The Floating Opera Read online

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living

  or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This low-priced Bantam Book

  has been completely reset in a type face

  designed for easy reading, and was printed

  from new plates. It contains the complete

  text of the original hard-cover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  THE FLOATING OPERA

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  The Floating Opera was originally published by

  Appleton Century Crofts, Inc., in 1956.

  The Doubleday edition was revised by the author.

  Doubleday edition published May 1967

  Bantam edition published July 1972

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1956, 1967 by John Barth.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by

  mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,

  277 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.

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  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Prefatory Note to the Revised Edition

  The Floating Opera was written in the first three months of 1955; its companion-piece, The End of the Road, in the last three months of the same year. The Opera was my first novel; I was twenty-four, had been writing fiction industriously for five years, and had had—deservedly—no success whatever with the publishers. One finally agreed to launch the Opera, but on condition that the builder make certain major changes in its construction, notably about the stern. I did, the novel was published, critics criticized the ending in particular, and I learned a boatwright little lesson. In this edition the original and correct ending to the story has been restored, as have a number of other, minor passages. The Floating Opera remains the very first novel of a very young man, but I’m pleased that it will sink or float now in its original design.

  John Barth

  Contents

  Prefatory Note to the Revised Edition

  I. tuning my piano

  II. the dorchester explorers’ club

  III. coitus

  IV. the captain’s confession

  V. a raison de coeur

  VI. maryland beaten biscuits

  VII. my unfinished boats

  VIII. a note, a warning

  IX. the handbill

  X. the law

  XI. an instructive, if sophisticated, observation

  XII. a chorus of oysters

  XIII. a mirror up to life

  XIV. bottles, needles, knives

  XV. that puckered smile

  XVI. the judge’s lunch

  XVII. the end of the outline

  XVIII. a matter of life or death

  XIX. a premise to swallow

  XX. calliope music

  XXI. coals to newcastle

  XXII. a tour of the opera

  XXIII. so long, so long

  XXIV. three million dollars

  XXV. the inquiry

  XXVI. the first step

  XXVII. the floating opera

  XXVIII. a parenthesis

  XXIX. the floating opera

  About the Author

  I. tuning my piano

  To someone like myself, whose literary activities have been confined since 1920 mainly to legal briefs and Inquiry-writing, the hardest thing about the task at hand—viz., the explanation of a day in 1937 when I changed my mind—is getting into it. I’ve never tried my hand at this sort of thing before, but I know enough about myself to realize that once the ice is broken the pages will flow all too easily, for I’m not naturally a reticent fellow, and the problem then will be to stick to the story and finally to shut myself up. I’ve no doubts on that score: I can predict myself correctly almost every time, because opinion here in Cambridge to the contrary, my behavior is actually quite consistent. If other people (my friend Harrison Mack, for instance, or his wife Jane) think I’m eccentric and unpredictable, it is because my actions and opinions are inconsistent with their principles, if they have any; I assure you that they’re quite consistent with mine. And although my principles might change now and then—this book, remember, concerns one such change—nevertheless I always have them a-plenty, more than I can handily use, and they usually hang all in a piece, so that my life is never less logical simply for its being unorthodox. Also, I get things done, as a rule.

  For example, I’ve got this book started now, and though we’re probably a good way from the story yet, at least we’re headed toward it, and I for one have learned to content myself with that. Perhaps when I’ve finished describing that particular day I mentioned before—I believe it was about June 21, 1937—perhaps when I reach the bedtime of that day, if ever, I’ll come back and destroy these pages of piano-tuning. Or perhaps not: I intend directly to introduce myself, caution you against certain possible interpretations of my name, explain the significance of this book’s title, and do several other gracious things for you, like a host fussing over a guest, to make you as comfortable as possible and to dunk you gently into the meandering stream of my story—useful activities better preserved than scrapped.

  To carry the “meandering stream” conceit a bit further, if I may: it has always seemed to me, in the novels that I’ve read now and then, that those authors are asking a great deal of their readers who start their stories furiously, in the middle of things, rather than backing or sidling slowly into them. Such a plunge into someone else’s life and world, like a plunge into the Choptank River in mid-March, has, it seems to me, little of pleasure in it. No, come along with me, reader, and don’t fear for your weak heart; I’ve one myself, and know the value of inserting first a toe, then a foot, next a leg, very slowly your hips and stomach, and finally your whole self into my story, and taking a good long time to do it. This is, after all, a pleasure-dip I’m inviting you to, not a baptism.

  Where were we? I was going to comment on the significance of the viz. I used earlier, was I? Or explain my “piano-tuning” metaphor? Or my weak heart? Good heavens, how does one write a novel! I mean, how can anybody stick to the story, if he’s at all sensitive to the significances of things? As for me, I see already that storytelling isn’t my cup of tea: every new sentence I set down is full of figures and implications that I’d love nothing better than to chase to their dens with you, but such chasing would involve new figures and new chases, so that I’m sure we’d never get the story started, much less ended, if I let my inclinations run unleashed. Not that I’d mind, ordinarily—one book is as good as another to me—but I really do want to explain that day (either the 21st or the 22nd) in June of 1937 when I changed my mind for the last time. We’ll have to stick to the channel, then, you and I, though it’s a shoal-draught boat we’re sailing, and let the creeks and coves go by, pretty as they might be. (This metaphor isn’t gratuitous—but let it go.)

  So. Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; I get letters addressed either way. I almost warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, “Tod is German for death: perhaps the name is symbolic.” I myself use two d’s, partly in o
rder to avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s because it just occurred to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd is almost Tod—that is, almost death—and this book, if it gets written, has very much to do with almost-death.

  One last remark. Were you ever chagrined by stories that seemed to promise some revelation, and then cheated their way out of it? I’ve run more times than I’d have chosen to into stories concerning some marvelous invention—a gravity-defier, or a telescope powerful enough to see men on Saturn, or a secret weapon capable of dislocating the solar system—but the mechanics of the gravity device are never explained; the question of Saturn’s inhabitation is never answered; we’re not told how to build our own solar-system dislocators. Well, not so this book. If I tell you that I’ve figured some things out, I’ll tell you what those things are and explain them as clearly as I can.

  Todd Andrews, then. Now, watch how I can move when I really care to: I’m fifty-four years old and six feet tall, but weigh only 145. I look like what I think Gregory Peck, the movie actor, will look like when he’s fifty-four, except that I keep my hair cut short enough not to have to comb it, and I don’t shave every day. (The comparison to Mr. Peck isn’t intended as self-praise, only as description. Were I God, creating the face of either Todd Andrews or Gregory Peck, I’d change it just a trifle here and there.) I’m well off, by most standards: I’m a partner in the law firm of Andrews, Bishop & Andrews—the second Andrews is me—and the practice nets me as much as I want it to, up to perhaps ten thousand dollars a year, maybe nine, although I’ve never pushed it far enough to find out. I live and work in Cambridge, the seat of Dorchester County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It’s my home town and my father’s—Andrews is an old Dorchester name—and I’ve never lived anywhere else except for the years I spent in the Army during the First World War and the years I spent in Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland Law School afterwards. I’m a bachelor. I live in a single room in the Dorset Hotel, just across High Street from the courthouse, and my office is in “Lawyers’ Row” on Court Lane, one block away. Although my law practice pays my hotel bill, I consider it no more my career than a hundred other things: sailing, drinking, walking the streets, writing my Inquiry, staring at walls, hunting ducks and ’coons, reading, playing politics. I’m interested in any number of things, enthusiastic about nothing. I wear rather expensive clothing. I smoke Robert Burns cigars. My drink is Sherbrook rye and ginger ale. I read often and unsystematically—that is, I have my own system, but it’s unorthodox. I am in no hurry. In short, I live my life—or have lived it, at least, since 1937—in much the same manner as I’m writing this first chapter of The Floating Opera.

  I almost forgot to mention my illnesses.

  The fact is, I’m not a well man. What reminded me of it just now was that while I was daydreaming about the name Floating Opera, sitting here at my table in the Dorset Hotel, surrounded by the files of my Inquiry, I commenced drumming my fingers on the table, in rhythm with a galloping neon sign outside. You should see my fingers. They’re the only deformity in a body otherwise serviceable and, it has in my life been whispered to me, not unlovely. But these fingers. Great clubbed things: huge, sallow, heavy nails. I used to have (probably still have) a kind of subacute bacteriological endocarditis, with a special complication. Had it since I was a youngster. It clubbed my fingers, and now and then I get weak, not too often. But the complication is a tendency to myocardial infarction. What that means is that any day I may fall quickly dead, without warning—perhaps before I complete this sentence, perhaps twenty years from now. I’ve known this since 1919: thirty-five years. My other trouble is a chronic infection of the prostate gland. It gave me trouble when I was younger—several kinds of trouble, as I’ll doubtless explain somewhere later—but for many years now I’ve simply taken a hormone capsule (one milligram of diethylstilbestrol, an estrogen) every day, and except for a sleepless night now and then, the infection doesn’t bother me any more. My teeth are sound, except for one filling in my lower left rear molar and a crown on my upper right canine (I broke it on a ferryboat railing in 1917, wrestling with a friend while crossing the Chesapeake). I’m never constipated, and my vision and digestion are perfect. Finally, I was bayoneted just a little bit by a German sergeant in the Argonne during the First World War. There’s a small place on my left calf from it, where a muscle atrophied, but the little scar doesn’t hurt. I killed the German sergeant.

  No doubt when I get the hang of storytelling, after a chapter or two, I’ll go faster and digress less often.

  Now then, the title, and then we’ll see whether we can’t start the story. When I decided, sixteen years ago, to write about how I changed my mind one night in June of 1937, I had no title in mind. Indeed, it wasn’t until an hour or so ago, when I began writing, that I realized the story would be at least novel-length and resolved therefore to give it a novel title. In 1938, when I determined to set the story down, it was intended only as an aspect of the preliminary study for one chapter of my Inquiry, the notes and data for which fill most of my room. I’m thorough. The first job, once I’d sworn to set that June day down on paper, was to recollect as totally as possible all my thoughts and actions on that day, to make sure nothing was left out. That little job took me nine years—I didn’t push myself—and the notes filled seven peach gaskets over there by the window. Then I had to do a bit of reading: a few novels, to get the feel of the business of narrating things, and some books on medicine, boatbuilding, philosophy, minstrelsy, marine biology, jurisprudence, pharmacology, Maryland history, the chemistry of gases, and one or two other things, to get “background” and to make sure I understood approximately what had happened. This took three years—rather unpleasant ones, because I had to abandon my usual system of choosing books in order to do that comparatively specialized reading. The last two years I spent editing my recollections of that day from seven peach baskets down to one, writing commentary and interpretative material on them until I had seven peach basketsful again, and finally editing the commentary back down from seven peach baskets to two, from which I intended to draw comments rather at random every half hour or so during the writing.

  Ah, me. Everything, I’m afraid, is significant, and nothing is finally important. I’m pretty sure now that my sixteen years of preparation won’t be as useful, or at least not in the same way, as I’d thought: I understand the events of that day fairly well, but as for commentary—I think that what I shall do is try not to comment at all, but simply stick to the facts. That way I know I’ll still digress a great deal—the temptation is always great, and becomes irresistible when I know the end to be irrelevant—but at least I have some hope of reaching the end, and when I lapse from grace, I shall at any rate be able to congratulate myself on my intentions.

  Why The Floating Opera? I could explain until Judgment Day, and still not explain completely. I think that to understand any one thing entirely, no matter how minute, requires the understanding of every other thing in the world. That’s why I throw up my hands sometimes at the simplest things; it’s also why I don’t mind spending a lifetime getting ready to begin my Inquiry. Well, The Floating Opera. That’s part of the name of a showboat that used to travel around the Virginia and Maryland tidewater areas: Adonis Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera; Jacob R. Adam, owner and captain; admissions 20, 35, and 50 cents. The Floating Opera was tied up at Long Wharf on the day I changed my mind, in 1937, and some of this book happens aboard it. That’s reason enough to use it as a title. But there’s a better reason. It always seemed a fine idea to me to build a showboat with just one big flat open deck on it, and to keep a play going continuously. The boat wouldn’t be moored, but would drift up and down the river on the tide, and the audience would sit along both banks. They could catch whatever part of the plot happened to unfold as the boat floated past, and then they’d have to w
ait until the tide ran back again to catch another snatch of it, if they still happened to be sitting there. To fill in the gaps they’d have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive neighbors, or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver. Most times they wouldn’t understand what was going on at all, or they’d think they knew, when actually they didn’t. Lots of times they’d be able to see the actors, but not hear them. I needn’t explain that that’s how much of life works: our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we either renew our friendship—catch up to date—or find that they and we don’t comprehend each other any more. And that’s how this book will work, I’m sure. It’s a floating opera, friend, fraught with curiosities, melodrama, spectacle, instruction, and entertainment, but it floats willy-nilly on the tide of my vagrant prose: you’ll catch sight of it, lose it, spy it again; and it may require the best efforts of your attention and imagination—together with some patience, if you’re an average fellow—to keep track of the plot as it sails in and out of view.

  II. the dorchester explorers’ club

  I suppose I must have waked at six o’clock, that morning in 1937 (I’m going to call it June 21). I had spent a poor night—this was the last year of my prostate trouble. I’d got up more than once to smoke a bit, or walk about my room, or jot some notes for my Inquiry, or stare out the window at the Post Office, across High Street from the hotel. Then I’d managed to fall asleep just before sunrise, but the light, or whatever, popped me awake on the tick of six, as it does every morning.

  I was just thirty-seven then, and as was my practice, I greeted the new day with a slug of Sherbrook from the quart on my window sill. I’ve a quart sitting there now, but it’s not the same one; not by a long shot. The habit of saluting the dawn with a bend of the elbow was a hangover from college-fraternity days: I had got really to enjoy it, but I gave it up some years ago. Broke the habit deliberately, as a matter of fact, just for the exercise of habit-breaking.