  WHEN HE REGAINED his senses Ebenezer found himself in the stables of the King o’ the Seas, lying in the hay; his friend Burlingame, dressed in Scotch cloth, squatted at his hip and fanned his face with the double-entry ledger.

  “I was obliged to fetch you outside,” said Henry with a smile, “else you’d have driven away the clients.”

  “A pox upon the clients!” the poet said weakly. “ ’Twas a pair of their clients brought me to this pass!”

  “Are you your own man now, or shall I fan thee farther?”

  “No farther, prithee, at least from where you stand, or I’ll succumb entirely.” He moved to sit up, made a sour face, and lay back with a sigh.

  “The fault is mine, Eben; had I known aught of your urgency I’d not have lingered such a time in yonder privy. How is’t you did not use this hay instead? ’Tis no mean second.”

  “I cannot make light of’t,” Ebenezer declared. “The while you sported with the wench, two pirate captains had like to put a ball betwixt my eyes, for no more cause than that I ventured to settle their quarrel!”

  “Pirate captains!”

  “Aye. I’m certain of’t,” Ebenezer insisted. “I’ve read enough in Esquemeling to know a pirate when I see one: ferocious fellows as like as twins; they were dressed all in black, with black beards and walking sticks.”

  “Why did you not declare your name and office?” Burlingame asked. “ ’Tis not likely they’d dare molest you then.”

  Ebenezer shook his head. “I thank Heav’n I did not, for else my life had ended on the spot. ’Twas the Laureate they sought Henry, to kill and murther him!”

  “Nay! But why?”

  “The Lord alone knows why; yet I owe my life solely to some poor wight, that walking past the window they took for me and gave him chase. Pray God they missed him and are gone for good!”

  “Belike they are,” Burlingame said. “Pirates, you say! Well, ’tis not impossible, after all—But say, thou’rt all beshit.”

  Ebenezer groaned. “Ignominy! How waddle to the wharf in this condition, to fetch clean breeches?”

  “Marry, I said naught o’ waddling, sir,” said Burlingame, in the tones of a country servant. “Only fetch off thy drawers and breeches now, that me little Dolly maught clean ’em out, and I shall bring ye fresh ’uns.”

  “Dolly?”

  “Aye, Joan Freckles yonder in the King o’ the Seas.”

  Ebenezer blushed. “And yet she is a woman, for all her harlotry, and I the Laureate of Maryland! I cannot have her hear of’t.”

  “Hear of’t!” Burlingame laughed. “You’ve near suffocated her already! Who was it found you on the floor, d’ye think, and helped me fetch you hither? Off with ’em now. Master Laureate, and spare me thy modesty. ’Twas a woman wiped thy bum at birth and another shall in dotage: what matter if one do’t between?” And Ebenezer having undone his buttons with reluctance, his friend made bold to give a mighty jerk, and the poet stood exposed.

  “La now,” chuckled Burlingame. “Thou’rt fairly made, if somewhat fouled.”

  “I die of shame and cannot even cover myself for filth,” the poet complained. “Do make haste, Henry, ere someone find me thus!”

  “I shall, for be’t man or maid you’d not stay virgin long, I swear, thou’rt that fetching.” He laughed again at Ebenezer’s misery and gathered up the soiled garments. “Adieu, now: thy servant will return anon, if the pirates do not get him. Make shift to clean yourself in the meantime.”

  “But prithee, how?”

  Burlingame shrugged. “Only look about, good sir. A clever man is never lost for long.” And off he went across the yard, calling for Dolly to come get his prize.

  Ebenezer at once looked about him for some means to remedy his unhappy condition. Straw he rejected at once, though there was enough and to spare of it in the stable: it could not even be clenched in the hand with comfort. Next he considered his fine holland handkerchief and remembered that it was in his breeches pocket.

  “ ’Tis as well,” he judged on second thought, “for it hath a murtherous row of great French buttons.”

  Nor could he sacrifice his coat, shirt, or stockings, for he lacked on the one hand clothes enough to throw away, and on the other courage enough to give the barmaid further laundry. “A clever man is never lost for long,” he repeated to himself, and regarding next the tail of a great bay gelding in a stall behind him, rejected it on the grounds that its altitude and position rendered it at once inaccessible and dangerous. “What doth this teach us,” he reflected with pursed lips, “if not that one man’s wit is poor indeed? Fools and wild beasts live by mother wit and learn from experience; the wise man learns from the wits and lives of others. Marry, is’t for naught that I spent two years at Cambridge, and three times two with Henry in my father’s summerhouse? If native wit can’t save me, then education shall!”

  Accordingly he searched his education for succor, beginning with his memory of history. “Why should men prize the records of the past,” he asked, “save as lessons for the present?” Yet though he was no stranger to Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Suetonius, Sallust, and other chroniclers ancient and modern, he could recall in them no precedent for his present plight, and thus no counsel, and had at length to give over the attempt. “ ’Tis clear,” he concluded, “that History teacheth not a man, but mankind; her muse’s pupil is the body politic or its leaders. Nay, more,” he reasoned further, shivering a bit in the breeze off the harbor, “the eyes of Clio are like the eyes of snakes, that can see naught but motion: she marks the rise and fall of nations, but of things immutable—eternal verities and timeless problems—she rightly takes no notice, for fear of poaching on Philosophy’s preserve.”

  Next, therefore, he summoned to mind as much as ever he could of Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the rest, not forgetting his Platonical professors and their one-time friend Descartes; but though they’d no end of interest in whether his plight was real or fancied, and whether it merited con
cern sub specie aeternitatis, and whether his future action with regard to it was already determined or entirely in his hands, yet none advanced specific counsel. “Can it be they all shat syllogisms, that have nor stench nor stain,” he wondered, “and naught besides? Or is’t that no fear travels past their Reason, to ruin their breeches withal?” The truth of the matter was, he decided, peering across the court in vain for Henry, that philosophy dealt with generalities, categories, and abstractions alone, like More’s eternal spissitude, and spoke of personal problems only insofar as they illustrated general ones; in any case, to the best of his recollection it held no answer for such homely, practical predicaments as his own.

  He did not even consider physics, astronomy, and the other areas of natural philosophy, for the same reason; nor did he crack his memory on the plastic arts, for he knew full well no Phidias or Michelangelo would deign to immortalize a state like his, whatever their attraction for human misery. No, he resolved at last, it was to literature he must turn for help, and should have sooner, for literature alone of all the arts and sciences took as her province the entire range of man’s experience and behavior—from cradle to grave and beyond, from emperor to hedge-whore, from the burning of cities to the breaking of wind—and human problems of every magnitude: in literature alone might one find catalogued with equal care the ancestors of Noah, the ships of the Achaians—

  “And the bum-swipes of Gargantua!” he exclaimed aloud. “How is’t I did not think of them till now?” He reviewed with joy that chapter out of Rabelais wherein the young Gargantua tries his hand, as it were, at sundry swabs and wipers—not in desperation, to be sure, but in a spirit of pure empiricism, to discover the noblest for good and all—and awards the prize at last to the neck of a live white goose; but hens and guineas though there were a-plenty in the yard around the stable, not a goose could Ebenezer spy. “Nor were’t fit,” he decided a moment later, somewhat crestfallen, “save in a comic or satiric book, to use a silly fowl so hardly, that anon must perish to please our bellies. Good Rabelais surely meant it as a jest.” In like manner, though with steadily mounting consternation, he considered what other parallels to his circumstances he could remember from what literature he had read, and rejected each in turn as inapplicable or irrelevant. Literature too, he concluded with heavy heart, availed him not, for though it afforded one a certain sophistication about life and a release from one’s single mortal destiny, it did not, except accidentally, afford solutions to practical problems. And after literature, what else remained?

  He recalled John McEvoy’s accusation that he knew nothing of the entire great real world and the actual people in it. What, in fact, he asked himself, would others do in his place, who did know the great real world? But of such knowledgeable folk he knew but two at all well—Burlingame and McEvoy—and it was unthinkable of either that they would ever be in his place. Yet knowledge of the world, he quite understood, went further than personal acquaintance: how fared the savage hordes and heathen peoples of the earth, who never saw a proper bum-swab? The Arabs of the desert, who had no forest leaves nor any paper? Surely they contrived a measure of cleanliness in some wise, else each perforce would live a hermit and the race die out in a single generation. But of all the customs and exotic practices of which he’d heard from Burlingame or read in his youthful books of voyages and travel, only one could he remember that was to the point: the peasant folk of India, Burlingame had once observed to him, ate with their right hands only, inasmuch as the left was customarily used for personal cleanliness.

  “ ’Tis no solution, but a mere postponement of my difficulties,” the poet sighed. “What hope hath he for other aid, whom wit and the world have both betrayed?”

  He started, and despite the discomfort of his position, glowed with pleasure when he recognized the couplet. “Whate’er my straits, I still am virgin and poet! What hope hath he… Would Heav’n I’d ink and quill, to pen him ere he cools!” He resolved in any case to dog-ear a leaf in his notebook as a reminder to set down the couplet later; it was not until the volume was spread open in his hands, and he was leafing through its empty pages, that he saw in it what none of his previous efforts had led him to.

  “A propitious omen, b’m’faith!” said he, not a little awed. He regretted having torn out in the London posthouse those sheets in the ledger on which Ben Bragg had kept his accounts, not only because his years with Peter Paggen had soured his taste for the world of debit and credit, but also because he remembered how scarce was paper in the provinces, and so was loath to waste a single sheet. Indeed, so very reluctant was he, for a moment he seriously considered tearing out instead what few pages he’d already rhymed on: his Hymn to Chastity, the little quatrain recalled to him by Burlingame, and his preliminary salute to the ship Poseidon. Only the utter impropriety, the virtual sacrilege of the deed, restrained his hand and led him at length to use two fresh and virgin sheets—and then two more—for the work, which, completed with no small labor, owing to the drying effect of the breeze, he turned into an allegory thus: the unused sheets were songs unborn, which yet had power, as it were in utero, to cleanse and ennoble him who would in time deliver them—in short, the story of his career to date. Or they were token of his double essence, called forth too late to prevent his shame but able still to cleanse the leavings of his fear. Or again—but his pleasant allegorizing was broken off by the appearance, from the rear of the King o’ the Seas, of befreckled Dolly, bringing his drawers and breeches out to dry. Despite his embarrassment he craned his head around the stable entrance and inquired after Burlingame, who had by this time been absent for nearly an hour; but the woman professed to know nothing of his whereabouts.

  “Yet ’twas but across the street he went!” Ebenezer protested.

  “I know naught of’t,” Dolly said stubbornly, and turned to go.

  “Wait!” the poet called.

  “Well?”

  He blushed. “ ’Tis something chill out here—might you fetch me a blanket from upstairs, or other covering, against my man’s return?”

  Dolly shook her head. “ ’Tis not a service of the house, sir, save to them as stop the night. Your man paid me a shilling for the breeches, but naught was said of blankets.”

  “Plague take thee!” Ebenezer cried, in his wrath almost forgetting to conceal himself. “Was Midas e’er so greedy as a woman? You’ll get thy filthy shilling anon, when my man appears!”

  “No penny, no paternoster,” the girl said pertly. “I have no warrant he’ll appear.”

  “Thy master shall hear of this impertinence!”

  She shrugged, Burlingame-like.

  “A toddy, then, i’God, or coffee, ere I take ill! ’Sheart, girl, I am—” He checked himself, remembering the pirate captains. “ ’Tis a gentleman that asks you, not a common sailor!”

  “Were’t King William himself he’d have not a sip on credit at the King o’ the Seas.”

  Ebenezer gave over the attempt. “If I must catch my death in this foul stable,” he sighed, “might you at least provide me ink and quill, or is that too no service of the house?”

  “Ink and quill are free for all to use,” Dolly allowed, and shortly brought them to the stable door.

  “Ye must use your own book to scribble in,” she declared. “Paper’s too dear to throw away.”

  “And I threatened you with your master! Marry, thou’rt his fortune!”

  Alone again, he set on the dog-eared page of his ledger book that aphoristic couplet which had so aided him, and would have tried his hand at further verses, but the discomfort of his situation made creation impossible. The passage of time alarmed him: the sun passed the meridian and began its fall toward the west; soon, surely, it would be time to board the shallop which was to ferry them to the Poseidon, and still there was no sign of Burlingame. The wind changed direction, blew more directly off the harbor and into the stable, and chilled the poet through. At length he was obliged to seek shelter in an empty stall nearby, where enough fres
h hay was piled to cover his legs and hips when he sat in it. Indeed, after his initial distaste he found himself warm and comfortable enough, if still a trifle apprehensive—as much for Burlingame’s welfare as for his own, for he readily imagined his friend’s having fallen afoul of the pirate captains. Resolving to cheer himself with happier thoughts (and at the same time fight against the drowsiness that his relative comfort induced at once) he turned again to that page in his notebook which bore the Poseidon quatrain. And for all he’d never yet laid eyes upon that vessel, after some deliberation he joined to the first quatrain a second, which called her frankly

  A noble Ship, from Deck to Peaks,

  Akin to those that Homers Greeks

  Sail’d east to Troy in Days of Yore,

  As we sail’d now to MARYLANDS Shore.

  From here it was small labor to extend the tribute to captain and crew as well, though in truth he’d met no seafaring men in his life save Burlingame and the fearsome pirate captains. Giving himself wholly to the muse, and rejecting quatrains for stanzas of a length befitting the epic, he wrote on:

  Our Captain, like a briny God,

  Beside the Helm did pace and plod,

  And shouted Orders at the Sky,

  Where doughty Seamen, Mast-top high,

  Unfurl’d and furl’d our mighty Sails,

  To catch the Winds but miss the Gales.

  O noble, salty Tritons Race,

  Who brave the wild Atlantics Face

  And reckless best both Wind and Tide:

  God bless thee, Lads, fair Albions Pride!

  In a kind of reverie he saw himself actually aboard the Poseidon, dry-breeched and warm, his gear safely stowed below. The sky was brilliant. A fresh wind from the east raised whitecaps in the sparkling ocean, threatened to lift his hat and the hats of the cordial gentlemen with whom he stood in converse on the poop, and fanned from red to yellow the coals of good tobacco in their pipes. With what grace did the crewmen race aloft to make sail! To what a chorus did the anchor rise dripping from the bottom of the sea and the mighty ship make way! The gentlemen held their hats, peered down at the wave of foam beneath the sprit and up at the sea birds circling off the yards, squinted their eyes against sun and spray, and laughed in awe at the scrambling sailors. Anon a steward from below politely made a sign, and all the gay company retired to dinner in the Captain’s quarters. Ebenezer sat at that worthy’s right, and no wit was sharper than his, nor any hunger. But what a feast was laid before them! Dipping his quill again, he wrote: