John Barth: An Introduction

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note: My Adventures with John Barth

Foreword: The Story behind the Story

One: The Life and Opinions of Todd Andrews, Ex-Suicide

Two: The Immobilization of Jacob Horner

Three: Ebenezer Cooke, Sot-Weed Factor Redivivus

Four: Ebenezer Cooke, Virgin, Poet, and Laureate of Maryland

Five: The Revised New Syllabus of Giles the Goat-Boy

Six: Ambrose Is Lost in the Funhouse

Seven: John Barth: His Fiction, 1968

Eight: John Barth in Chiaroscuro, 1969

Nine: Perseus in the Vortex, 1972

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m deeply grateful to the following people:

To John Barth for permitting access to those manuscripts of his on file at the Library of Congress, for permission to reproduce pages of those manuscripts and to quote from various unpublished essays, and for the time he gave to answering questions and correcting factual errors in the biographical sections of this book’s typescript.

To Philip Young, research professor in residence at The Pennsylvania State University, a former colleague of Barth, for more encouragement and guidance than can possibly be described here.

To Barth’s agent, Lurton Blassingame, as well as his editors, Anne Freedgood, and Timothy Seldes, for the information they provided about Barth’s relationship with his publishers.

To Charles W. Mann, curator of the rare book room at the Pattee Library of The Pennsylvania State University, for permitting access to the Barth correspondence on file there.

To Professor Bernard Oldsey for several afternoons of conversation about Barth that helped ease the author into the present study.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

MY ADVENTURES WITH JOHN BARTH

A couple of times in my life, everything changed for me in an instant, as if fortune or fate or whatever reached out to touch me, alerting me that something important was going to happen and I'd better pay attention.

I talk about one example whenever anyone gives me a chance—how the debut of the classic TV series Route 66 (about two young man in a Corvette convertible driving across the United States in search of themselves) prompted me to send a letter to the show's co-creator Stirling Silliphant and tell him that I wanted to be what he was: a writer. I was 17. I never looked back.

Another example occurred in the fall of 1965. I was then starting my final year as an undergraduate student in a small college in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school, St. Jerome's, eventually became a university, but in those days, it was tiny, with only a couple of hundred students and only four, including me, in the English honors program.

The school's library was the size of a couple of living rooms. What are the odds against what happened there? An interest in Hemingway prompted me to search for a book about him. At the time, only one had been published, but somehow, that small college library with its few thousand books, had a copy.

Simply titled Ernest Hemingway, it was written by Philip Young, a professor at Penn State. I spent the day reading it and was so captivated by Young's voice, by his vibrant attitude toward Hemingway and toward literature in general, that I went home to my wife, who was pregnant and who taught high-school history classes.

I asked, After the baby comes, what would you think about quitting your job and moving to the United States, to Pennsylvania, so that I can study with Philip Young?

I don't recall that she even blinked before saying, Sure, let’s go.

Somehow I got accepted at Penn State without even taking a graduate-school entrance exam. I became Young's assistant, and after his wife died, my wife managed his house for a year. That was a rare experience, having dinner each night with the professor whom I had left Canada to meet.

That's a short version of a long adventure that I describe in my introduction to Young's posthumous collection of essays, American Fiction, American Myth. But what I haven't talked about until now is another life-changing moment that I can easily identify: the day I met John Barth.

I started graduate school at Penn State in the fall of 1966. By 1968, the end of my graduate studies beckoned, and it was time to select a topic for my doctoral dissertation. Young was my advisor, and because his dissertation was about Hemingway, a living writer, we thought that perhaps I too should choose a living writer as my subject.

As it turned out, acclaimed contemporary author John Barth was one of Young's close friends. Barth had taught at Penn State from 1953 to 1965, leaving the year before I arrived. He published three novels while he was there, The Floating Opera, The End of the Road (eventually adapted into a film), and The Sot-Weed Factor (a comic historical novel about Maryland in the 1700s). By the time his New York Times bestselling Giles Goat-Boy was released, Barth had moved and was teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Strictly speaking, I didn't need Barth's permission to write a dissertation about him, but my hope was that I might be able to interview him and perhaps even have his permission to look at documents that he’d donated to the Library of Congress.

Do you think he'd let me interview him? I asked Young.

Jack’s returning for Homecoming weekend, Young answered. He and I and Bob Frank will have a jazz session in the basement on Sunday. Why don't you come over and talk to him during a break?

So I showed up for the session, drank a bottle of beer, and enjoyed the music. Young played the piano. Frank (a medieval scholar) played trombone, and Barth (a former Juilliard student) played drums.

Halfway through the session, Young introduced me to him. I explained what I had in mind: an introduction to his work, aimed toward undergraduates, a kind of story behind the story that analayzed the books, the publishing world, and elements of American culture, as well as relevant aspects of Barth's life.

Perhaps I made a good case. Or perhaps Barth was simply agreeing to a request from Young. In any case, he said he'd be willing to help me. Then he returned to playing the drums.

While I did my research, a new Barth volume was published, Lost in the Funhouse, a short-story collection that's among the most inventive ever written by an American. At SUNY in Buffalo, Barth had discovered the university's media department and was experimenting with stories that changed their meaning when they were read out loud, especially when recorded stereo voices allowed a story to talk to itself or to confront its author.

At the time, Barth was much in demand as a public speaker, who used tape recordings of his stories while he was on stage, debating with those stories as if they were alive. This was great fun and very advanced in 1969, changing the way people thought about narrative. Lost in the Funhouse, especially the title story (which is about getting lost in the funhouse of both fiction and life), influenced my writing immeasurably, as the frequent references to Barth in my writing book, The Successful Novelist, indicate.

One memorable day in November of 1969, I drove north to his home on Lake Chautauqua outside Buffalo (he loved to sail). He spent a gracious afternoon with me, serving beer and sandwiches (in his Penn State years, he’d brewed beer in his home), and answering my questions. Later we went to an Italian restaurant up the road. Then we drove to Buffalo for a student literary event. We talked further in a corner bar. We went to a student party and at midnight drove back to his lakeside home. On that occasion alone, he graciously gave me twelve hours of his time.

Along the way, Barth asked me about my own fiction-writing efforts. Young had told him that I was working on a novel (it became First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created). I answered that it was coming very slowly and that I’d adjusted to the probability that I wouldn't have a writing career. Barth, a writing teacher, made some positive comments about staying with it and having faith, etc. I still remember how seriously he treated my ambition. Maybe he gave me that extra push I needed.

In any case, when I finished the dissertation, Barth was kind enough to read its biographical sections and correct any factual errors. In 1970, Ph.D. in hand, I took my family to the University of Iowa, where Philip Young had received his doctorate and where I began teaching American literature. In 1971, I completed First Blood. In 1972, the novel was published. At the time I’d sent an agent the manuscripts of both First Blood and my dissertation. When the agent phoned to say that he'd sold my book, I thought at first that he was talking about the dissertation. Then my agent corrected my mistake, and I couldn't believe that I was actually going to be a published author.

In 1975, the Penn State Press agreed to publish John Barth: An Introduction. Meanwhile, something new from Barth, a novella collection called Chimera, had appeared in 1972.  To make my Barth book as up to date as possible, I flew to Johns Hopkins University, where Barth now taught, and spent another afternoon speaking with him. My research completed, I finished the new chapter.

John Barth: An Introduction finally appeared in 1976, one of the first book-length studies of Barth’s work. Over the years, the book acquired a reputation for its biographical elements, which became a go-to reference for Barth scholars wanting to learn about his formative years. For this e-book edition, I revised the text, trying to get the Ph.D. out of it. Endnotes remain but are worth looking at, particularly the mini-essays about Ambrose Lightship, Marshall McLuhan, and the mystery of the lost manuscript for Barth’s first novel. I hope that my fascination with his brilliance compensates for any lingering academic tone. If you’re a fiction writer, you’ll find plenty of Barth’s insights about technique. Structure, description, viewpoint: I learned a lot from him, especially the idea that the way a book is written must be related to its theme, that form needs to match content.

After I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1990s, Barth visited there several times to give lectures. (He’s one of the best public speakers I’ve ever seen.) The last time I saw him, he was sitting in my living room. I reminded him of our drive into Buffalo in 1969 and the encouragement he gave me when I doubted that I’d ever be a novelist. I thanked him for the generosity and good nature that he showed to a young man who needed a boost. In complex ways, he changed my life.

David Morrell

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2015

FOREWORD

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

The best writer of fiction we have at present, and one of the best we have ever had: that’s how critic Robert Scholes described John Barth.¹ Another critic, Leslie Fiedler, said that Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor is closer to the ‘Great American Novel’ than any other book of the last decades,² while still another, Granville Hicks, called Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy one of the most important novels of our time.³ Some disagree, and in the course of this study their opinions will be noted, but these three critics represent many others who are impressed by Barth’s work. In 1965, a Book Week poll ranked The Sot-Weed Factor among the twenty best American novels since 1945. The American Library Association voted Giles Goat-Boy one of the Notable Books of 1966. The National Book Committee nominated his first novel, The Floating Opera, for its 1956 award. It nominated him again for his 1968 collection of short fiction, Lost in the Funhouse, and it awarded him half of its 1972 fiction honors for his collection of novellas, Chimera. Giles Goat-Boy attracted enough readers to become a New York Times bestseller. His other books have become widely read as well, especially at universities, where (in the 1960s and ’70s) various English departments made Lost in the Funhouse required reading for their majors.

But despite Barth’s considerable reputation, there have been few extended efforts to group his work and try to understand it (as of 1976). Accordingly, the present study is an attempt to provide the commentary that the novels and stories invite. With any luck, the result will be a little like Barth’s The Floating Opera, full of curiosities, melodrama, spectacle, instruction, and entertainment.

I have mixed feelings about narrative writing, Barth once said.

Contemporary writers can’t go on doing what’s been done, and done better. I revere Flaubert and Tolstoy, Hemingway and Faulkner; but they’re finished as objects of interest to the writer. My God, we’re living in the last third of the twentieth century. We can’t write nineteenth-century novels.

Joyce and Kafka bring the novel to one kind of conclusion. So do Beckett and Borges. From both, I get pure esthetic bliss. It’s an esthetic of silence. Beckett is moving toward silence, refining language out of existence, working toward the point where there’s nothing more to say. And Borges writes as if literature had already been done and he’s writing footnotes to imaginary texts.

But my temperament is entirely different. The future of the novel is dubious. OK. So I start with the premise of the end of literature and try to turn it against itself. I go back to Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, the Arabian Nights, to the artificial frame and the long connected tales. I’m interested in the artifices of narrative, in what can be done with language.⁵

What can be done with language, at any rate what Barth does with it, is a story in itself and the topic of this book.

The Original Floating Theater. Barth found this photograph in A. Aubrey Bodine’s collection of photographs about Maryland, Chesapeake Bay and Tidewater. A caption indicates: This ‘floating theater’ sailed up and down the Bay for 25 years. It had a seating capacity of about 500 (reserved seats cost 40 cents), and a repertoire that included such favorites as ‘Smilin’ Through’ and ‘Ten Nights in a Barroom.’ Edna Ferber spent a summer aboard soaking up background for her famous novel, ‘Show Boat.’ (The photograph is reproduced through the courtesy of Mr. Bodine.)

CHAPTER ONE

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TODD ANDREWS, EX-SUICIDE

It is not things themselves which disturb men, but their judgments about those things.

(Epigraph to vol. 1 of Tristram Shandy)

By the time John Barth was twenty-four, he’d been writing for five years and had published three short stories. His master’s project, a novel titled Shirt of Nessus, was of interest to no one, not even himself (a neo-primitive miscarriage, he called it); and his half-finished cycle of tales imitating the Decameron was, he feared, too bawdy to be published.¹ Then, in 1954, he happened upon a photograph of an old showboat that used to tour up and down the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. He’d seen that showboat at the dock of his hometown, Cambridge, Maryland, when he was around seven, and now, remembering, he decided to use it in the climactic scene of another novel.²

That novel was eventually christened The Floating Opera. As though making up for lost time, Barth wrote it quickly, from early January to late March of 1955, and the theme he chose was one that had fascinated him since at least 1953: nihilism. I thought that I had invented [it], he said.³ So fascinated was he that, having finished this book about it, he planned to write a series of them, dramatizing various nihilistic attitudes. The plot of one would not continue exactly into the plot of another, he explained in a letter to the Library Journal, nor would they have any specific characters in common. But they would, he went on in the letter, all have one similar character, some sort of bachelor, more or less irresponsible, who either rejects absolute values or encounters their rejection. The flagship of the series, The Floating Opera, he said was his nihilistic comedy, and the bachelor he presented in it was Todd Andrews—a fifty-four-year-old Maryland lawyer characterized mainly by his opinions, like Tristram Shandy, who one day plays with those opinions until he reasons himself into attempting suicide.⁴

As it happens, Barth wasn’t directly influenced by Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. I’ve never been a great admirer of Sterne, although he’s certainly an interesting figure, he later said. "But when I wrote The Floating Opera…I was very much under the influence of a Brazilian novelist whom I’d just come across, Machado de Assis—who in turn, though he wrote at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, was very much under the influence of Tristram Shandy; the same kind of technical playfulness and similar view of the world. So I got my Sterne by way of Brazil." ⁵

In particular, Barth liked the way the narrator of one book by de Assis, Dom Casmurro, introduced himself directly at the start, explained the title of his book and the purpose of the book itself, and then went on to digress freely as the dictates of his interest overwhelmed the chronological development of his plot. These devices Barth incorporated fully.

At the same time, his reference to Tristram Shandy wasn’t just a second thought. His character resembles Tristram in other ways besides his playing with opinions. Both, for example, are in imminent danger of death: Tristram from consumption and Todd from heart disease. They both look back over their lives and write about them, and they both have no wish to stay on any subject very long. What’s more, they both engage in extensive mock-dialogue with the reader, and while Tristram employs such typographical devices as blank, inked, and marbled pages, Todd reproduces in full the handbill for a minstrel show, provides a double column of narrative, and ends two chapters with the same paragraph.

There is one main difference between them, however. Tristram never tries to kill himself: he’s too absorbed in life, or at least in writing about it, to want to leave it. But then he’s a notoriously sentimental eighteenth-century Englishman. He relishes emotion, and laughter is for him a drug against pain. Todd, on the other hand, is an intensely rational twentieth-century American, a detached observer who’s almost always conscious of observing. Only five times in his life has he experienced great emotion, and when he laughs (which is surprisingly seldom, considering how funny the book often is), the laughter is no drug at all, but a hysterical reaction to the absurdity he believes is everywhere around him.

That Todd is writing about himself is the result of his father’s having hanged himself on Groundhog Day, 1930, in the basement of the family home. The ostensible motive for the suicide was that his father had gone bankrupt in the crash of 1929 and couldn’t face his creditors. But Todd didn’t accept that as the actual reason, and so he began preparing to write an inquiry into his father’s death, a project that soon blossomed into a second inquiry, this one investigating his father’s life and the relationship between his father and himself. He had also another inquiry to make, a self-inquiry that took the form of an autobiographical letter to his father. He’d been drafting it since 1920, and even though his father was now dead, he still continued. In it, he included everything important about himself, and because every thought and action seemed important, the letter grew extremely long. The older he got, the more material there was to add, so the letter grew longer yet; and eventually Todd’s life outdistanced his writing. He could never catch up to the point where he’d be writing about the events of the day when he was writing (a problem shared by Tristram Shandy). The Floating Opera is a part of Todd’s self-inquiry. He’s composing it in 1954 in his room in the Dorset Hotel, Cambridge, Maryland, and his topic is a June day in 1937 when he decided to kill himself and then changed his mind.6

Todd tried to kill himself, he explains, because it is my bad luck that I tend to attribute to abstract ideas a life-or-death significance. When, that is, an Army doctor casually informed him in 1919 that he had a heart condition that could kill him at any second, Todd began assuming various poses to help him hide his heart from his mind and his mind from his heart. First he became, he says, a rake, then a saint, then a cynic, and at last in 1937 he found the mask of cynicism gone and despair in its place. Since it was his habit to justify on philosophical grounds his every attitude, he investigated the several reactions he could have to despair. Turning to God was out of the question: Todd didn’t believe in God, and he refused to sacrifice his integrity by pretending to do so.  There is no way to master the fact with which I live, he concluded, went to sleep with that conclusion, woke up in the morning, splashed cold water on his face, and decided to kill himself.

 The next twelve hours he spent gathering philosophical support for his decision.

I. Nothing has intrinsic value. Things assume value only in terms of certain ends.

II. The reasons for which people