John Barth's First Novel
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS&WRITING John Barth's First Novel By Stanley Edgar Hyman John barth's The Sot-Weed Factor was first published in 1960, but I did not catch up with it until last year, when it appeared in...
...He was an ordinary boy until the discovery of the heart condition...
...Neither one of us has any regrets that I made love to you," Janie informs Todd when they break off...
...Todd describes himself as tall, thin, and handsome, except for ugly clubbed fingers...
...After his walk, without taking off his good clothes, he works for an hour on a boat he is building, then proceeds to the office...
...Todd's life has been relatively eventful...
...The principal sign of immaturity in The Floating Opera is sentimentality...
...It involves 17 wills, each leaving the estate, which includes three million dollars as well as 129 pickle jars in which Mack preserved his excreta, in a different spiteful combination...
...Todd's father, also a lawyer and his predecessor as senior partner of the firm, was ruined in 1929, and hanged himself a few months later...
...he discovered his father's corpse and cut it down...
...Barth has since gone far beyond it...
...Otherwise Todd spends the evening alone, working on what he calls the Inquiry, an elaborate research into his father's life and the reasons for his suicide...
...There are periodic roman candles and pinwheels of rhetoric, and the narrative style is an elaborate mock-dIalogue WIth the reader...
...Todd describes his life as a series of disguises determined by his misfortunes...
...We certainly had no right to expect him not to make love to other women," Harrison later admonishes Janie...
...Some of Todd's memories of his father suggest soap opera, and there is a mistaken effort to relate Todd's change of mind about killing himself to a concern with the Macks' little daughter Jeannine (who may in fact be Todd's daughter...
...He was educated at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland Law School...
...These are caused by a defective heart, first diagnosed when he was 19...
...Barth uses Todd to explain his symbols, apologize for them, mock them as "Hollywoodish,' and, in the course of this, to expand and develop them usefully...
...Barth sees through Todd Andrews, as it were, with a light eye...
...All this makes the book sound far more earnest than it is...
...The covert, symbolic homosexuality of The Floating Opera (biting in the Macks, farcical in the Mortons, melodramatic in the episode of the German prisoner) becomes the mad polymorphous pansexuality of The Sot-Weed Factor...
...after that he posed as "a saint" until his father's suicide...
...then he masked as "a rake" until the discovery of the prostate infection...
...His narration is leisurely (often too leisurely), opinionated, quirky, full of artful flashbacks and delayed disclosures-so that bald chronological synopsis does the story an injustice...
...It symbolizes, we are flatly told, the law, Todd's mind, life itself, and this book...
...by 1937 he had become largely impotent with her...
...A naked matron at a drunken party is a "dugong hoisted from the deep...
...His other ailment is a chronic prostate infection, now under control...
...Beneath this cheery narrative surface, Barth offers a very different view of Todd Andrews...
...He himself does not have much heart for involvement, but it is just this ultimate involvement that a floating opera does not require...
...The Floating Opera of the title is a showboat that arrives at Cambridge on the day of the story, and becomes the scene of some of the action...
...He begins the day with a kindly note to Janie proposing that she exhibit herself to an 83-year-old retired oyster dredger at the hotel...
...One strand of the book has great satiric bite...
...Between 1933 and 1937, Todd had a mistress, Janie Mack, the wife of his best friend, Harrison Mack, Jr...
...before the day is over he has driven another elderly neighbor to suicide...
...Todd was seduced by a worldly young schoolgirl named Betty June Gunter on his 17th birthday, and soon afterward he enlisted in the Army and fought overseas...
...since then he has shown himself to the world as "a cynic...
...The novel's story consists of one day in June, 1937, on which Todd Andrews changed his mind about committing suicide...
...I still cannot imagine what Barth will write next, and I still await it eagerly, but meanwhile his first novel, The Floating Opera, originally published in 1956, has now come out in paperback (Avon Books, 272 pp., $.75...
...The second is Todd's reencounter with Betty June in a Baltimore brothel seven years after he laughed at her: she resourcefully tries to dismember him with a broken bottle...
...Then he goes downstairs and pays his bill at the desk (he takes his room by the day, to acknowledge his weak heart...
...The night before he had been miserably impotent with Janie, had known despair, and had recovered his good spirits by the decision to end his life...
...Since his father's death he has lived in Room 307 of the Dorset Hotel, across the street from the courthouse and a block from his office...
...The Floating Opera is narrated by Todd Andrews, a bachelor lawyer in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore...
...Todd eventually wins the money for Harrison and Janie by his discovery that the widow had misapplied, on her zinnia beds, the less desirable part of the bequest...
...Although generally self-satisfied, Todd does not regard himself as particularly passionate...
...Barth's feat has been to make this shallow and conventional Maryland gentleman, so unlike the autobiographical heroes of first novels, not only interesting to us but important...
...A cherished part of Todd's cynicism is his vision of human copulation as animal and consequently ludicrous...
...all are Floating Operas, stages for putting on a show...
...The "happy ending," in short, is a life free of the embarrassing animality of the female body...
...The day he lost his virginity, Todd enraged Betty June and drove her away in a fury when he caught sight of the two of them in a mirror, "animals in the act of mating" and broke into uncontrollable laughter...
...The final chapter title offers this as a "happy ending" and Todd assures us that his life since then has been adequately gratifying, although "there have been no women in my bed since that morning...
...These occasions were his initiation by Betty June, his seduction by Janie and final failure with her, and two traumatic experiences of death: he captured a German prisoner during the War, hugged him and kissed him, then bayoneted him...
...He is a victim of his Oedipus complex, a latent homosexual, a cold fish, and a malicious sadist...
...One is the legal case of the estate of Harrison Mack, Sr., the Dill Pickle King...
...I can hardly conceive a limit to his eventual attainment...
...Morton of Morton's Marvelous Tomatoes, which turns into another sort of courtship by the Colonel's lady, a marvelous tomato indeed...
...his mother died when he was seven...
...Once the cringing stops, we recognize what I once named "the Albertine Strategy," an affair with a man variously disguised as an affair with a woman...
...When Janie ends their affair, Todd spitefully pictures her and Harrison "permanently locked together" like copulating crabs...
...Todd's daily routine, at the time we encounter him, is as regular and reassuring as the mailman's...
...The pages that reproduce the Floating Opera handbill typographically and describe the performance in detail give us a foretaste of Barth's Nabokovian talent for elaborate, spurious documentation Three wild comic episodes stand out in The Floating Opera...
...The third is Todd's courtship by the richest man in Cambridge, Col...
...It is the manner in which Harrison and Janie Mack talk about Janie's affair with Todd: an affair which, as an emancipated couple, they have contrived jointly...
...The minstrels do an old-fashioned walkaround and the show is over...
...We are treated to such Tristram Shandy devices as breaking the page into repetitive double columns (one for each eye) and ending two chapters with the same formula (on the grounds that the first occasion was premature...
...The' Floating Opera exhibits, in bud, much that was to flower in The Sot-Weed Factor...
...I found it the funniest of all the New American Novels, and I concluded my appreciation of Barth in these pages (March 2, 1964): "Although I cannot imagine what he could write after this book, I look forward to it eagerly...
...He was born in 1900 and is 54 at the time of writing...
...The only way to learn anything, Todd tells us, is "to learn it stingingly, to the heart, through involvement...
...Todd wakes at six, takes a shot of rye from a quart he keeps on the windowsill, and goes down the hall to have coffee with some elderly neighbors in the hotel...
...I did it-we did it-because we like you," Harrison tells Todd after Janie has popped into his bed...
...Since then he has occupied himself with sailing, hunting, and less demanding sports...
...After dinner, if it is Tuesday or Friday, Janie appears in his room...
...The Albertine Strategy is far more overt in The Sot-Weed Factor, where Henry Burlingame cheerily confesses that he lusts equally for Ebenezer and his sister...
...At seven Todd goes for a walk, breakfasting on some hard biscuits in his pocket...
...WRITERS&WRITING John Barth's First Novel By Stanley Edgar Hyman John barth's The Sot-Weed Factor was first published in 1960, but I did not catch up with it until last year, when it appeared in paperback...
...In my life I have experienced emotion intensely on only five occasions," Todd tells us...
...This is that variation of it, obsessive in the work of James Joyce, in which two male friends attain symbolic union by sharing the body of a woman...
...Otherwise the book is quite an achievement for a man of 26...
...It is a most interesting and impressive work...
...Todd may lunch or dine with a client...
...Then Todd simultaneously ended the Inquiry into his father's suicide by writing down his discovery that absolute values do not exist, so that "There is, then, no 'reason' for living...
...In the course of the day, during which Janie breaks with him and he makes a half-hearted suicide attempt, he discovers the importance of relative values, corrects his final proposition with the addition that there is no reason for dying prematurely, either, and determines to live...
Vol. 48 • April 1965 • No. 8
