The Friday Book

by John Barth

  Meanwhile, I never sail past such a modified day beacon without admiring both the osprey’s crazy nest with that wonderful piece of pipe sticking up beside it, through it, anyhow well above it, and the simple elegance of the Coast Guard’s solution to a seemingly irreconcilable dilemma—a solution which may have taken the human imagination decades to come up with, but which the osprey imagination couldn’t equal except perhaps in evolutionary time. In my innocence I can’t help wondering why Israelis and Arabs, for example, or Iraqis and Iranis, or (to take a really thorny example) modernists and antimodernists, don’t simply somehow raise the light a little higher above their conflicting and more or less legitimate claims. No doubt there are good reasons other than insufficient imagination—but the example of the day-beacon lights makes me wonder.

  Back now to the important subject of dippy verses as a legitimate contaminant of novels. My wife and I rounded one particular Chesapeake Bay day beacon last summer closely enough for us to observe, while Ma and Pa Osprey circled our mast, kvetching about invasion of privacy, that in addition to the usual sticks, straws, battery box, and very homely baby ospreys, their nest incorporated several odd lengths of fish-line, one with plastic float and hooks still attached, a strip of what looked like toilet paper, a ribbon of Dacron sailcloth (probably a furling gasket from somebody’s mainsail), a twisted chrome-plated piece of what was doubtless Detroit automobile trim, and other, less recognizable odds and ends. It had also become a sort of polyglot condominium, in whose lower reaches noncompeting species such as house sparrows and beach swallows had built their own small nests, while over all rose the beacon on its pipe—and I thought about the Novel.

  I wish some book reviewers, too, would raise their lights a bit. Verses, I repeat, even dippy ones—perhaps especially dippy ones—have an ancient and honorable place in booklength works of prose fiction. I shall not presume to judge the dippiness of, e.g., Lisa Erdman’s long poem which comprises the “Don Giovanni” section of D. M. Thomas’s novel The White Hotel, or Warren Penfield’s long poem “Loon Lake” in E. L. Doctorow’s novel of the same title, or John Shade’s 555-line poem which Charles Kinbote annotates to make Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, or even Stephen Dedalus’s villanelle composed in the closing chapter of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If you happen to enjoy those poems straight, on their own merits—as I rather do—the novelist is ahead of the game (Doctorow’s “Loon Lake” poem appeared in the Kenyan Review, over Doctorow’s name, before the novel was published). But as a rule you won’t find such poems-within-novels excerpted for separate publication or included in serious anthologies of poetry: Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” etc. are wonderful exceptions to this general rule. If on the other hand you find such poems as those just mentioned less than immortal as poems in their own right, all the way back to Rabelais’s avant-garde pattern-poem “Ode to a Bottle” in Gargantua and Pantagruel —even if you find some of them a touch dippy—the novelist’s tracks are covered. For a poem incorporated into the text of a novel—or a page of musical score so incorporated, or a play, a line drawing, a photograph, even a political or philosophical idea—is no longer its innocent existential self, any more than that bit of fishline worked into that osprey’s nest is still a line for catching fish. Now: If such a line should happen also to dangle accidentally into the water at flood tide, say, and accidentally catch fish for the ospreys to eat, we are permitted to be charmed by that coincidence; but if it doesn’t, we shall not therefore call it a dippy piece of fishline.

  No need to belabor this simple point, except to say that unlike day beacons and osprey nests, which can be said each to have a single “true” function and other accidental ones (such as serving as symbols in a lecture on the novel), a novel may be an osprey-nest of intentions as well as of materials. We know that certain novelists take their political, social, philosophical, even mystical-religious ideas quite as seriously as they take their literary ideas, and may even regard their novels primarily as launching platforms for those ideas, the way the osprey regards the day beacon as a launching platform for fledgling ospreys. To such novelists—whose ranks include not only mediocrities and cranks but many great artists as well, from Charles Dickens to Gabriel García Márquez—I think we may say, “Go to it—so long as you don’t obscure the light.” Which is to say, so long as we are permitted to admire your work for other reasons.

  Back to dippy verses. My own mentor in that art, as in some others, is Scheherazade. The 1001 Nights, in Richard Burton’s ten-volume 1885 edition, comprises, in addition to the great primary frametale of Scheherazade and King Shahryar, 169 secondary tales, by my count, told by Scheherazade to the King (plus one told to her by her father the Grand Vizier), 87 third-level tales told by the characters in Scheherazade’s second-level tales, and 11 fourth-level tales told by the characters in those third-level tales told by the characters in the second-level tales told by Scheherazade, the heroine of the nameless author’s primary tale: some 268 tales in all. The work also includes, by Burton’s estimate, about 1,400 poems or parts of poems: approximately 10,000 lines of verse in all, very many of which—in translation, at least, and across the centuries and cultures—strike this admiring reader as fairly dippy. But I couldn’t care less, and I can’t imagine that magnificent catch-all work without those bright bits of bunting worked into its construction. King Shahryar himself, at the end of those 1001 nights, describes Scheherazade’s fiction as consisting of “proverbs and parables, chronicles and pleasantries, quips and jests, stories and anecdotes, dialogues and histories and elegies and other verses…” In short, the works. And it works.

  As for dippy verses in my own fiction: I’m pleased to find that I can virtually review my life’s work under that aspect, and now I virtually shall. My first published novel, The Floating Opera, contains a few, in the showboat-show from which that novel takes its name. My original intention, in fact, had been to do the whole novel in the form and format of the turn-of-the-century American blackface minstrel show, but by the time this particular osprey’s nest was built, the show was reduced to part of one chapter and the poetry abridged to a single quatrain in the show, spoken by Mister Bones to Mister Tambo. Never mind that quatrain: It’s apprentice dippy; mere fledgling dippy.

  Two novels later, in The Sot-Weed Factor, I was able to spread my wings much farther, dippy-versewise, since that novel’s hero is a real-life Colonial American poet, Ebenezer Cooke of Maryland, whose real-life poem, so to speak—“The Sot-Weed Factor”—is the armature of my novel. Cooke was one of our earliest American poets and would be one of our dippiest were it not that his medium is satire. Indeed, I believe him to have been the first American satirist. He was an Augustan poet much influenced by Samuel Butler’s Hudibras; his characteristic vehicle is Butler’s mock-heroic couplet. E.g., from Cooke’s original “Sot-Weed Factor” of 1708:

  The Indians call their wat’ry Wagon

  Canoe: a Vessel none can brag on.

  Pretty dippy. Or the luckless tobacco-dealer’s closing malediction upon the province of Maryland, which has used him so ill:

  Embarqu’d and waiting for a Wind,

  I leave this dreadful Curse behind.

  May Canniballs transported o’er the Sea

  Prey on these Slaves, as they have done on me;

  May never Merchant’s trading Sails explore

  This cruel, this Inhospitable Shoar;

  But left abandon’d by the World to starve,

  May they sustain the fate they well deserve:

  May they turn Salvage, or as Indians wild,

  From Trade, Converse, and Happiness exil’d;

  Recreant to Heaven, may they adore the Sun,

  And into Pagan Superstitions run

  For Vengeance ripe—

  May Wrath Divine then lay these Regions wast

  Where no Man’s Faithful, nor a Woman Chast!

  The hudibrastic couplet, like Herpes simplex, is a contagion m
ore easily caught than cured. It was my pleasure to compose a great many hudibrastic couplets for my fictionalized Ebenezer Cooke, of which two brief specimens, the first and the last, will serve here. The first is from early in the novel, when, as the opening paragraph declares:

  In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping point.

  These particular dippy verses Cooke writes at Magdalene College, Cambridge, after an undergraduate lecture on philosophical materialism. He leaves the lecture hall, we’re told, with no more in his notebook than:

  Old Plato saw both Mind and Matter;

  Thomas Hobbes, naught but the latter.

  Now poor Tom’s Soul doth fry in Hell:

  Shrugs GOD, “ ’Tis immaterial.”

  In the course of the story Cooke perpetrates many another hudibrastic, for which I am responsible—on love, innocence, sea-voyaging, the fall from innocence—as well as the rough draft of “The Sot-Weed Factor” poem itself. And since no one knows when the historical Ebenezer Cooke died or where he’s buried, it was my privilege to close the novel with a dippy epitaph, which I have the disillusioned old poet compose for himself:

  Here moulds a posing, foppish Actor,

  Author of The Sot-Weed Factor,

  Falsely prais’d. Take Heed, who sees this

  Epitaph; look ye to Jesus!

  Labour not for Earthly Glory:

  Fame’s a fickle Slut, and whory.

  From thy Fancy’s chast Couch drive her:

  He’s a Fool who’ll strive to swive her!

  E.C., Gent, Pt & Lt of Md

  Well. Since art is long—some of my art particularly—and life is short (as Horace remarks in one of his verses), I shall spare you my dippy-verse satire of Sophocles in Giles Goat-Boy. Also the dippy effusions of my stranded, nameless Homeric bard in Lost in the Funhouse (in the story “Anonymiad”), who is reduced to making love to empty wine-jugs and inventing alternative endings to the Trojan War, which he writes on goatskins and publishes by floating them off in the empty amphorae from his desert island. Oh well, I will read you one dippy lyric of his; it’s called “The Minstrel’s Last Lay,” and it’s written in extremis—a favorite verse-form of dippy poets. First he invokes his muse:

  Twice-handled goddess! Sing through me the boy

  Whom Agamemnon didn’t take to Troy,

  But left behind to see his wife stayed chaste.

  Tell, Muse, how Clytemnestra maced

  Her warden into song, made vain his heart

  With vision of renown; musick the art

  Wherewith was worked self-ruin by a youth

  Who’d sought in his own art some music truth

  About the world and life, of which he knew

  Nothing. Tell how ardent his wish grew

  To autograph the future, wherefore he

  Let sly Aegisthus ship him off to see

  The Wide Real World. Sing of the guile

  That fetched yours truly to a nameless isle,

  By gods, men, and history forgot,

  To sing his sorry self.

  And die. And rot. And feed his silly carcass to the birds.

  But not before he’d penned a few last words,

  inspired by the dregs and lees of the muse herself, at whom, Zeus willing, he’ll have a final go before he corks her for good and casts her adrift, vessel of his hopeless hope. The Minstrel’s Last Lay.

  Once upon a time

  I composed in witty rhyme

  And poured libations to the muse Erato.

  Merope would croon,

  “Minstrel mine, a lay! A tune!”

  “From bed to verse,” I’d answer; “that’s my motto.”

  Stranded by my foes,

  Nowadays I write in prose,

  Forsaking measure, rhyme, and honeyed diction;

  Amphora’s my muse:

  When I finish off the booze,

  I hump the jug and fill her up with fiction.

  You shall likewise be spared the occasional verses floating through the ample waters of the novel LETTERS, some of them allegedly composed by a contemporary lineal descendant of Maryland’s original Poet Laureate, Ebenezer Cooke. Instead, I shall now end my lecture twice: first with the ending of Sabbatical: A Romance, which closes as it opened, with you-know-what. The good ship Pokey, Wye I., has come to anchor behind Cacaway, an uninhabited island off Chesapeake Bay. Susan and Fenwick have not resolved all the problems and mysteries that beset their sabbatical voyage; almost certainly they will not have children of their own. But they have decided to write their story, the story of their literal and figurative voyage. (The text throughout, I ought to explain, has been appropriately star-spangled with footnotes—Susan being a working academic and Fenwick the descendant of F. S. Key—and the couple will append their names to its bottom line in a final such note.) Susan says:

  If that’s going to be our story, then let’s begin it at the end and end at the beginning, so we can go on forever. Begin with our living happily ever after.

  Fenwick says he doesn’t quite get it and then cries I get it! Oh Susan!

  Yet we both know that not even a story is ever after. Here come more storms toward Cacaway, and we’ve yet to retrieve that dinghy. No matter, there’s light left. Happily after, Susan prompts, unfastening. Come on. Right readily her grateful mate complies; we commence as we would conclude, that they lived

  Happily after, to the end

  Of Fenwick and Susie…§

  Finally, as a kind of footnote to that footnote, I shall read you the opening of my work in progress. A sort of opposite-sex twin to Sabbatical: A Romance, this novel, too, involves a couple of Chesapeake sailors: a man rather younger than Fenwick Turner, named Peter Sagamore; a woman somewhat older than Susan Seckler, named Katherine Sherritt. But their situation, as shall be seen, is rather the reverse of Fenwick’s and Susan’s. If I am spared to write it, the book will be called The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. It will be divided into two parts, the first called “Our Story,” the second called “Our Stories.” And Part I, “Our Story,” will begin with the following dippy verses, after its opening subtitle. The subtitle is:

  KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE,

  THIRTY-NINE YEARS OLD AND NINE MONTHS PREGNANT,

  BECALMED IN OUR ENGINELESS SMALL SAILBOAT

  AT THE END OF A STICKY JUNE CHESAPEAKE AFTERNOON

  AMID EVERY SIGN OF THUNDERSTORMS APPROACHING FROM ACROSS

  THE BAY,

  AND SPEAKING AS SHE SOMETIMES DOES IN VERSE,

  SETS HER HUSBAND A TASK.

  The dippy verses are these:

  Tell me a story of women and men

  Like us: like us in love for ten

  Years, lovers for seven, spouses

  Two, or two point five. Their house’s

  Increase is the tale I wish you’d tell.

  Why did that perfectly happy pair,

  Like us, decide this late to bear

  A child? Why toil so to conceive

  One (or more), when they both believe

  The world’s aboard a handbasket bound for hell?

  Well?

  Sentimentality, was it? A yen

  Like ours to be one person, blend

  Their flesh forever, so to speak—

  Although the world could end next week

  And that dear incarnation be H-bomb-fried?

  Maybe they thought that by joining their

  (Like our
) so different genes—her

  Blue-blooded, his blue-collared—they’d make

  A blue-eyed Wunderkind who’d take

  The end of civilization in his/her stride?

  What pride!

  Or maybe they weren’t thinking at all,

  But (unlike us) obeyed the call

  Of blind instinct and half-blind custom:

  “Reproduce your kind and trust ’em

  To fortune’s winds and tides, life’s warmth and frost!”?

  Perhaps they considered all the above

  (Like us, exactly)—instinct, love,

  The world’s decline from bad to worse

  In more respects than the reverse—

  And decided to pay, but not to count, the cost…

  Fingers crossed.

  Well:

  Tell me their story as if it weren’t ours,

  But like ours enough so that the Powers

  Which drive and steer good stories might

  Fetch them beyond our present plight,

  And navigate the tale itself to an ending more rich and strange than everyday realism ordinarily permits; a bottom line that will make art if not sense out of the predicament your sperm and my egg, with a lot of help from their producers, have got us into; in short, yet another rhyme as it were for cost to end this poem with, even if we have to abandon verse for prose or prose for verse to reach it: a rhyme less discouraging, more pregnant so to speak with hope, than lost.

  Okay?

  * I am delighted by the news (Friday, January 13, 1984) that my American publisher, Putnam’s, has just bought a 1176-page novel by an eighty-eight-year-old resident of a nursing home in Xenia, Ohio, who has spent the last half-century settling the narrative score with Sinclair Lewis for poor-mouthing the midwest in Babbitt and Main Street. “I wanted to do as artistic a piece as possible,” declares the author, Ms. Helen Santmyer of Hospitality Home East in Xenia. And I’ll bet she did, too.