The American Adam
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The American Adam By Stanley Edgar Hyman When John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor was published in 1960, I appear to have been off hunting caribou near Baffin Bay, and reading...
...the other couples drift apart...
...Barth produces a musical-comedy happy ending in which Ebenezer and Anna recover their lost estate, and all the separated lovers are united...
...The debunking of colonial Maryland is wittier and funnier...
...Then in an epilogue he tears it apart: Ebenezer has won his love, Joan, but she has become a poxed and ugly opium-addict, and she soon dies bearing a dead child: Anna loses both men she loves...
...We see him attempt to seduce one Indian queen with the delightful offer of "a lewd figure done in ivorie, a smalle coyne inscrib'd in filthie Arabick, and the pledge of twelve yardes of Scotch cloth, to be deliver'd on the next boat from London...
...I pledge to swive your pleasant ladies from sprit to transom,' said Long Ben Avery...
...There is something childish about this insistence on showing Captain Smith with his pants down, as though Barth were finally refuting his seventh-grade history teacher...
...the mission of Father FitzMaurice to the Ahatchwhoop Indians (p...
...Basically, of course, it is a redoing of Candide, which is the archetypal American novel, as writers from Cooper to Salinger have demonstrated by rewriting it...
...The long annotated list of the foods consumed in the eating contest is uproarious, as is the simple list of the foods not served: "No rabbitts...
...When instead he writes his satire, The Sot-Weed Factor, to revenge himself on the province, the poem gives Maryland a reputation for graciousness and refinement, and attracts good families to settle there...
...The book's engaging title is an old term for "tobacco merchant," and is the name of the protagonist's satiric poem...
...66) of her defloration by a "great torn leech...
...It has now been reissued in paperback (Grosset's Universal Library, 806 pp., $2.95), and, alert to the teacher's duty of following after the culture of his students at a decent interval, I dutifully sat down to read it...
...The book starts out as though it meant to affirm this generally, introducing us in an early chapter to two old pederasts named Henry More and Sir Isaac Newton...
...Henry is a protean figure who assumes a variety of identities, but everyone in the book takes a turn or two at disguising himself: at one point three other characters are pretending to be Ebenezer, producing an effect like the scene in Duck Soup in which all the Marx brothers nightgown themselves as Groucho...
...The new American Novel, as I have remarked previously in these pages, tends to be a picaresque comedy of the anti-hero...
...At still other times it resembles nothing seen before...
...As a consequence, 34 years after he has given up poetry, Ebenezer really is commissioned Laureate...
...It is soon clear that Barth's principal interest is in debunking American colonial history, specifically that of Maryland, his native state...
...and the wooing (p...
...The sex, as represented by Joan's passion for the great torn leech, or Mary's joys with her Ahatchwhoop lover Charley Mattassin, or Roxanne Russecks asking her daughter's seducer only that he be gentle and discreet, seems morally innocuous...
...Henry's account (p...
...I was reduced to helpless laughter by at least half a dozen episodes, all improper...
...I am not as readily amused by scatological humor as some, perhaps because of the ferocities of Brooklyn child-rearing in the 1920s, but that does not dismiss the matter...
...Of the species with venom, as Stern is the most profound, The Moviegoer the most honest, and V the most imaginative, so The Sot-Weed Factor seems to me the funniest yet...
...The book is slow starting and too long, and it has its languors, but for the most part it is wonderfully funny...
...When a Roman Catholic priest mentions Casteene's Indian wife, Henry says: "Two Indian women, Father Smith: 'tis a sin God will forgive, in return for the massacre of Schenectady...
...Since then my students have been singing the book's praises...
...T pledge to give every jack o' my crew his slavering fill o' them, and when they're done I pledge to carve your little sister into ship's-beef and salt her down for the larboard watch.' " As in all superior humor, there is a strain of melancholy just under the surface...
...an eating contest (p...
...The Sot-Weed Factor is a mock 18th-century picaresque novel, set mostly in colonial Maryland...
...The book ends on Ebenezer's bitter epitaph for himself as a failure and a fool...
...In our fallen and paradoxical world, nothing is what it seems...
...When Ebenezer tries to write a Marylandiad, an epic to celebrate the province and justify his unauthorized title "Laureate of Maryland," he cannot...
...Where the comedy of these journals is not sexual, it relies heavily on our seeing Smith covered with urine or excrement...
...The three great lovers in the book, the two Ahatchwhoops and Henry, turn out to have in common not only that they are brothers (I warned you about the plot) but that they are all impotent...
...One is that history tells glamorous lies...
...At various times The Sot-Weed Factor is a pastiche of Rabelais, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, and Fanny Hill...
...There is another kind of innocence, represented by Ebenezer, which consists of ignorance of the world...
...Sex is preferably non-phallic, however...
...Mary Mungummory's story (p...
...It seems here to stay, and has even produced a species of harmless snakes that mimic its coloration: the first of them Catch-22, and the latest Elliott Baker's A Fine Madness...
...When 100 pirates capture a ship bound for Mecca, carrying 1,600 young Moorish virgins, they spend a day and a night deflowering them, and "the deck looked like a butcher's block...
...It is not news that history glamorizes...
...His talent and learning are formidable, and although I cannot imagine what he could write after this book, I look forward to it eagerly...
...The language of the book sparkles with eloquence and wit...
...Actually the book is a series of comic set-pieces, loosely strung on two threads of action: the efforts of Ebenezer Cooke, poet and virgin, to make his way in the world, and the efforts of his tutor, Henry Burlingame III, to learn his parentage...
...628) of Ebenezer's twin sister Anna by an Ahatchwhoop called Billy Rumbly...
...WRITERS & WRITING The American Adam By Stanley Edgar Hyman When John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor was published in 1960, I appear to have been off hunting caribou near Baffin Bay, and reading nothing but the labels on cans of evaporated milk...
...Barth loves lists, and even his lists are funny...
...There are dozens of recognition scenes, culminating in Ebenezer's discovery that the attractive matron who has just attempted to seduce him used to be his wetnurse...
...In one of his disguises, Henry pretends to be Monsieur Casteene, a French Canadian agent rousing the Indians against the English...
...their mastery lies in other directions...
...At other times it is reminiscent of Tarzan, the Rover Boys, and the Keystone Comedies...
...The plot contrivance is the most fantastic of any book I know, but Barth is not interested in making it convincing: it is at once preposterous and predictable, and that is part of the fun...
...431) of the spiritual exercises that led to her conception...
...Ebenezer's experiences show him a province containing "naught but scoundrels and perverts, hovels and brothels, corruption and poltroonery...
...They include: the whore Joan Toast's story (p...
...An English whore and a French whore exchange insulting terms for their profession, the exchange covering six pages...
...At one point of desperation he cries out, "Better the pistol than another day in Maryland...
...John Barth is 34, and this is his third novel...
...These scurrilous documents make it clear that Smith was a foul-minded lecher, that the compass with which he impressed Powhatan contained pornographic pictures, that Pocahontas saved his life out of lust, and that he introduced the Indians to the arts of sodomy, "learnt from the scurvie Arabs...
...Indeed, the two acts are indistinguishable...
...The Sot-Weed Factor conceals a number of preachments in its clowning, although in this deceptive book it is hard to tell just how seriously they are meant...
...The result was four most pleasurable evenings...
...597) to determine the Ahatchwhoop kingship...
...When Ebenezer, about to be tossed overboard by pirates, asks the pirate captain to pledge to respect the ladies, he gets a proper pirate answer...
...Barth's novel has so many literary sources that it would be easier to list the books that it does not copy or burlesque...
...344) of his passion for a sow named Portia and his spirited defense of pansexuality...
...IN the moral universe of The Sot-Weed Factor, it is public affairs that is wicked and sinful, while sex is harmless or benign...
...When Anna marries the Ahatchwhoop Billy Rumbly, he becomes a handsomely dressed English gentleman, and she chooses to become a filthy squaw in deerskin and bear-grease...
...I shall not attempt to synopsize the plot...
...The main instruments in this effort are two spurious manuscript journals in the book, Captain John Smith's Secret Historie and The Privie Journall of Sir Henry Burlingame, Smith's lieutenant and Henry's grandfather...
...When Ebenezer goes to buy a notebook for poetry, he is undone by a choice of 16 varieties, from plain thin cardboard folio to fat ruled leather quarto, with their various advantages and disadvantages, and he goes after the proprietor with a short-sword...
...376) and his martyrdom at their hands...
...Ebenezer and Anna eventually sell the estate and move away...
...The jockeying for power in England and Maryland is shown as endless corruption, chicanery, intrigue, and betrayal...
...Phallic sexuality is identified with sadism, and is typified by the book's pirates: they rape conventionally and kill afterwards...
...In one of its aspects, The Sot-Weed Factor is an allegory of American innocence and optimism, R. W. B. Lewis' "the American Adam," and Ebenezer might fairly be called what Henry James, Sr., called Emerson: "my fair Unfallen friend...
...Since this is a service magazine, I shall list them, with the pages on which they begin, for the convenience of dippers...
...it is bad, destructive to the innocent and to those who come in contact with him...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 5
