Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons

by John Barth

  On a mid-June Saturday in 1954 (stalemated Korean War ended by armistice dividing country at 38th Parallel into communist North and democratic South, but Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting witch-hunt continues, and publicinstitution academics like George Irving Newett—entry-level Instructor of English Composition at Marshyhope State on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore—must grit teeth and sign loyalty oath denying past or present Communist-party membership), twenty-four-year-old Second Lieutenant Edward “Ned” Prosper, on weekend leave from the Army Language School, drove with one Ms. Lucinda Barnes, a young civilian employee in the ALS library and his girlfriend-of-the-moment, from Monterey down to Baja California in her bucktoothbumpered cream-and-green Buick Special sedan in search of warmer-water surfing than could be found nearer by: ideally (Ms. Barnes would later report), a spot isolated enough for them to ride the waves and each other au naturel. Somewhere below Tijuana they located an adequately secluded stretch of beach and commenced what sounds like a replay of that earlier-narrated southwest Florida Spring Break Flashbang of 1952, but with only one couple this time, and thus no partner-swapping. Consumption of mucho tequila and Acapulco Gold pot while singing with mock-military zest the Latino lyrics of La Cucaracha,12 duly followed by naked woozy frisking on the sand and in the surf, including not-very-successful attempts to ride the waves while both liquored and stoned. Project soon abandoned (“On Second Thought,” G. imagines N. proposing) in favor of mere splashing and body-surfing in the breakers, and that in turn, by Ms. Barnes anyhow, for passing out on their beach-blanket while her boyfriend carried on out there. “Bit more of a swim,” she believed she remembered his calling after her as she staggered to shore, “and then I’ll join you.”

  But he never did. No sign of him when she woke up some while later, sunburned and hung over; nor any thereafter, despite her ever-more-frantic searching and calling up and down the beach and adjoining headlands, then an at-least-perfunctory search by Tijuana authorities upon the hysterical gringuita’s reporting the matter to them, and more extensive follow-up investigations by both the U.S. military and the missing man’s grief-stricken parents, who flew out with sister Ruth from Maryland to Mexico and then Monterey. By general best-guess consensus, he must have been either caught in a riptide and carried out farther than he could swim back in his impaired condition, or attacked by a shark: Both perils were reported in the vicinity from time to time. A third possibility briefly considered by the military was that with or without Ms. Barnes’ knowledge and collusion, Lt. Prosper had planned and staged his disappearance in order to desert the service and embrace some other of life’s arms. But while it was true that in recent communications to his family and to G., as well as in conversation with his Language School comrades, he had expressed a growing boredom with his military life and a hope to move on before very long to some interesting Next Thing that would also give him more time for his writing, criminal desertion and the attendant elaborate subterfuges were altogether out of character for him. Moreover, his clothing, backpack, passport, and wallet were on the beach and in the Buick, where he’d left them, and his other belongings all in place back in his quarters. Suicide, then, perhaps? But except for the aforementioned restlessness he had seemed in fine spirits, all hands testified, and very much involved with that “Third Thought” opus-in-presumable-progress, which despite G.’s several requests his friend had steadfastly declined to share with him until at least its first draft was complete. No trace of Edward “Ned” Prosper from that mid-June afternoon to this mid-August one fifty-four summers later—nor of that manuscript (which, despite her hungover and much-distressed condition, Ms. Barnes was confident he’d not brought along with them to Mexico, much less taken into the surf).

  What kind of story-ending is that?

  Well: As Ned himself remarked apropos of something-or-other in the last letter G. received from him, shortly before that ill-fated south-of-the-border excursion,Our lives are not stories, G-Man. The story of one’s life is not one’s life; it is one’s Story (one of one’s stories, anyhow). ¡Hasta la vista, amigo mio, and on with the story! N.

  That was that—and the unfinishedness of it, as Reader may have noticed, haunts Narrator to this hour, this minute, this sentence. Was his friend even really writing that “Seasons” thing through the two years between spring break ’52 and June’54, or did he for some inscrutable reason only pretend to be absorbed in doing so while G. himself completed his modest Tidewater State M.F.A., scored his first modest short-story publications (which Ned praised—and helpfully appraised—with a perceptive astuteness unmatched by any subsequent G.-readers except Amanda Todd), and commenced his modest academic career? Could it be that that fiction so long in the works was in fact fictitious?

  Aiaiai, oyoyoy—and on with this unended (but presumably not ending-less) story. In their ambitious early-apprentice-writer days, Ned Prosper once remarked with apparent pride to George Newett, apropos of who knows what, that his bowels moved regularly once a day, always so promptly after breakfast that he scarcely had time to brush his teeth before defecation. “That’s so anal!” G. had been pleased to tease, both young men having duly studied Freud at their separate colleges. “Anal my ass,” had responded Ned; “I just don’t take any shit off my bowels, you know?” Whence he went on to declare that the same was going to apply to his Muse: If, as Thomas Edison remarked, genius is “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” then the remedy for artistic constipation is to grunt harder. “When you’re stuck, bust your gut; better a bloody stool than none.”

  Yuck. But applying this maxim to the stalled or anyhow idling “Summer” section of the narrative in hand, on the aforeinvoked “midsummer” Delmarva morning of August 21, 2008 (Beijing Olympics in full swing; Barack Obama prepares to accept Democratic presidential nomination at upcoming party convention in Denver), its narrator, whose bowel and other movements had ever been less programmed than his late buddy’s, booted up his word processor, scrolled to where he had too long since left off, and boldly typed the small-caps boldface heading

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #3:

  Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Then he closed his eyes, drew and held a very deep breath, clenched as tight as possible his fists and every other clenchable muscle in his high-mileage but still serviceable body, and waited to see which would happen first: inspiration, perspiration, loss of consciousness, or loss of nerve....

  None of those, it turned out: merely the end of his capacity for suspended animation. Literally dizzied by the unprecedented attempt, after who knows how many seconds or (less likely) minutes he opened eyes, resumed breathing, relaxed muscles, woozily regarded that boldface subtitle, and by-George found himself typing below it something that might after all serve, if not quite for a midsummer night’s dream, at least for

  D/V/T/W #3:

  —changing its subtitle to the date implied in his wife’s reference, somewhile back, to “forty years ago, when you and I were a hot new item.” I.e.,

  1968, the height of the High Sixties, a full fourteen years after Ned Prosper’s disappearance: Pop Art, the New Feminism, Black Power, Counterculturalism. Hair, the Beatles, bell-bottoms and miniskirts, beards and bongs. Massive anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in D.C. and elsewhere; sometimes-violent student “sitins” on college campuses (even at normally tranquil StratColl), often broken up by tear-gas-firing National Guardsmen. “Cultural Revolution” in Mao’s China, Tet Offensive in Saigon, nationwide leftist strikes in France, black urban ghettos aflame across the USA. Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy assassinated, and Richard Nixon narrowly elected president over Hubert Humphrey after turbulent Democratic convention in Chicago. A transformative, near-apocalyptic year in many parts of the world—but for us George Newetts and Amanda Todds, “the blooming summertime of our lives.” G.’s five-year first marriage was by then a decade behind him: Marsha Green had successfully remarried and, one heard, was turning out children in Michigan, Min
nesota, or Montana (relieved of mailing her monthly alimony checks, her ex-husband knew only that her new locale, like her former one and her first name, began with an M). Thirty-eight-year-old George, in his eighth year at Stratford College, had newly attained the rank of Full Professor in the college’s English and Creative Writing Department on the strength of his teaching record and his modest-but-adequate publications. In his post-Marsha, post-Marshyhope years he had enjoyed a couple of semi-serious romances (fewer hookup opportunities in small-town Stratford than at Tidewater or Marshyhope State Universities, with their larger faculty, staff, and surrounding community), which however—like those multistage NASA rockets that lift off successfully but whose subsequent stages misfire or otherwise fail to place their payload into orbit—fizzled out after a semester or two. Reconciling himself, on the sexual front anyhow, to his condition of potent sterility or sterile potency, he had grown more or less resigned to bachelorhood, much as he missed the sort of loving companionship that he’d enjoyed before his marriage soured.

  Then came, not 1968 yet, but the summer of ’66, when StratColl’s English Department, in need of a new Creative Writing hand, hired twenty-four-year-old Amanda Todd as an entry-level assistant professor: M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, where she’d also been a Graduate Teaching Assistant and was kept on for an additional year as a “Super-T. A.”; a half-dozen poems published already in reputable quarterlies; well-read, sharp-minded and sharp-looking, immediately popular both with her students and with her colleagues. Then 1967, in the late October whereof, only two members of the Stratford faculty, George Newett and Amanda Todd, joined 50,000 other demonstrators in the massive anti-Vietnam War protest across the Chesapeake in Washington that would inspire Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. The pair were already by then ever-closer friends as well as mutually admiring colleagues, respectful of their separate muses and their shared departmental responsibilities; the twelve-year difference in their ages and two-notch difference in their academic titles seemed ever less significant as they’d come to know each other better over the semesters. Nothing really “romantic” between them yet as of fall ’67, but their ever-more-frequent shared pleasures—lunches à deux; the occasional movie, concert, or student theater production; side-by-side workouts in the college gym; singles tennis as well as mixed doubles with other faculty or student couples; canoeing on the Matahannock from the college’s waterfront facility—had taken on an unmistakably flirtatious air despite their mutual reserve: his lest he seem to be exploiting his seniority, hers lest she seem to be courting it. The adrenaline-rush of that October march from Capitol to Pentagon, however, with its encircled-semaphore peace icons, its multi-thousand-voice chants (“Hey hey, LBJ: How many kids did you kill today?”) and hippie banners urging America to MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR! nudged them across an unacknowledged threshold. Having driven over to D.C. in G.’s Volkswagen Beetle among a caravan of Stratford-student cars, when they rejoined the exhausted group for the less coordinated return trip Professor Newett found himself announcing to them that he and Professor Todd would probably drop out somewhere en route for a late dinner.

  “Right on, guys!” one of their students seconded—and then added, with a knowing wink, Timothy Leary’s popular mantra: “Turn on, tune in, drop out!”

  An hour later, over Maryland crabcakes and chardonnay at a waterfront restaurant just off the Eastern Shore side of the Bay Bridge, “Just what was that supposed to mean?” young Mandy pretended to wonder. “What do they think you and I are up to?”

  “Making love, not war?” G. suggested or proposed, and raised his glass to hers.

  Clink. “I’m ready,” M. confessed. “Been ready this whole semester, wondering when you’d get around to propositioning me. Your place or mine, Boss?”

  Replied George Irving Newett, “Why wait that long? There’s a motel right across the highway: I say let’s go for it, soon’s we’re done here.”

  “And I say sooner,” countered Amanda Todd, and signaled their server to bring the check, but at G.’s urging agreed to finish their meal and enjoy a celebratory glass of champagne before moving to the Next Stage of their connection. She insisted, moreover, that they either split the cost both of their dinner and of the motel, or else one of them cover the first and the other the other, and that that be their way thenceforward with all shared-experience expenses. “Agreed?”

  Agreed. And mildly awkward as it was, after finishing their wine, to check into a motel with no other luggage than Mandy’s purse and George’s briefcase—no nightclothes, toiletries, or even fresh underwear after their tiring day’s march—they eagerly peeled out of their and each other’s clothing, turned back the bedcovers, and went at it before even washing; again after a joint post-coital shower; and yet a third time in the course of that night, pausing only and briefly before the first of those penile intromissions to address the circumstance of their having brought with them neither male nor female contraceptive devices.

  “Withdrawal before ejaculation,” had proposed Assistant Professor Todd by nightstand light, opening her lovely smooth thighs to him in the Missionary Position. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” agreed Full Professor Newett—and so did, not long after. But when they then showered together, returned to bed, re-embraced, and soon found themselves re-aroused, “You might as well know,” he informed her, “that with your new playmate, neither withdrawal nor contraceptives are necessary.”

  “Because you want to knock me up in a hurry?” his bed-partner wondered. “That’s a career move we need to discuss first, don’t you think?”

  “I wish.... But the truth is—”

  “Let me guess: Is it that you and your late pal Ned,” of whom he’d already spoken in numerous of their conversations, “had bilateral vasectomies in your freshman year at Stratford High, to keep from impregnating every coed in class? Or maybe just you did, just last week, to keep Shotgun Marriage out of our playbook? How thoughtful of you!” To her new lover’s considerable surprise then, his new lover bent over him, cupped his scrotum, kissed his already re-tumescing ejaculator (both organs shrouded by her nut-brown hair, worn longer back then than in later years), and crooned, “Poor little spermies, nipped in the bud . . . ” To him then, “So: All the way this time, shall we? Fill ’er up?”

  “Mandy . . . ” Taking her head between his hands as she straddled him: “I never had a vasectomy. Didn’t need one, it seems. Sorry about that.” He lifted her chin; saw her eyes moisten; began to wonder what he was getting himself into, so to speak. “My scribblings are the only offspring I’ll ever sire. If you want kids, you’ll have to find yourself another stud.”

  She brushed back her hair. Looked him in the eye. Compressed her lips. Then nodded, wiped her tears on the sheet-edge, and smiled—all this by the afore-noted nightstand illumination, accompanied now by caresses and reembracement. “Advice perpended, Gee,” she said softly. “Meanwhile, if your precious pen is your other penis [G. had showed her the prized black-and-gold Montblanc with which for years he’d first-drafted all his manuscripts], at least they’re both Meisterstücken. So: Dip your pen in my well, and what we make together is up to our separate muses. Fill ’er up good now, okay?”

  Done. And what they then for the first time together made (happily coincident with her first use of his new nickname) was not merely “love” as opposed to “war,” but Capital-L Love as distinct from mere though delicious sexual connection: an uppercase blessing that was to be theirs—ever deeper and more richly seasoned, if not necessarily so frequent and athletic—through the forty years from that autumn to the one approaching as G. pens this paragraph. So what if some literal seasons are out of synch with some figurative, and some third-person pronouns fused with first-? What followed that October “springtime” of His/Her/Our conjunction was the prolonged Summer of Our Love—after a tempestuous academic year marked by town/gown confrontations between, on the one hand, the Stratford mayor’s office and police department, and on the other
a group of student anti-war protestors headquartered in the Shakespeare House for angry demonstrations in town as well as on campus, defused with difficulty by StratColl faculty and administrators (the local National Guard armory being just down the road, fed-up townsfolk agitated in vain for the sort of armed suppression of those rowdy hippies that would lead in 1970 to the Kent State and Jackson State killings). When to all hands’ relief Commencement Day finally cleared the campus, the couple were wed in a modest civil ceremony over in Mandy’s western-Maryland hometown, attended by their parents and a half-dozen colleagues/friends. They treated themselves to a brief but luxurious-by-their-standards honeymoon tour of Joyce’s “Trieste/Zurich/Paris,” capped off by a return visit to the same Route 50 motel where they’d first fucked, then set up housekeeping in a newly-rented old clapboard bungalow just off-campus and commenced their married life.

  1968: For them it lasted at least until 1975, after Richard Nixon’s Watergate-scandaled resignation from the presidency, South Vietnam’s surrender to North, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from that beleaguered country. By then the Woodstock Festival had emblemized another sort of love-summer; American astronauts had landed on the moon, and a not-yet disgraced President Nixon had made landmark diplomatic visits to both Beijing and Moscow. The Senate approved an Equal Rights Amendment banning gender-based pay discrimination13, and the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade against banning abortions in the first two trimesters of pregnancy. For the first time in its history, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average closed above 1000; the military draft ended, and Congress passed (over Nixon’s veto) a War Powers bill that curbed the president’s authority to initiate overseas military action without its approval. The nation, along with its college and university campuses, largely quieted down; Elvis Presley died, but the Newett/Todds’ long Summer summered on. They learned to keep house together; adjusted to each other’s ways and routines, their likes, dislikes, and separate histories, sexual and other. With two not-bad academic salaries and no children (more yet to come on that), they were able to buy and renovate the house they’d been renting and turn its spare bedrooms into separate home offices. G. added vegetable-gardening to His several pastimes, and A. flower-gardening to Hers. For three seasons each year they taught their literature classes and writing workshops and served on sundry academic committees; in the long literal summertimes they vacation-traveled in the U.S. and abroad. And for a few hours daily amid all the above, George Irving Newett Montblanc’d his first-draft fictions before editing and transcribing them on his big gray Royal manual typewriter, while Amanda Todd, half a generation ahead of him technologically, composed her verses directly on her handsome IBM Selectric until the advent of desktop computers and word processors. Then, like Eve before Adam, she bit the Apple before her mate, and by the mid-1980s had equipped their home offices with state-of-the-art Macintoshes (although G. preferred still to pen his first drafts).