When I think of John Barth, I can’t help thinking of those lines in A.E. Housman’s famous poem “To an Athlete Dying Young”: “Now you will not swell the rout / Of lads who wore their honors out, / Runners whom renown outran, / And the name died before the man.” Barth, the darling of critics and scholars in the 60s and 70s, has for decades been the forgotten man among the pioneers of post-modernism. His books over the past thirty years have not reached the best-seller status of his previous successes, and now, at 93, his name is virtually never mentioned in the catalogues of our most significant writers.
But in a series of books beginning with The Sot Weed Factor in 1960, followed by best-seller Giles Goat Boy, the Borges-influenced collection of short stories Lost in the Fun House, the National Book Award-winning collection of novellas Chimera, and the mind-boggling epistolary tour-de-force Letters in 1979, Barth was at the forefront of the movement that became known as post-modernism and the development of what became known as metafiction. His post-modernist manifesto “The Literature of Exhaustion,” published in The Atlantic in 1967, called literary realism a “used-up tradition,” and inspired a widespread prediction of what his contemporaries called “the death of the novel.” Barth was not so pessimistic. He was merely announcing a new direction, a different kind of novel—a novel, as he said “which imitate[s] the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of author.”
Of all Barth’s brilliant satires, the one I find most compelling is The Sot-Weed Factor, his first foray into this new kind of novel, and this is the book I’m choosing as book #10 on my list of “The 100 Most Lovable Books in the English Language.” This novel was included in Time magazine’s 2005 list of the “100 Best English-Language Novels Since 1923,” and though it might not appear on a lot of reading lists in college literature courses any more, it has lost none of its appeal nor its infinite inventiveness, and remains a rollicking good time of a read.
In The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth turns from the structure of the modern realist novel (a form he had employed in his first two novels, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road) to embrace the very roots of the novel tradition in English. Producing what Fielding called a “comic epic in prose,” Barth essentially imitates the form of Tom Jones and, going farther back, Don Quixote itself. One can also see the influence of Voltaire’s Candide on the novel in the series of disasters that beset its protagonist, Ebenezer Cooke, converting his early optimism into a decidedly satiric view of the world by the novel’s end; and the influence of that other eighteenth-century begetter of the novel, Samuel Richardson and his Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, in which the heroine struggles to keep her chastity despite the amorous advances of her employer: Ebeneezer, too, strives comically to keep his virginity against the temptations of any a female in the course of his narrative.
Barth takes his title (which is an old phrase meaning “tobacco merchant”) from the title of a 1708 poem of the same name: “The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr,” by an otherwise unknown poet named Ebenezer Cooke, who lived ca. 1665-ca. 1732. Little is known of Cooke’s life, so Barth used the poet’s unknown story as a blank slate on which to construct a fantastic and hilarious pseudo-biography in the form of this novel. In Barth’s telling, Cooke is a rather unsuccessful London poet who is exiled by his father to his tobacco farm in the new colony of Maryland. Before leaving London, he obtains the title “Poet Laureate of Maryland” from Charles Calvert, Third Baron Baltimore, who commissions him to write an epic Marylandiad to advertise the assets of the new colony.
Ebenezer is in love with the prostitute Joan Toast, for whom he is saving his virginity, but he falls under the influence of his former tutor, a kind of trickster figure by the name of Henry Burlingame, who appears in disguise as most of the novel’s most important characters. After a long and complex series of misadventures involving pirates, Indians and rebellious slaves, and a variety of folks laying a claim to Ebenezer’s farm, the disillusioned Ebenezer’s Marylandiad turns into that satirical Sot-Weed Factor of real-life history.
It’s impossible to sum up the 804 pages of the novel in a coherent way in a short review, and I don’t want to print any spoilers, but let me assure you that those 804 pages fly by and if you’re anything like me you will wish the book was actually longer. But there are set pieces in the novel that I might lift up to give you a sense of the flavor of the narrative if you haven’t read it: You will discover a hilarious retelling of the story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith that turns history into farce. There is one chapter that is completely in rhyme. Another chapter contains some eight pages dedicated to an exchange of insults between two women calling one another synonyms for “whore” through alternating English and French epithets. But perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the novel is Barth’s adaptation of an 18th century narrative voice, apparent from his very first very long sentence:
“In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping point.”
How can you resist a beginning like that one? Of course you can’t. Neither could Steven Soderbergh, who announced ten years ago that he was planning to make a 12-part TV production of Barth’s novel. Five years ago, he claimed to still be working on it. But nothing has surfaced yet. So my advice is, don’t wait for the TV mini-series. Make it a point to read this novel as soon as you can. You’re welcome.