The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  In any case, one knows that John Coode never attained the grand objectives attributed to him, and neither did that shadowy figure presumed to be at the other pole of morality, Lord Baltimore—at least not in his lifetime. For however ambiguous Charles Calvert’s means and motives, if he existed at all (and if Burlingame did not entirely misrepresent him) one assumes at least that he was anxious to recover his family’s proprietary rights to Maryland. This much granted, he must have died in 1715 a doubly disappointed man, for not only was Maryland under the rule of her sixth Royal Governor, but his son and heir, Benedict Leonard Calvert, had two years previously renounced Catholicism in favor of the Church of England, at the expense of his annual allowance of four hundred fifty pounds. It was this very defection, however, that set in progress a swift and dramatic change in the family fortunes: Charles Calvert died on the twentieth of February, and the outcast Benedict Leonard became the fourth Lord Baltimore; but less than two months later, on April 5, Benedict himself passed on, and the title was inherited by his sixteen-year-old son, also named Charles. Now this fifth Lord Baltimore was not only a Protestant like his father, but a handsome, dissolute courtier to boot, so well respected in the royal house for his abilities at pimping and intrigue that in time he became Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. With this array of qualifications in his favor, it took him exactly one month to do what his grandfather had not managed in twenty-five years: in May of 1715, His Majesty George I restored to him the charter of Maryland, its almost monarchic original privileges intact.

  These marvels alone, it seems to the Author, are sufficient evidence to convict Mistress Clio on the charge of shamelessness once lodged against her by our poet; what then is one to think on seeing this same young Baltimore, in 1728, offer to Ebenezer Cooke a bona fide commission as Poet and Laureate of Maryland? “On to Hecuba!” as our poet was wont to cry. Or, after the manner of his hybrid metaphors: let us plumb this muse’s farce to its final deep and ring the curtain!

  First, the Reader must know that after the burst of inspiration which drove him, during his convalescence at Malden in the winter of 1694, to compose not the promised Marylandiad but a Hudibrastic exposé of the ills that had befallen him, Ebenezer wrote no further verse for thirty-four years. Whether this fallowness was owing to the loss of his virginity, dissatisfaction with his talents, absence of inspiration, alteration of his personality, or some more subtle cause, it would be idle presumption to say, but Ebenezer was as astonished as will be the Reader to find that precisely during these decades his fame as a poet increased yearly! The manuscript of his attack on Maryland, one remembers, Ebenezer had taken with him on his shameful flight from Malden and entrusted, via Burlingame, to the captain of the bark Pilgrim. At the time, Ebenezer had been apprehensive over its safety and had exacted assurances from Burlingame that the captain would deliver it to a London printer; but in the rush of events thereafter, he forgot the poem entirely, and when, after the christening of Andrew III, Life eased its hold upon his throat, he only wondered disinterestedly whatever became of it.

  His slight curiosity was gratified in 1709, when his father sent him a copy of The Sot-Weed Factor under the imprint of Benjamin Bragg, at the Sign of the Raven in Paternoster Row! The Pilgrim’s captain, Andrew explained in an accompanying letter, had delivered the manuscript to some other printer, who, seeing no profit in its publication, had passed it about as a curiosity. In time it had fallen into the hands of Messrs. Oliver, Trent, and Merriweather, Ebenezer’s erstwhile companions, who, upon recognizing it as the work of their friend, created such a stir of interest that the printer decided to risk publishing it. At this point, however, Benjamin Bragg got wind of the matter and asserted a prior right to the poem, on the ground that its author was still in his debt for the very paper on which it was penned. There ensued an exchange of mild threats, at the end of which Bragg intimidated his rival into relinquishing the manuscript and brought out an edition of it at 6d. the copy. The first result, Andrew declared, was a vehement denial from the third Lord Baltimore that he had in any way commissioned Ebenezer Cooke—a perfect stranger to him—as Laureate of Maryland or anything else, and a repudiation of the entire contents of the poem. There were even rumors of a libel suit against the poet, to be brought by the Lord Proprietary at such time as the King saw fit to restore him his province; in time, however, the rumors had ceased, for some favorable notices of the poem began to appear that same year. Andrew included one in his letter: “A refreshing change from the usual false panegyrics upon the Plantations…” it read in part. “… admirable Hudibrastics… pointed wit… Lord Calvert’s loss is Poesy’s gain…”

  “What a feather in thy cap!” Anna cheered upon reading it. “Nay, i’faith, ’tis a very plume, Eben!”

  But her brother, surprised as he was to learn of his sudden notoriety, was unimpressed. In fact, he seemed more annoyed than pleased by the review.

  “The shallow fop!” he exclaimed. “He nowhere grants the poem’s truth! ’Twas not to wax my name I wrote it, but to wane Maryland’s!”

  Nevertheless, in the years that followed, The Sot-Weed Factor enjoyed a steady popularity among literate Londoners—though not at all of the sort its author wished for it. Critics spoke of it as a fine example of the satiric extravaganza currently in vogue; they praised its rhymes and wit; they applauded the characterizations and the farcical action—and not one of them took the poem seriously! Indeed, one writer, commenting on Lord Baltimore’s wrath, observed:

  It is a curious thing that Baltimore, so anxious to persuade us of the elegance of his former Palatinate, should so hardly use that Palatinate’s first Poet, when the very poem he despises is our initial proof of Maryland’s refinement. In sooth, it is no mean Plantation that hath given birth to such delicious wit as Mister Cooke’s…

  Such accolades chagrined and wisened the poet, who accepted not a word of them. In 1711, when old Andrew died and Ebenezer was obliged to sail to London for the purpose of probating his father’s will, he permitted himself to be wined and dined by Bragg and Ben Oliver, who had become his partner in the printing-house (Tom Trent, they informed him, had renounced poetry and the Established Church to become a Jesuit; Dick Merriweather, after wooing Death in a hundred unpublished odes and sonnets, had made such a conquest of that Dark Lady that at length, his horse rearing unexpectedly and throwing him to the cobbles, she had turned into an eternal embrace what he had meant as a mere flirtation), but to their entreaties for a sequel to the poem—a Fur-and-Hide Factor or a Sot-Weed Factor’s Revenge—he turned a deaf ear.

  Truth to tell, he had little to say any more in verse. From time to time a couplet would occur to him as he worked about his estate, but the tumultuous days and tranquil years behind him had either blunted his poetic gift or sharpened his critical faculities: The Sot-Weed Factor itself he came to see as an artless work, full of clumsy spleen, obscure allusions, and ponderous or merely foppish levities; and none of his later conceptions struck him as worthy of the pen. In 1717, deciding that whatever obligation he owed to his father was amply satisfied, he sold his moiety of Cooke’s Point to one Edward Cooke—that same poor cuckold whose identity Ebenezer had once assumed to escape Captain Mitchell—and Anna hers to Major Henry Trippe of the Dorset militia; though “their” son Andrew III was by this time a man of twenty-one and had already sustained whatever wounds the scandal of his birth was likely to inflict, they moved first to Kent and later to Prince George’s County. For income, Ebenezer—now in his early fifties—performed various clerical odd-jobs as deputy to Henry and Bennett Lowe, Receivers General of the Province, with whom he became associated (the Author regrets to say) by reason of his conviction that their brother Nicholas was actually Henry Burlingame. Anna, be it said, did not permit herself to share this delusion, though she indulged it in her brother; but Ebenezer grew more fixed in it every day. If, indeed, it was a delusion: Nicholas Lowe did not in the least resemble Burlingame’s past impersonation of him or any other o
f the former tutor’s disguises, but he was of the proper age and height, possessed a curious wit and broad education, and even displayed what can only be called “cosmophilist” tendencies now and again. Furthermore, to all of Ebenezer’s hints and veiled inquiries he replied with a mischievous smile or even a shrug… But no! Like Anna, we shall resist the temptation to folie à deux: age has made our hero fond, like many another, and there’s an end on it!

  Two things occurred in 1728 to conclude our history. Old Charles Calvert was then a baker’s dozen years under the sod and thus unable to savor, as did our poet in his sixty-second year, this final irony concerning The Sot-Weed Factor: that its net effect was precisely what Baltimore had hoped to gain from a Marylandiad, and precisely the reverse of its author’s intention. Maryland, in part because of the well-known poem, acquired in the early eighteenth century a reputation for graciousness and refinement comparable to Virginia’s, and a number of excellent families were induced to settle there. In recognition of this fact, the fifth Lord Baltimore (that famous young rake and dilettante referred to earlier) was moved to write a letter to the aging poet, from which the following excerpt will suffice:

  My Grandfather & namesake, for all his unquestiond Virtues, was no familiar of the Arts, and thwarted in his original purpose in calling you Laureat (wch be it said We are confident he did, notwithstanding his later denials thereof), he was unable to perceive the value of your gift to Maryland. We do hence mark it fit, that now, when a generation hath attested the merits of your work, you shd accept in fact, albeit belatedly, that office & title the qualifications whereto you have so long since fulfill’d. Namely, Poet & Laureat of the Province of Maryland…

  Ebenezer merely smiled at the invitation and shook his head at his sister’s suggestion that he accept it.

  “Nay, Anna, ’tis a poor climate for a poet, is Maryland’s, nor is my talent hardy enough to live in’t. Let Baltimore give his title to one whose pen deserves it; as for me, methinks I’ll to the muse no more!”

  But that same year saw the death of Nicholas Lowe, which so touched the poet (owing to his delusion) that he broke his vow and his long silence to publish, in the Maryland Gazette, an Elegy on the Death of the Hon. Nicholas Lowe, Esq., containing sundry allusions to his ambivalent feelings towards that gentleman. Thereafter, either because he felt a ripening of his talents or merely because breaking one’s vow, like losing one’s innocence, is an irreparable affair which one had as well make the best of (the Reader will have to judge which), he was not sparing of his pen: in 1730 he brought out the long-awaited sequel, Sot-Weed Redivivus, or The Planter’s Looking-Glass, which, alas, had not the success of its original; the following year he published another satirical narrative, this one dealing with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, and a revised (and emasculated) edition of The Sot-Weed Factor. In the spring of 1732, at the age of sixty-six, he succumbed to a sort of quinsy, and his beloved sister (who was to follow him not long after), in setting his affairs in order, discovered among his papers an epitaph, which, though undated, the Author presumes to be his final work, and appends for the benefit of interested scholars:

  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, Pt & Lt of Md

  Regrettably, his heirs saw fit not to immortalize their sire with this inscription, but instead had his headstone graved with the usual piffle. However, either his warning got about or else his complaint was accurate that Maryland’s air—in any case, Dorchester’s—ill supports the delicate muse, for to the best of the Author’s knowledge her marshes have spawned no poet since Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Laureate of the Province.

  About the Author

  JOHN BARTH, born May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland, was only twenty-six when his first novel was published. Titled The Floating Opera, it was the runner-up for the 1956 National Book Award. Mr. Barth’s other works include The End of the Road, Lost in the Funhouse, Chimera, Giles Goat-Boy, and The Sot-Weed Factor. In 1965, a poll of two hundred prominent authors, critics, and editors placed John Barth among the best American novelists to emerge in the past twenty years.

  John Barth holds an A.B. and an M.A. degree from Johns Hopkins University. From 1953 to 1965 he taught English at Pennsylvania State University. He is currently professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is married and has three children.

  Back Cover

  The great American novel of anti-Americana

  “Outrageously funny, villainously slanderous… The book is a bare-knuckled satire of humanity at large… Barth’s masterstroke is an alleged secret journal of Capt. John Smith. Its version of the Pocahontas story is truly Rabelaisian and marvelously executed.”—The New York Times Book Review

  “The Sot-Weed Factor is that rare literary creation—a genuinely serious comedy… Ebenezer Cooke, in this boisterous historical farce, emerges as one of of the most diverting heroes to roam the world since Candide.”—Time

  Scan Notes, v3.0 (RTF only): This was a tough proof because of the language used and the preponderance of apostrophes, but I spent many hours on’t and ’tis about as close to perfect as one might expect in a file such as this one. One thing I did do is insert a space between all quotes and apostrophes. Though this may seem to be annoying at times, it looked much worse to let them run together. Italics and special characters are intact just as they were in the book. If you change the format of this file, be careful that you do not lose the formatting in the histories of the words that resemble such: “wch”, of which there is many. By the real caterpillar

  converted to .ePUB by antimist on 09/01/15