The Prose and Poetry of It All,

or,

Dippy Verses

       This Friday-piece needs no introduction.

       Some seasons ago I published a novel called Sabbatical: A Romance. It is about love and spies and sailing on Chesapeake Bay and deciding not to have children at this late hour of the world. I myself think well of the story, and so did numerous of its reviewers, but a number of others decidedly did not.

       Now, it happens that for nearly thirty years I have been pleased to be a professional teacher as well as a professional writer. Since it behooves a teacher to be an ongoing learner, still at my age I try to learn from sympathetic critics how to practice my storytelling art better. If it's somebody else's art they want me to practice -- even the art of other writers I admire, and those are many and various -- I shrug my shoulders: The leopard may polish up his spots, but he can't change them; he may well not wish to. Moreover, like any battle-wise veteran, I've learned to dismiss criticism which itself is merely dismissive: hired hatchet-jobs, literary kneecapping, exercises in the venting of spleen, for which the work under review is merely the trigger. Such attacks are worth one exasperated sigh and no more: The world is the world; one is who one is.

       Even so, an occasional sand-grain gets under my shell and irritates my imagination into pearling it over. The novel Sabbatical: A Romance opens with 3½ lines of verse, the last of which modulates into the prose of the story like this:

       There was a story that began,

       Said Fenwick Turner: Susie and Fenn--

       Oh, tell that story! Tell it again!

       Wept Susan Seckler. . .

       Graybeard Fenn would be happy to give it another go; we have fiddled with our tale through this whole sabbatical voyage: down the Intracoastal in the fall in our cruising sailboat, Pokey, Wye I., from Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf of Mexico and across to Yucatan; all about the Caribbean, island-hopping through the mild winter of 1980; and in May through our first long open-ocean passage, from St. John in the U.S. Virgins direct for the Virginia Capes, Chesapeake Bay, Wye Island, the closing of the circle, sabbatical's end.

       One unfriendly reviewer -- I have forgotten which; that's my revenge -- called these verses "dippy." What he or she said was, "Barth's new novel begins with some dippy verses. . ."

       Dippy verses!

       Well, of course they're dippy. If the reviewer-person had used that adjective as neutral description, I wouldn't have minded. Those couplets, both of them, are spoken by the hero of the novel, the male of the couple, Fenwick Scott Key Turner: a 50-year-old ex-CIA officer currently between careers; ardent sailor and husband; lineal descendant of the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner"; and himself the author of a troublemaking book about his former employer. Fenwick Turner is now an aspiring novelist who hates spy novels as much as he loves his wife of seven years, his Black-Eyed Susan. The verses are a kind of standing joke between him and that same wife, Susan Rachel Allan Seckler: a sharp young associate professor of classical American literature -- part Jewish, part Gypsy, and possibly descended from Edgar Allan Poe. Fenwick is, in fact, as he repeats this versified standing joke, standing -- at the tiller of the couple's 33 1/3 foot cruising sailboat Pokey, Wye I., in which they are just completing that aforementioned nine-month sabbatical voyage, beset by a number of large problems and small adventures. The verses are dippy.

       But they are not simply dippy. For one thing, they are understood by speaker, listener, author, and reader (if not by that nameless book-reviewer) to be. . . ironic. Fenwick Turner says "There was a story that began," etc., but in fact he has not yet begun the story he knows is there to be told. For another, one of the few things that Fenwick and the author of Sabbatical: A Romance have in common is that neither of us is a poet -- not that professional poets are incapable of perpetrating dippy verses. Fenwick and I don't even aspire to poetry, much as I, at least, value much of it. William Faulkner's infamous remark that all novels are failed poems strikes me and Fenwick as far from the truth: Leaving aside all the poems that are failed poems, there are surely a great many novelists who never aspired to serious verse. I am of that number, and so is Fenwick Scott Key Turner. Indeed, much later in the novel, having shared with Susan a flashback-dream that flashes all the way back to the Big Bang that began the story of our universe, the couple experience separate but equal flashforward dreams, different in content but similarly apocalyptic, and Fenwick's includes an acknowledgment of his poetical incapacity. Here's Susan's dream first:

       Her night's mare has flashed forward from the night before's, and is for the most part impersonal. Our marriage having failed along with the Democratic coalition, the NATO alliance, the U.S. dollar, and Fenwick's heart, to the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner," Susan witnesses the physical collapse in turn of the continental United States (which splits anticlimactically at the San Andreas fault), then of the solar system, the galaxy, the universe -- for some reason all because she and Fenn will have no children. From Fort McHenry's ramparts, which are also Pokey's cockpit, Susan sees the West sink into the sun, the sun into the galactic vortex like Odysseus's ship-timbers into Charybdis, or whatever-it-was into Poe's Maelstrom. Pokey himself is now become our galaxy, now our universe, rushing headlong into one of its own Black Holes like that legendary bird that flies in ever-diminishing circles until it vanishes into its own fundament; like [Arthur Gordon] Pym's canoe rushing into the chasm at the foot of the cataract at the southern Pole: a black hole aspirating, with a cosmic shlup, us, U.S., all.

And here's Fenwick's flashforward dream:

       His was about failure: professional, personal, physical. Sitting next to him yesterday in the Amtrak coach to Baltimore had been a paunchy self-important late-sixtyish man in soiled summer worsteds -- string bow tie, loose dentures, florid face, dandruff on his shoulders like shaken salt from his ill-kempt salt-and-pepper hair -- who turned out to be a leading figure in the Virginia Poetry Society, a compulsive self-promoter even unto strangers on a short train ride, and the very odor of failure. In Fenn's dream, Fenn was that man, losing obscure battles with the right-wing Poet Laureate of Maryland. Susan was long since gone, god knows where: She'd left him, and with good reason. Every dollar counted. He had no friends. [His ex-wife] Marilyn Marsh, thriving, prospering, was thick as thieves with [Daughter-in-law] Julie and Grandson Marshall Marsh Turner, named in her honor. But [his son] Orrin's career was going ill, and even Marshall Marsh was doing poorly in school. [Fenn's parents] Chief and Virgie were dead; Fenn himself was sick and sore; every movement was painful; Key Farm was falling down; there was no money to maintain it. Even Wye Island was disappearing, and that circumstance was somehow Fenn's fault. An aide to the President-elect was on the telephone, but Fenwick could find no other rhyme for inaugural than doggerel. He smelled death: It smelled like the breath of that Virginia Poetry Society man.

       Now, that is not a dream that I have ever had -- and anyhow, Fenwick Scott Key Turner n'est pas moi. He is a better sailor than I am, for one thing, with a bigger boat. Charles Darwin once praised Charles Dickens for "[giving] us heroes we can admire and heroines we can love." Another function of art, surely, is to provide us with larger sailboats than we can in fact afford. But I am a better novelist than Fenwick is; if he has a longer boat, I have a longer bibliography, and enough experience in the medium he aspires to to know that doggerel and other varieties of dippy verse have an ancient and honorable place in that medium. Two wonderful things about the capital-N Novel are that of all the genres of literature -- maybe even of all the forms of art -- it is 1) the most hospitable to amateurs and 2) the most accommodating to contamination of every sort.

       Let us consider the first of these: It would strain plausibility, if not possibility, to imagine a 50-year-old with no previous real experience in the medium making a successful debut as a Wagnerian Heldentenor, I think, or a director of Chekhov's plays, or a sculptor of bronzes. A character in a novel who aspired to such a debut would almost have to be drawn with dramatic irony: He may think he'll make it, but we know that probably nobody ever picked up a violin, say, or a stonecutter's chisel and did it right the first time. Yet it is a famous blessing of the Novel, to the chagrin of many professional novelists and the despair of agents and editors buried under over-the-transom manuscripts, as they're called in the trade, that numerous amateurs have done it more or less right the first time, and numerous professionals have never equalled their first published effort. The list is long, and it runs the length of the genre's history, from those middle-aged beginners (as novelists) Cervantes and Defoe and Richardson, through the great flood of nineteenth-century amateurs like Lewis Carroll (but everybody in the nineteenth century wrote novels), down to such modern late starters and out-of-practically nowherers as Joseph Conrad and Amos Tutuola, let's say -- not to mention such mainly popular successes as William F. Buckley, Jr., John Erlichman of Watergate fame, and the Margarets -- from Margaret Truman back through Margaret Mitchell to Marguerite the Queen of Navarre.*

* I am delighted by the news (Friday, January 13, 1984) that my American publisher, Putnam's, has just bought a 1176-page novel by an eighty-eight-year-old resident of a nursing Home in Xenia, Ohio, who has spent the last half-century settling the narrative score with Sinclair Lewis for poor-mouthing the midwest in Babbitt and Main Street. "I wanted to do as artistic a piece as possible," declares the author, Ms. Helen Santmyer of Hospitality Home East in Xenia. And I'll bet she did, too.

       Well, okay: Margaret of Navarre's Heptameron of 1558 isn't really a novel; it's a frametale cycle on the order of Boccaccio's and Chaucer's and Giambattista Basile's and Scheherazade's. That brings us to the other characteristic of the form which I mentioned admiringly a while ago: its almost anarchical flexibility and its capacity not only for absorbing but for thriving upon all sorts of extrinsic input, as it were, like immigrant America once upon a time, or the folkloristic recipe for stone soup. If I don't go along with Faulkner on the matter of novelists as failed poets, I very much sympathize with his stated wish to be reborn as a turkey-buzzard; I even take his remarks on that subject to be descriptive of the art he practiced. Faulkner said he'd like to come back as a turkey-buzzard because the animal has no natural enemies and can feed on anything. I say that the novel is your great turkey-buzzard of art.

       What's more, it is a protean turkey-buzzard, which can pass itself off as everything from a hummingbird to an ostrich. What do the following objects have in common: Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Capote's and Mailer's "nonfiction novels"; Alex Haley's whatyoucallit novel Roots; Dino Buzzati's comic-strip novel of the late 1960s; Marc Saporta's unbound, unpaginated, randomly packaged novel-in-a-box of about the same vintage; Nikos Kazantzakis's long verse-novel, as some have called it, The Odyssey: a modern sequel; the latest pornographic photonovel from Hamburg, Paris, or Rome; Marcel Proust's zillion-word roman fleuve, The Remembrance of Things Past; and Robert Coover's very short new novel Spanking the Maid, which could have been published as a long short story?*

* And in fact was, in The Iowa Review, before the Grove Press version appeared.

       Damned if I know. Even Randall Jarrell's wonderful definition of the novel -- a prose narrative fiction of a certain length that has something wrong with it -- has several things wrong with it, as can be seen by applying it to the list above: Some of those items aren't prose, some can scarcely be called narrative, some aren't fiction, and their length is wildly uncertain. It doesn't even quite fit Madame Bovary, which Nabokov among others declares has nothing wrong with it. The novel is an essentially existentialistic form whose existence not only precedes its essence, but keeps redefining its essence right out of existence. It is a (usually, mainly) verbal Watts Towers, a backyard cathedral made sometimes out of whatever wretched refuse lies to the builder's hand. It is a literary osprey's nest, which may look thrown together like a pile of pick-up-sticks, but which in the best cases will withstand storms of criticism and the shifting winds of fashion.

       I shall now digress at length upon the subject of ospreys' nests: Faulkner had his favorite bird; I have mine. The osprey, or fish-hawk, a cousin of the eagle, builds its big ramshackle rickety-looking nest in the crotch of a dead tree in or near tidewater when it has to rely upon nature for a Homesite. However, it much prefers the osprey platforms built for it by conservationists: a $10 square of marine-grade plywood mounted well above the high water line on a $125 piling driven into a river bottom not far from shore. And even more than an official osprey platform, it likes a U.S. Coast Guard navigational day beacon as a building site: Since their purpose is to mark shoals, day beacons satisfy all the osprey's basic requirements -- a sturdy platform on a sturdy post well above the highwater mark in shallow water not far from shore -- plus the bonus of the beacon's dayboards, which serve as windbreaks and side braces for the nest. Having a very bright light flash every 2½ seconds or so all night long a few inches from his head doesn't seem to bother your osprey: So ideal is a Coast Guard day beacon as a nesting site that you are unlikely ever to see one without a grand osprey-house upon it, and so enthusiastically do the ospreys build there that very frequently their nests come to obscure the lights which mariners depend upon to identify day beacons by night. The notice Light obscured (osprey) is a refrain even today in the list of "Discrepancies in Aids to Navigation" in the Coast Guard's weekly bulletin Local Notices to Mariners, and it used to be even more so.

       For decades and decades, what the Coast Guard did, assisted by local mariners, was routinely to destroy such ospreys' nests; and the ospreys, being ospreys, routinely rebuilt them. Everybody was unhappy. The Coast Guard was unhappy because destroying osprey nests is expensive, disagreeable, time-consuming nuisance work that could never really be kept up with even in the make-work 1930s. The mariners were unhappy because day-beacon lights were still very often obscured, and when you're sailing at night and can't find a day-beacon light that is supposed to be there, you're likely to pile up on a shoal, either because you've made a serious navigational error or because you haven't but erroneously conclude that you have. The ospreys were unhappy for obvious reasons. And the conservationists, in their increasing number, were unhappy because the ospreys in their decreasing number were unhappy. Everybody's claim was legitimate, but the claims seemed irreconcilable.

       We are not done with this digression.

       Attempts to design a day beacon uninviting to ospreys failed: You need a platform on that pile to support those day boards and that battery box with its light. Attempts to lure the ospreys away from the day beacons with those special platforms built exclusively for ospreys failed: The osprey population quickly correlates exactly with the nesting sites available to it. The number of ospreys went up, but the number of obscured day-beacon lights did not go down. Surprisingly late in the day -- just a few years ago, I believe -- some anonymous genius was inspired to a simple, cheap, permanent solution to this dilemma that made all parties happy: Instead of them obscuring our lights and us destroying their nests, why not leave the day beacons and the osprey nests exactly as they are and raise the light? Raise the light a meter or so above the battery box on a simple, sturdy, skinny length of pipe, and all problems vanish; all claims are reconciled. The ospreys are as happy as it is given to ospreys to be. The conservationists are as happy (on this one subject) as it is given to conservationists to be. The mariner knows that if the light that ought to be visible by now in fact is not, the fault is very probably his; we cannot call that condition Happiness, but at least it's a less equivocal and less frequent misery. And the Coast Guard -- that most beneficent, most useful, most pacific, most deserving, least well funded of our more or less armed services* -- its resources diminishing even as the ospreys' resources increase, can now turn its strained attention to higher priorities. If we still see the notice Light obscured (osprey} in the Local Notices to Mariners, that is because the USCG can't afford to make even so cheap and easy a modification right across the board. They fix a few every year.

* The U.S. Coast Guard is not, strictly speaking, a branch of the military, though its cutters are lightly armed.

       Meanwhile, I never sail past such a modified day beacon without admiring both the osprey's crazy nest with that wonderful piece of pipe sticking up beside it, through it, anyhow well above it, and the simple elegance of the Coast Guard's solution to a seemingly irreconcilable dilemma -- a solution which may have taken the human imagination decades to come up with, but which the osprey imagination couldn't equal except perhaps in evolutionary time. In my innocence I can't help wondering why Israelis and Arabs, for example, or Iraqis and Iranis, or (to take a really thorny example) modernists and antimodernists, don't simply somehow raise the light a little higher above their conflicting and more or less legitimate claims. No doubt there are good reasons other than insufficient imagination -- but the example of the day-beacon lights makes me wonder.

       Back now to the important subject of dippy verses as a legitimate contaminant of novels. My wife and I rounded one particular Chesapeake Bay day beacon last summer closely enough for us to observe, while Ma and Pa Osprey circled our mast, kvetching about invasion of privacy, that in addition to the usual sticks, straws, battery box, and very Homely baby ospreys, their nest incorporated several odd lengths of fish-line, one with plastic float and hooks still attached, a strip of what looked like toilet paper, a ribbon of Dacron sailcloth (probably a furling gasket from somebody's mainsail), a twisted chrome-plated piece of what was doubtless Detroit automobile trim, and other, less recognizable odds and ends. It had also become a sort of polyglot condominium, in whose lower reaches noncompeting species such as house sparrows and beach swallows had built their own small nests, while over all rose the beacon on its pipe -- and I thought about the Novel.

       I wish some book reviewers, too, would raise their lights a bit. Verses, I repeat, even dippy ones -- perhaps especially dippy ones -- have an ancient and honorable place in booklength works of prose fiction. I shall not presume to judge the dippiness of, e.g., Lisa Erdman's long poem which comprises the "Don Giovanni" section of D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel, or Warren Penfield's long poem "Loon Lake" in E. L. Doctorow's novel of the same title, or John Shade's 555-line poem which Charles Kinbote annotates to make Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, or even Stephen Dedalus's villanelle composed in the closing chapter of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If you happen to enjoy those poems straight, on their own merits -- as I rather do -- the novelist is ahead of the game (Doctorow's "Loon Lake" poem appeared in the Kenyan Review, over Doctorow's name, before the novel was published). But as a rule you won't find such poems-within-novels excerpted for separate publication or included in serious anthologies of poetry: Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," "The Walrus and the Carpenter," etc. are wonderful exceptions to this general rule. If on the other hand you find such poems as those just mentioned less than immortal as poems in their own right, all the way back to Rabelais's avant-garde pattern-poem "Ode to a Bottle" in Gargantua and Pantagruel -- even if you find some of them a touch dippy -- the novelist's tracks are covered. For a poem incorporated into the text of a novel -- or a page of musical score so incorporated, or a play, a line drawing, a photograph, even a political or philosophical idea -- is no longer its innocent existential self, any more than that bit of fishline worked into that osprey's nest is still a line for catching fish. Now: If such a line should happen also to dangle accidentally into the water at flood tide, say, and accidentally catch fish for the ospreys to eat, we are permitted to be charmed by that coincidence; but if it doesn't, we shall not therefore call it a dippy piece of fishline.

       No need to belabor this simple point, except to say that unlike day beacons and osprey nests, which can be said each to have a single "true" function and other accidental ones (such as serving as symbols in a lecture on the novel), a novel may be an osprey-nest of intentions as well as of materials. We know that certain novelists take their political, social, philosophical, even mystical-religious ideas quite as seriously as they take their literary ideas, and may even regard their novels primarily as launching platforms for those ideas, the way the osprey regards the day beacon as a launching platform for fledgling ospreys. To such novelists -- whose ranks include not only mediocrities and cranks but many great artists as well, from Charles Dickens to Gabriel García Márquez -- I think we may say, "Go to it -- so long as you don't obscure the light." Which is to say, so long as we are permitted to admire your work for other reasons.

       Back to dippy verses. My own mentor in that art, as in some others, is Scheherazade. The 1001 Nights, in Richard Burton's ten-volume 1885 edition, comprises, in addition to the great primary frametale of Scheherazade and King Shahryar, 169 secondary tales, by my count, told by Scheherazade to the King (plus one told to her by her father the Grand Vizier), 87 third-level tales told by the characters in Scheherazade's second-level tales, and 11 fourth-level tales told by the characters in those third-level tales told by the characters in the second-level tales told by Scheherazade, the heroine of the nameless author's primary tale: some 268 tales in all. The work also includes, by Burton's estimate, about 1,400 poems or parts of poems: approximately 10,000 lines of verse in all, very many of which -- in translation, at least, and across the centuries and cultures -- strike this admiring reader as fairly dippy. But I couldn't care less, and I can't imagine that magnificent catch-all work without those bright bits of bunting worked into its construction. King Shahryar himself, at the end of those 1001 nights, describes Scheherazade's fiction as consisting of "proverbs and parables, chronicles and pleasantries, quips and jests, stories and anecdotes, dialogues and histories and elegies and other verses. . ." In short, the works. And it works.

       As for dippy verses in my own fiction: I'm pleased to find that I can virtually review my life's work under that aspect, and now I virtually shall. My first published novel, The Floating Opera, contains a few, in the showboat-show from which that novel takes its name. My original intention, in fact, had been to do the whole novel in the form and format of the turn-of-the-century American blackface minstrel show, but by the time this particular osprey's nest was built, the show was reduced to part of one chapter and the poetry abridged to a single quatrain in the show, spoken by Mister Bones to Mister Tambo. Never mind that quatrain: It's apprentice dippy; mere fledgling dippy.

       Two novels later, in The Sot-Weed Factor, I was able to spread my wings much farther, dippy-versewise, since that novel's hero is a real-life Colonial American poet, Ebenezer Cooke of Maryland, whose real-life poem, so to speak -- "The Sot-Weed Factor" -- is the armature of my novel. Cooke was one of our earliest American poets and would be one of our dippiest were it not that his medium is satire. Indeed, I believe him to have been the first American satirist. He was an Augustan poet much influenced by Samuel Butler's Hudibras; his characteristic vehicle is Butler's mock-heroic couplet. E.g., from Cooke's original "Sot-Weed Factor" of 1708:

       The Indians call their wat'ry Wagon

       Canoe: a Vessel none can brag on.

       Pretty dippy. Or the luckless tobacco-dealer's closing malediction upon the province of Maryland, which has used him so ill:

       Embarqu'd and waiting for a Wind,

       I leave this dreadful Curse behind.

       May Canniballs transported o'er the Sea

       Prey on these Slaves, as they have done on me;

       May never Merchant's trading Sails explore

       This cruel, this Inhospitable Shoar;

       But left abandon'd by the World to starve,

       May they sustain the fate they well deserve:

       May they turn Salvage, or as Indians wild,

       From Trade, Converse, and Happiness exil'd;

       Recreant to Heaven, may they adore the Sun,

       And into Pagan Superstitions run

       For Vengeance ripe --

       May Wrath Divine then lay these Regions wast

       Where no Man's Faithful, nor a Woman Chast!

       The hudibrastic couplet, like Herpes simplex, is a contagion more easily caught than cured. It was my pleasure to compose a great many hudibrastic couplets for my fictionalized Ebenezer Cooke, of which two brief specimens, the first and the last, will serve here. The first is from early in the novel, when, as the opening paragraph declares:

       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.

       These particular dippy verses Cooke writes at Magdalene college, Cambridge, after an undergraduate lecture on philosophical materialism. He leaves the lecture hall, we're told, with no more in his notebook than:

       Old Plato saw both Mind and Matter;

       Thomas Hobbes, naught but the latter.

       Now poor Tom's Soul doth fry in Hell:

       Shrugs GOD, " 'Tis immaterial."

       In the course of the story Cooke perpetrates many another hudibrastic, for which I am responsible -- on love, innocence, sea-voyaging, the fall from innocence -- as well as the rough draft of "The Sot-Weed Factor" poem itself. And since no one knows when the historical Ebenezer Cooke died or where he's buried, it was my privilege to close the novel with a dippy epitaph, which I have the disillusioned old poet compose for himself:

       Here moulds a posing, foppish Actor,

       Author of The Sot-Weed Factor,

       Falsely prais'd. Take Heed, who sees this

       Epitaph; look ye to Jesus!

       Labour not for Earthly Glory:

       Fame's a fickle Slut, and whory.

       From thy Fancy's chast Couch drive her:

       He's a Fool who'll strive to swive her!

              E.C., Gent, P^t & L^t of M^d

       Well. Since art is long -- some of my art particularly -- and life is short (as Horace remarks in one of his verses), I shall spare you my dippy-verse satire of Sophocles in Giles Goat-Boy. Also the dippy effusions of my stranded, nameless Homeric bard in Lost in the Funhouse (in the story "Anonymiad"), who is reduced to making love to empty wine-jugs and inventing alternative endings to the Trojan War, which he writes on goatskins and publishes by floating them off in the empty amphorae from his desert island. Oh well, I will read you one dippy lyric of his; it's called "The Minstrel's Last Lay," and it's written in extremis -- a favorite verse-form of dippy poets. First he invokes his muse:

       Twice-handled goddess! Sing through me the boy

       Whom Agamemnon didn't take to Troy,

       But left behind to see his wife stayed chaste.

       Tell, Muse, how Clytemnestra maced

       Her warden into song, made vain his heart

       With vision of renown; musick the art

       Wherewith was worked self-ruin by a youth

       Who'd sought in his own art some music truth

       About the world and life, of which he knew

       Nothing. Tell how ardent his wish grew

       To autograph the future, wherefore he

       Let sly Aegisthus ship him off to see

       The Wide Real World. Sing of the guile

       That fetched yours truly to a nameless isle,

       By gods, men, and history forgot,

       To sing his sorry self.

       And die. And rot. And feed his silly carcass to the birds.

       But not before he'd penned a few last words,

inspired by the dregs and lees of the muse herself, at whom, Zeus willing, he'll have a final go before he corks her for good and casts her adrift, vessel of his hopeless hope. The Minstrel's Last Lay.

       Once upon a time

       I composed in witty rhyme

       And poured libations to the muse Erato.

       Merope would croon,

       "Minstrel mine, a lay! A tune!"

       "From bed to verse," I'd answer; "that's my motto."

       Stranded by my foes,

       Nowadays I write in prose,

       Forsaking measure, rhyme, and honeyed diction;

       Amphora's my muse:

       When I finish off the booze,

       I hump the jug and fill her up with fiction.

       You shall likewise be spared the occasional verses floating through the ample waters of the novel LETTERS, some of them allegedly composed by a contemporary lineal descendant of Maryland's original Poet Laureate, Ebenezer Cooke. Instead, I shall now end my lecture twice: first with the ending of Sabbatical: A Romance, which closes as it opened, with you-know-what. The good ship Pokey, Wye I., has come to anchor behind Cacaway, an uninhabited island off Chesapeake Bay. Susan and Fenwick have not resolved all the problems and mysteries that beset their sabbatical voyage; almost certainly they will not have children of their own. But they have decided to write their story, the story of their literal and figurative voyage. (The text throughout, I ought to explain, has been appropriately star-spangled with footnotes -- Susan being a working academic and Fenwick the descendant of F. S. Key -- and the couple will append their names to its bottom line in a final such note.) Susan says:

       If that's going to be our story, then let's begin it at the end and end at the beginning, so we can go on forever. Begin with our living happily ever after.

       Fenwick says he doesn't quite get it and then cries I get it! Oh Susan!

       Yet we both know that not even a story is ever after. Here come more storms toward Cacaway, and we've yet to retrieve that dinghy. No matter, there's light left. Happily after, Susan prompts, unfastening. Come on. Right readily her grateful mate complies; we commence as we would conclude, that they lived

       Happily after, to the end

       Of Fenwick and Susie. . .*

* Susan. Fenn.

       Finally, as a kind of footnote to that footnote, I shall read you the opening of my work in progress. A sort of opposite-sex twin to Sabbatical: A Romance, this novel, too, involves a couple of Chesapeake sailors: a man rather younger than Fenwick Turner, named Peter Sagamore; a woman somewhat older than Susan Seckler, named Katherine Sherritt. But their situation, as shall be seen, is rather the reverse of Fenwick's and Susan's. If I am spared to write it, the book will be called The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. It will be divided into two parts, the first called "Our Story," the second called "Our Stories." And Part I, "Our Story," will begin with the following dippy verses, after its opening subtitle. The subtitle is:

KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE,

THIRTY-NINE YEARS OLD AND NINE MONTHS PREGNANT,

BECALMED IN OUR ENGINELESS SMALL SAILBOAT

AT THE END OF A STICKY JUNE CHESAPEAKE AFTERNOON

AMID EVERY SIGN OF THUNDERSTORMS APPROACHING FROM ACROSS

THE BAY,

AND SPEAKING AS SHE SOMETIMES DOES IN VERSE,

SETS HER HUSBAND A TASK.

The dippy verses are these:

       Tell me a story of women and men

       Like us: like us in love for ten

       Years, lovers for seven, spouses

       Two, or two point five. Their house's

       Increase is the tale I wish you'd tell.

       Why did that perfectly happy pair,

       Like us, decide this late to bear

       A child? Why toil so to conceive

       One (or more), when they both believe

       The world's aboard a handbasket bound for hell?

              Well?

       Sentimentality, was it? A yen

       Like ours to be one person, blend

       Their flesh forever, so to speak --

       Although the world could end next week

       And that dear incarnation be H-bomb-fried?

       Maybe they thought that by joining their

       (Like our) so different genes -- her

       Blue-blooded, his blue-collared -- they'd make

       A blue-eyed Wunderkind who'd take

       The end of civilization in his/her stride?

              What pride!

       Or maybe they weren't thinking at all,

       But (unlike us) obeyed the call

       Of blind instinct and half-blind custom:

       "Reproduce your kind and trust 'em

       To fortune's winds and tides, life's warmth and frost!"?

       Perhaps they considered all the above

       (Like us, exactly) -- instinct, love,

       The world's decline from bad to worse

       In more respects than the reverse --

       And decided to pay, but not to count, the cost. . .

              Fingers crossed.

       Well:

       Tell me their story as if it weren't ours,

       But like ours enough so that the Powers

       Which drive and steer good stories might

       Fetch them beyond our present plight,

       And navigate the tale itself to an ending more rich and strange than everyday realism ordinarily permits; a bottom line that will make art if not sense out of the predicament your sperm and my egg, with a lot of help from their producers, have got us into; in short, yet another rhyme as it were for cost to end this poem with, even if we have to abandon verse for prose or prose for verse to reach it: a rhyme less discouraging, more pregnant so to speak with hope, than lost.

       Okay?

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