The Floating Opera

by John Barth

  Well, perhaps not all, or at least perhaps not clearly. It doesn’t directly explain, for example, why I chose and choose to pay my bill daily, every morning, instead of weekly or seasonally. Don’t think, I beg you, that I fear not living to get my money’s worth if I pay too far ahead: lose money I might, but fear losing it, never. There’s nothing in me of Miss Holiday Hopkinson, my ninety-year-old neighbor and senior member of the D.E.C., who buys her one-a-day vitamin pills in the smallest bottles—for her, the real economy size—and sleeps fully dressed, her arms folded funereally upon her chest, so as to cause, by her dying, the least possible trouble for anybody. No, I pay my buck-fifty every morning to remind myself—should I ever forget!—that I’m renting another day from eternity, remitting the interest on borrowed time, leasing my bed on the chance I may live to sleep on it once more, for at least the beginning of another night. It helps me maintain a correct perspective, reminds me that long-range plans, even short-range plans, have, for me at least, no value.

  To be sure, one doesn’t want to live as though each day may be his last, when there is some chance that it may be only his next. One needs, even in my position, something to counter-balance the immediacy of a one-day-at-a-time existence, a life on the installment plan. Hence my Inquiry, properly to prepare even for the beginning of which, as I see it, would require more lifetimes than it takes a lazy Buddhist to attain Nirvana. My Inquiry is timeless, in effect; that is, I proceed at it as though I had eternity to inquire in. And, because processes persisted in long enough tend to become ends in themselves, it is enough for me to do an hour’s work, or two hours’ work, on my Inquiry every night after supper, to make me feel just a little bit outside of time and heartbeats.

  So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life.

  VI. maryland beaten biscuits

  Now you know my secret, or an important part of it. No one else—except Dr. Frisbee, I suppose—ever knew it, not even my excellent friend Harrison. Why should I have told him? I never told him I was a saint, and yet he became one himself soon enough afterwards. I never told him in so many words that I was a cynic, and yet he’s one today, as far as I know. If I had told him of my heart condition he’d only have tried to acquire one too, and I’ve no particular wish to make anyone unhappy. No, I long ago learned that one’s illnesses are both pleasanter and more useful if one keeps their exact nature to himself: one’s friends, uncertain as to the cause of one’s queer behavior and strange sufferings, impute to one a mysteriousness often convenient. Even Jane never suspected my ailing heart, and though she well knew—from how many painful nights!—that something was wrong with me, I never told her about my infected prostate, either. As a result, she often attributed to herself failures in our intercourse that were incontestably mine, and Jane—proud Jane—is never lovelier or more desirable than when contrite.

  Enough: I paid my hotel bill, then, and stepped onto High Street just as the clock on the People’s Trust building struck seven. Already the air was warm; it promised to be a blistering day, like the day before, when temperature and humidity both were in the nineties. Very few people were about yet, and only an occasional automobile wandered down the quiet expanse of the street. I crossed diagonally aganst the traffic—to the corner of Christ Episcopal Church, whose lovely stones were softly greened, and strolled from there down the left side of High Street toward Long Wharf, eating my breakfast as I walked.

  I recommend three Maryland beaten biscuits, with water, for your breakfast. They are hard as a haulseiner’s conscience and dry as a dredger’s tongue, and they sit for hours in your morning stomach like ballast on a tender ship’s keel. They cost little, are easily and crumblessly carried in your pockets, and if forgotten and gone stale, are neither harder nor less palatable than when fresh. What’s more, eaten first thing in the morning and followed by a cigar, they put a crabber-man’s thirst on you, such that all the water in a deep neap tide can’t quench—and none, I think, denies the charms of water on the bowels of morning? Beaten biscuits, friend: beaten with the back of an ax on a sawn stump behind the cookhouse; you really need a slave system, I suppose, to produce the best beaten biscuits, but there is a colored lady down by the creek, next door to the dredge builder’s… If, like a condemned man, I had been offered my choice from man’s cuisine for this my final earthly breakfast, I’d have chosen no more than what I had.

  Few things are stable in this world. Your morning stomach, reader, ballasted with three Maryland beaten biscuits, will be stable.

  High Street, where I walked, is like no other street in Cambridge, or on the peninsula. A wide, flat boulevard of a street, gently arched with edge-laid yellow brick, it runs its gracious best from Christ Church and the courthouse down to Long Wharf, the municipal park, two stately blocks away. One is tempted to describe it as lined with mansions, until one examines it in winter, when the leaves are down and the trees gaunt as gibbets. Mansions there are—two, three of them—but the majority of the homes are large and inelegant. What makes High Street lovely are the trees and the street itself. The trees are enormous: oaks and cottonwood poplars that rustle loftily above you like pennants atop mighty masts; that when leaved transform the shabbiest houses into mansions; that corrugate the concrete of the wide sidewalks with the idle flexing of their roots. An avenue of edge-laid yellow bricks is the only pavement worthy of such trees, and like them, it dignifies the things around it. Automobiles whisper over this brick like quiet yachts; men walking on the outsized sidewalk under the outsized poplars are dwarfed into dignity. The boulevard terminates in a circular roadway on Long Wharf—terminates, actually, in the grander boulevard of the Choptank. Daniel Jones, upon whose plantation the city of Cambridge now rests, put his house near where this street runs. Colonel John Kirk, Lord Baltimore’s Dorchester land agent, built in 1706 the town’s first house near where this street runs. There are slave quarters; there are porch columns made of ships’ masts; there are ancient names bred to idle pursuits; there are barns of houses housing servantless, kinless, friendless dodderers; there are brazen parades and bold seagulls, eminence and imbecility; there are Sunday pigeons and excursion steamers and mock oranges—all dignified by the great trees and soft glazed brick of the street. The rest of Cambridge is rather unattractive.

  As was my custom, I strolled down to the circle and over beside the yacht basin. The river was glassy and empty of boats, too calm to move the clappers of the bell buoy out in the channel, a mile away. A single early motor truck inched across the long, low bridge. The flag above the yacht club predicted fair weather. With a great sense of well-being I tossed the last hard half of my breakfast biscuits at a doubler crab mating lazily just beneath the surface. As was their custom, the gentleman did the swimming while the soft lady beneath, locked to him with all her legs, allowed him his pleasure, which might last for fourteen hours. Crabbers refer to the male and female thus coupled as one crab, a “doubler,” just as Plato imagined the human prototype to be male and female joined into one being. My biscuit landed to starboard of the lovers, and the gentleman slid, unruffled, six inches to port, then submerged, girl friend and all, in search of the missile that had near scuttled his affair. I laughed and made a mental note to make a physical note, for my Inquiry, of the similarity between the crabbers and Plato, and to remind Jane that there were creatures who took longer than I.

  I lit my first cigar and completed the circle, coming around to the side nearest the creek. Work was commencing in the lumber mill and shipyard across the creek mouth from where I stood: a weathered bugeye, worn by forty or fifty years of oyster-dredging, was hauled up on the railway, and a crew of men scraped barnacles and marine growth from her bottom. I surveyed the
scene critically and with pleasure, but no more intently than usual, despite the fact that I might never see it again, for I was determined to preserve the typicality of this great day. I had knocked the first ash from my cigar and was preparing to walk part way up High Street to the garage where my boat lay a-building, when my satisfied eye caught something new in the picture: a brightly lettered poster tacked to a piling at the farthest corner of the wharf, where the creek joined the river, and at the foot of the piling a small package or bale tied with a string. I walked over to investigate.

  ADAM’S ORIGINAL & UNPARALLELED FLOATING OPERA, announced the poster; Jacob R. Adam, Owner & Captain. 6 BIG ACTS! it went on to declare: DRAMA, MINSTRELS, VAUDEVILLE! Moral & Refined! TONIGHT TONIGHT TONIGHT TONIGHT! Admissions: 20¢, 35¢, 50¢! TONIGHT TONIGHT! FREE Concert Begins at 7:30 PM! Show Begins 8:00 PM!

  The bundle at the foot of the piling contained printed handbills advertising the show in more detail; it was obviously dumped there temporarily by the showboat’s advance man. I took a handbill from the bundle, stuck it into my coat pocket to read at my leisure, and continued my morning walk.

  I smoked my way back onto High Street, the handbill folded in my pocket and my mind preoccupied with scampering ideas as fitting as idle mice. In thirty seconds I had forgotten all about the poster, the handbill, and ADAM’S ORIGINAL & UNPARALLELED FLOATING OPERA.

  VII. my unfinished boats

  When I think of Cambridge and of Dorchester County, the things I think of, understandably, are crabbing, oystering, fishing, muskrat-trapping, duekhunting, sailing, and swimming. It is virtually impossible, no matter what his station, for a boy to grow to puberty in the County without experiencing most of these activities and becoming proficient in one or two of them.

  Virtually, but not entirely. I, for example, though I was not a sheltered child, managed to attain the age of twenty-seven years without ever having gone crabbing, oystering, fishing, muskrat-trapping, duekhunting, sailing, or even swimming, despite the fact that all my boyhood companions enjoyed these pursuits. I just never got interested in them. Moreover, I’ve never tasted an oyster; I can’t enjoy crabmeat; I’d never choose fish for dinner; I detest wild game of any sort, rodent or fowl; and although Col. Henry Morton, who owns the biggest tomato cannery on God’s earth, is a peculiar friend of mine, the tomatoes that line his coffers upset my digestion. But lest you conclude too easily that this represents some position of mine, let me add that I have done some sailing since I set up my law practice here in 1927—though I still can’t handle a sailboat myself—and I’d become, as a matter of fact, something of an expert swimmer by the time of this story. And this does, in a small way, reflect a philosophical position of mine, or at least a general practice, to wit: being less than consistent in practically everything, so that any general statement about me will probably be inadequate. To be sure, many people make such statements anyway—I get the impression at times that doing so constitutes a chief activity of the town’s idle intelligences—but I have the not-inconsiderable satisfaction of knowing that they’re wrong and of hearing them contradict one another (and thereby, I conclude, cancel one another out).

  All this, deviously, by way of introduction to my boatbuilding, for my next step, after completing my morning stroll around Long Wharf, was to turn off High Street into an alley running down to the creek. There, in a two-car garage loaned me by a friend and client of mine, every morning I did an hour’s work on the boat I’d been building for some years.

  My boats—what shall I say of them? In my life I’ve built two. The first I started when I was perhaps twelve years old. I had devoured every yachting magazine I could lay my hands on, had “sent away” for blueprints and specifications, had tossed and dreamed of hulls and spars and sails until I was dizzy with yearning. To build a boat—that seemed to me a deed almost holy in its utter desirability. Then to provision it, and some early morning to slip quietly from my mooring, to run down the river, sparkling in the sun, out into the broad reaches of the Bay, and down to the endless oceans. Never have I regarded my boyhood as anything but pleasant, and the intensity of this longing to escape must be accounted for by the attractiveness of the thing itself, not by any unattractiveness of my surroundings. In short, I was running to, not running from, or so I believe.

  But I could never be content with anything even remotely within my power to achieve. My father, delighted at the idea of my building a boat, suggested various types of skiffs, scows, prams, dinghies, and tenders, and even a simple catboat: he would help me, of course, with the steaming of the frames and strakes. But what! Go to Singapore in a dinghy? Cap the black growlers of the northern ocean in a row-skiff? For me it was more a problem of choosing between a fifty-foot auxiliary sloop and a fifty-foot auxiliary schooner. The sloop rig, I remember arguing to myself, lent itself more readily to one-man cruising, and I’d not need to rely for help on the indistinct young girls I somehow saw lying about the deck; on the other hand, if in a typhoon, say, I should be dismasted, that would be all, brother, were I to put my eggs in one basket as the sloop rig does. A divided rig-schooner, yawl, or ketch, in the order of my preference—would leave me some hope of limping bravely to port under the remaining mast. To be sure, these delicate arguments had to be kept to myself. I allowed my father to buy me enough lumber for a skiff, and I remember quite clearly regretting then that he and Mrs. Aaron, the current housekeeper, weren’t dead, so that I could commence work on my schooner without their scoffing to embarrass me.

  Finally I more or less began work on the skiff, declaring it to be a lifeboat for my schooner. Alas! I was clumsy with tools, if deft and ingenious with daydreams. My measurements were wrong, my lines out of plumb and out of symmetry, my saw cuts rough and crooked, my nails askew. All summer I worked on the thing, correcting one error with another, changing the length and shape of a miscut strake to fit a mismeasured frame, laying a split batten over a gaping seam, ignoring fatal errors into nonexistence, covering incompetence with incompetence, and pretending that the mere labor and bulk of the thing would somehow rectify all the fundamental mistakes implied in the very first step (rather, misstep) of construction. I made it known that I desired neither help nor advice, and my father, chalking the cost of the lumber up to my education, left me alone.

  When autumn came I lost interest in boatbuilding. Why labor so on a dinghy, when what I wanted was a schooner? And a schooner, of course, I could never build where there were people to watch and scoff. Left to myself, absolutely to myself, I was certain I could build one and surprise everybody with the finished product. But it must be only the finished product that they judge me by, not the steps of construction: there would be a grandeur in the forest, so to speak, transcending and redeeming any puny deficiencies in the individual trees. All through the winter the half-framed hull weathered untouched in the back yard, like a decomposing carcass whose ribs are partly exposed; by spring I was interested in nothing but horses. The skiff remained in the yard, a silent reproach to my fickleness, for perhaps six years. Then one year, while I was in the Army, a hurricane blew the boat off its sawhorses, and the rotting planks sprang from the frames. My father used it for firewood, I believe.

  I tell you this story because it’s representative of a great many features of my boyhood. My daydreams, my conceptions of how things should be, were invariably grandiose, and I labored at them prodigiously and always secretly. But my talent for doing correctly the small things that constitute the glorious whole was defective—I never mastered first principles—and so the finished product, while perhaps impressive to the untutored, was always mediocre to the knowledged. To how many of my young achievements does this not apply! I dazzled old ladies at piano recitals, but never really mastered the scales; won the tennis championships of my high school—a school indifferent to tennis—but never really mastered the strokes; graduated first in my class, but never really learned to think. And so on: it’s a painful list.

  Now a deficiency like this, which doubtles
s stems from overeagerness to shine in the eyes of one’s neighbors, can be hard to throw off, and I’m confident I should have it yet, but that the Army cured me of it.

  Not the Army as such—heavens no. The Army as such was a terrible experience in every way. I enlisted impulsively in 1917 and realized before the bus left Cambridge what a really distasteful experience I was going to have. And I had it, too: every unpleasant thing that could happen to a soldier in that insane army happened to me, except being gassed and being killed. Certainly I wasn’t patriotic. I had no feelings at all about the issues involved, if there were any (I’ve never been curious enough really to find out).

  Well, this isn’t a book about my war experiences, though I could write a good long book about them, and it wouldn’t resemble any war book you’ve ever read, either. Except for a single incident—and I mean to tell you about it at once—my Army career was largely without influence on the rest of my life. This one incident, during the battle in the Argonne Forest, I find significant in two ways, at least: it in some manner cured the tendency described above, and it provided me with the second of two unforgettable demonstrations of my own animality.

  The Argonne fighting was well under way before my outfit was sent in to replace a rifle company that had been destroyed. It was my first and only battle. I was, of course, inadequate fighting material—what intelligent boy isn’t?—but I was no more afraid as the lorries drove us to the front than were any of my fellows, and I’ve never been cowardly, to my knowledge, in matters of physical violence. It was late afternoon when we arrived, and the Germans were laying down an incredible barrage on our positions. We were hustled out of the lorries onto the ground, and it was much as I imagine jumping from an airplane would be: relative calm, and then bang! horrible confusion. We were all paralyzed. None of us remembered anything, not anything that we’d been told. Frightful! Horrifying! The air, I swear, was simply split with artillery. The ground—you couldn’t stand on it, no matter how loudly your officers shouted. We all simply fell down: fortunately for us, I guess. I suppose most of you, if you are men of this century, have experienced the like, or worse.