by John Barth
“You should know,” one of us teased her—Gee, G. suspects, inasmuch as Ned was already remarking that a handful of whacks was exactly the right number: yet another possible explanation of the five-count.
“Don’t think I’m going to show you,” came back pert Ruthie, whose budding breasts, as far as Gee could judge, were not yet cupped: “Those peep-show days are in the attic for keeps.”
“On second thought,” Ned suggested on the school playground shortly after, where he and Gee and an approximate handful of their dodge-ball-playing classmates were yet again invoking what they’d come to call “the B.B.B. poem” (Brinsley/ Burlesque/Brassiere), “shouldn’t it go ‘But when the boys began to cheer’ instead of ‘And when the boys’ et cetera?” Not only because but adds yet another b to the line and the poem, he went on to explain, but because but (“Three more B’s, guys, get it?”) better suits the sense of the situation: She “sneaks into” the burlesque show; she sits “way back in the very last row,” not to be noticed—but the popping of her bra-snaps blows her cover.
“Not his exact words, of course,” G. said now: “He and I are only eleven years old here, and people didn’t ‘blow their cover’ back in 1941, and who remembers anyhow? What I do remember is that ‘and/but’ business, and agreeing that he was Right On (as we didn’t say yet back then) about both the sense of the line and the alliteration—although of course we didn’t know that term yet.”
“In short,” offered Ever-Helpful Spouse, “Fledgling Author and Fledgling Critic sprout their first feathers. I wish I’d had fifth-grade pals like you guys.”
“Fledgling O.F.F. and about-to-fledge Capital-A Author,” in her husband’s opinion, “who alas had his wings clipped early. I wish I’d been your fifth-grade pal.”
“Likewise. But when you were in fifth grade I was just getting conceived, and didn’t know from bra hooks yet. I think I’m supposed to ask now: If that was your late buddy’s Second Thought about your maiden literary effort (which I gather soon became your-and-his collaboration), what was his Third?”
Thanks for asking. If nipped-in-the-bud-novelist Ned Prosper were alive today to hear about George Newett’s recent post-equinoctial vision and subsequent solstitial illumination, one can imagine his proposing on Third Thought that whatever else G.’s well-deserved fifth-grade paddle-whacks might be said to signify, they echoed also the five platform-stops of our birthday fire-tower climb back in first-grade days, of which the fifth and last before the tower-top had been declared to mark the inauguration of their friendship. “What he said at the time, however—unless I’m just dreaming all this?—was something like ‘On third thought, Gee, that’s the last time I’m getting paddled for being the damned Reader. From now on, whether I get whacked or whoopeed, I want it to be for my own scribbles, not somebody else’s.’ End of quote, paraphrase, misrecollection, whatever.”
“And none too soon, in your helpmeet’s helpful opinion. But if you’re really doing this whatever-it-is, you might as well mention that that particular Third Thought of his was the first we’ve heard so far that’s also one of those Last Things that you say he liked to make note of, if that happens to be the case. Excuse all those thats.”
“May your grateful husband kiss your hand?”
“Whatever anatomical item he pleases. And before she washes her hands of this dubious enterprise, pray tell your ever-less-patient Reader what further relevance, if any, this extended naughty-poem recollection has to anything?”
Relevance? Ah yes, that. Well: Eight or nine years later, when Ned Prosper is a flourishing undergrad here at StratColl, and G. I. Newett is hanging on by his fingernails over at Tidewater State, and both are pretty much persuaded that their Capital-C Calling is the writing of Capital-L Literary fiction, Ned will enjoy maintaining that future lit-historians will trace the pair’s epoch-making careers back to that initially humiliating but eventually inspiring day in Miss Brinsley’s fifth grade, which introduced them to both the pains and the pleasures of literary creation. In his retrospective opinion, it will have been the B.B.B.-poem’s subsequent notoriety, as it passed from furtively scrawled note into jointly revised and raucously repeated Playground Oral Tradition, that really fired both boys’ passion not only for reading (especially novels: no longer Tom Swift and Tarzan of the Apes after elementary school, but Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, Jack London’s White Fang, even Dumas père’s The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo), but for writing made-up stuff: in Stratford Junior High, a satirical mock-Nazi underground “newspaper” called Der Berlin Times with crude cartoons of Hitler & Co., its handwritten single-sheet copies circulated among their classmates; in Avon County High, a pseudonymous gossip-and-humor column in the school’s biweekly AvCoHi Eagle called “The Osprey,” bylined PN (for Prosper/Newett, their joint “PNNAME”) and motto’d, “The Eagle soars; the Osprey pounces.”
But that’s another story: the blooming springtime of their teens and twenties and the American Century’s ’40s and ’50s, following these Winter’s-end first stirrings of their nascent sap, so to speak.
“Another nom de plume for the pair of you, maybe: Nascent Saps?”
Touché. And in the Here and Now, as the vernal equinox of 2008 approaches, Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin at least nominally transfer authority over their respective domains to each’s hand-picked successor; Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama still go at it in the early Democratic presidential primaries; the dollar slides; crude oil tops $100 a barrel; the Iraq war, then in its fifth year, costs the U.S. some $21 billion per month; the Taliban regains strength in our stalemated Pakistan/ Afghanistan misadventure; severe late-winter storms strike California and the midwestern and northeastern states (but spare our mid-Atlantic Tidewaterland); and in early March a woman in Kansas is discovered not only to have been living secluded in her bathroom for two years, but to have remained seated so long on her toilet that the skin of her butt has grown literally attached to the seat, which must be removed before her discoverer/rescuers can transport her to hospital for its surgical detachment.
Which reminds George Irving Newett, changes changed, of his hibernating Muse—who however now bestirs herself to prompt him (better never than late?) to close this section of this Whatever with a couple of Last Things from the “Winter” of his&Ned’s preadolescent boyhood....
But she then on Second Thought remembers, or is by him reminded, that we did that already, just a few pages back....
And so on Third Thought we say, “Literal and figurative First Winter, adieu,” and bid the Reader (if he/she’s still out there) to follow Pete Seeger’s season-song’s advice:
“Turn, turn, turn . . . ”
3
spring
Spring has sprung. The grass has riz. I wonder where the flowers is?3
TO HIS PAL George Newett, “Solstices are mine,” Ned Prosper declared one late-March morning back in their Stratford High days (he having been born on one, Q.E.D.). And by the same reasoning, “Equinoxes are yours.”
Sixty years later, recollective G.I.N. assumes this declaration to have been made Nedward-style, his friend’s right fist clenched thumb-up for emphasis, and followed some while after by “On second thought [forefinger raised beside thumb and pointed Georgeward like a cocked pistol], I guess that gives me just the winter solstice and you the fall equinox, right? And so on third thought [raising middle finger to make three, then closing thumb and fore to make the Up Yours gesture with middle solo], fuck all that. Last day of winter! First of spring! Time to lose our fucking cherries, man!”
“The word that won the war,” British soldiers called that all-purpose Anglo-Saxon expletive,4 so common in adult fiction and film dialogue nowadays as to raise scarcely an eyebrow 5 (G. writes these lines on Just Another Workday Morning in 2008), but still such a No-No back then as to make Stratford/Bridgetown teenage boys feel macho/horny just saying it aloud. Even a dozen years later, when America’s warafter- that will have ended in Korea (and Ned�
��s life as well, in Baja California, with his first and only “novel” just begun) and G.I.N.’s own maiden effort will have lucked into modest, short-lived print, the Word remained so touchy that the book’s university-press publisher considered it daring for one of G.’s characters, an aggrieved wife, to demand of her former college roommate, “Why in God’s name did you fuck my husband, Jane?” To which her ex-best friend replies with a shrug, “Takes two to tango, Barb: Go ask Pete why he fucked me.” And in the novel’s even shorter-lived British edition, that once-war-winning verb was unaccountably softened, without authorial permission, to “bed.”
“And why the F-blank-blank-blank are you telling Dear Reader this?” inquires Poet/Professor/Critic/Wife Amanda Todd of her (still-effing-faithful and faithfully-effing) spouse. Who happens to be wondering the same thing, sort of, but suspects it may be his vagrant Muse’s lead-in to Dream/Vision/Transport/ Whatever #2, which occurred not quite on the ’08 vernal equinox, but closer thereto than #1 to the ’07 winter solstice. It was, he’ll grant, less a flat-out vision than a dream-inspired reverie, involving (he just now notes) not the several B’s of that badboy Brinsley/Burlesque/Brassiere poem, but about as many S’s: Springtime. Sex. Sudden Storms . . .
“In short,” Mandy will tease when he bores her with all this during a pre-coital wake-up chat in each other’s arms the morning after the Dream, “Much B.S. About Nothing?” But then—parodying The Isley Brothers this time instead of the Bard—she’ll croon, “C’mon, baby, lemme shake your spear!”
Bear in mind, s.v.p., that “all this season/vision shit,” as G. himself will come to call it—the pattern of more-or-lesscoincident season-turns and more-or-less illuminations—hadn’t yet been established. But Narrator’s preoccupation with equinoxes/solstices/seasons and their association with youthful buddy Ned Prosper very much had been; enough so that as winter faded and spring arrived but nothing quite came together at His still-unfamiliar new workspace (the way he could imagine it might have done back in His dear “old” one in Heron Bay Estates before its tornadoing), he could not help wondering “where the flowers is.” Town and campus were a-bloom with crocuses, forsythia, daffodils, jonquils, hyacinths, and tulips, but his Muse’s garden-plot, while not altogether bud- and sprout-free, remained blossomless. Mocking the deep-Southern accent of one of his favorite professor-coaches back at Tidewater State U. (who often exaggerated it himself to humorous effect), G.I.N. used to advise his own StratColl coachees, “Y’all wannabe Cree-ay-tive Rotters, y’gotta learn how to Rot Cree-ay-tively.” By which was meant that they should turn, re-turn, and monitor the fermenting compost of their imagination—its lumps and shards of observation, sensation, experience, and reflection as registered in notebook-notes or pungent memory—until certain of them somehow came together, germinated, and flowered into poem or story.
Creative Rotting.
On the locally-mild winter’s closing day, for example, George Irving Newett’s notebook noted: Th 3/20/08: V. Equinox (= “V.E. Day”?) + 5th anniversary of U.S. Iraq invasion. New prisoner abuses revealed @ Abu Ghraib & Guantanamo. 200 anti-war demonstrators arrested in D.C. (Bush/Cheney dismiss protests). China arrests 4000 Tibetan protesters (embarrassment to upcoming Beijing Olympics).
SPRING.
I wonder where Miz Muse’s flowers is?
The days immediately following had their own, similarly So What? entries, each concluding with that same folk-proverbial question, to which the diarist found his fancy more and more turning, turning, turning....
Wait: How’s that? “Turn, turn, turn”: the refrain of Pete Seeger’s earlier-cited “To Everything There Is a Season,” which now (i.e., “then,” back in winter/spring season-turning time) reminded our floundering fictor of that anti-war folk-ballad composed by the same gifted hand after his McCarthy-era indictment by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956, and popular right through the Vietnam-War ’60s and’70s: not the rustic “I wonder where the flowers is?”, it occurred to him on one of those post-equinoctial mornings, but “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, its poignantly circular lament here abridged as in G.I.N.’s immediate notebook-note:Where have all the flowers gone?
Girls have picked them every one.
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young girls gone?
Taken husbands every one.
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one.
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards every one.
When will they ever learn?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one.
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?6
No time soon, it would appear. Half a century after those verses’ composition, the nation remained mired in two more indecisive wars at a cost of billions of dollars per month and more than 4,000 U.S. military personnel “gone to graveyards every one,” along with 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans. The economy was in deep shit from home-mortgage foreclosures, the virtual collapse of the real-estate market, the soaring cost of oil, and record federal-budget deficits. Our international approval rating sank along with the lame-duck president’s, while his administration blithely continued such Fuck-the-Constitution policies as detainee torture, arrogation of power to the executive branch, and presidential “signing orders” to avoid implementing congressionally-passed bills that the White House disapproved of but chose not to veto. And the economic disparity between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of their countrymen grew to Gilded Age, brink-of-Depression size. When would we ever learn?
Maybe by the upcoming November election—but it was late March still, and G. I. Newett had no more idea than did his drowsing Muse why the F-blank-blank-blank he was telling his notebook all this. What he knew—all he knew, in this department—was that at bedtime on or about Sunday, March 23 (Easter Sunday, as it irrelevantly happens), as he and his mate turned to each other for their customary lights-out embrace, the “Cree-ay-tive Rotting” part of his Imagination felt the equivalent of an impending . . . orgasm? Or burp? Sneeze? Fart? He even pressed his eyes more tightly shut; squeezed his Fancy, so to speak (as unobtrusively as possible, not to alarm his bedmate), to Make It Happen. But succeeded only in falling asleep, as he realized with initial disappointment some two hours later, at First Urination Time, then again with a groggy sigh three hours after that, at Second U.T., and finally towards dawn, with the opposite of disappointment, when a brief earlyspring thundershower—quite unusual for that still-chilly time of year—rolled over Stratford/Bridgetown and roused him from that long-since-signaled
DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #2,
Spring Break Flashbang
over in a flash/bang, appropriately, of Donner und Blitzen7:
Whoosh of wind and rush of rain. “Here it comes!” Observer/ Narrator huddles for shelter on wet beach with high-spirited others among pilings under ocean boardwalk or pier as sudden squall moves ashore from open water. “Coming . . . coming . . . ” Beach umbrellas cartwheel off; roaring wind blows rain almost horizontal. “CAME!” Flashbang! Then going . . . going . . .
Gone, and the dreamer woke both exhilarated and a bit embarrassed as the brief present storm rumbled off eastward. Embarrassed to find that he’d had a “wet dream” in both senses, the drenching rain plus a lusty ejaculation—literal in the dream, but virtual in waking fact, Dreamer not having experienced a literal “nocturnal emission” since his latter teens. Embarrassed further that the (hind-to) dream-ejaculatee had been not his beloved Amanda (whom he woke to find himself embracing from behind, his pajama-bottomless front pressed against her ditto rear), but . . .
Spring Break Flashbang
Aiyiyi: Naples, Florida, late March/early April 1952. Senioryear spring break time for G.I.N., his Tidewater State classmate and all-but-official
fiancée Marsha Green, his still-best-buddy Ned Prosper, and Ned’s Stratford College classmate and latest girlfriend Ginny Hyman. Long-since-devirginated Virginia, Virginia the Vagina, hymenless Hyman—oyoyoy!
“Something bothering you?” wonders Narrator’s waking wife. With whom, once he gets it duly notebooked for his Muse’s consideration, he’ll share a discreetly edited account of that flashbang “vision’s” reverberations—immediately clear to him, unlike his earlier fire-watchtower one:
Korean War cease-fire talks in “progress,” but bloody fighting rages on (armistice won’t be declared for another year), as does U.S. military draft in Harry Truman’s final presidential year, Narrator’s and Marsha Green’s last undergraduate semester at TSU, and Ned Prosper’s and Ginny Hyman’s at StratColl (already thus abbreviated in those pre-Internet days). Both young men have thus far avoided military conscription—as we would not have chosen to do, we believe, in World War Two—first via student deferments and then, when Selective Service Director General Hershey raised the bar, by joining our local National Guard units for weekly armory-drills, a brief summer encampment, and potential call-up to active duty should the situation worsen. As it presently seems not to be about to, but who knows? Especially since America’s involvement with the weakening French government in Vietnam appears to be turning into a possible next anticommunist front, and campus rumor has it that soon only married students—maybe even only married students with children!—will continue to be draft-exempt.
