The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

  Well, he did try some of those things, as a matter of fact, but they didn’t work. When we were safely split and things had quieted down, Poon found himself another nice dumb Deniston girl to marry, whom I should have warned but didn’t, and they set up housekeeping over in Saint Marys County, and things seemed to go his way. He had himself a pair of children to be photographed with and became an archconservative, and he’s rising fast in the state Republican organization these days and hopes to run for Congress in a couple of years, even though it’s an open secret now that he’s a lush if not a flat-out alky and a closet gay as well, who covers his ass by cozying up to the Moral Majority. I worry now and then about the physical integrity of his new wife’s rectum, but that’s her business, no? At least he’s out of mine.

  So I found out I was pregnant from aggravated assault, and Doctor Jack took care of that, and I went up to New York for a while for a change of scene and jumped you that night at the Ninety-second Street Poetry Center and got a taste of what I’d been missing. You must have wondered what you’d fallen into! And then down to D.C. and the U. of M. and those other boyfriends and then May Jump and now you again. Good old May was so indignant when I told her the Poonie Baldwin story that she made me learn karate so I can cripple the next sumbitch tries to lay a hand on me where I don’t want one laid, but I haven’t gotten that good yet, but I will.

  So now you know why you found me a little skittish back there and also up in the Gramercy Park Hotel when it came to hineyholes, Katherine Shorter Sherritt told Peter Sagamore aboard Story in Poplar Island Harbor in 1970. The reader understands now too our woman’s particular fascination with that lexicon of homosexual slang from which she gave her closed-circuit reading in the First Guest Cottage early in this book. Boyoboy, she sighed (Poplar I., 1970): I bet your friend Marcie Blitz there took it up the tush and loved it.

  Said Peter Sagamore Never mind my friend Marcie Blitz, and let’s get tushes off our minds for a while. I’m gratified to hear the tale of your sorry first marriage and the subsequent seasoning and annealing of your heart. I do not tire of such confidences, unless boastful on the one hand or abject on the other, and they are safe with me.

  Well, then, his fine new woman said, your turn, but her fine new man said Another time: I didn’t promise to show you mine yet. It is a long way, he tells her now while we wait on Rhode River for a breeze, from the Doomsday Factor to the Forest-Green Crayola Factor. But the seamy undersides of power and the seamy backsides of the powerful are as one in the seamless web of our tidewater tales, which should likewise incorporate

  THE STORY OF PETER SAGAMORE’S MEETING HIMSELF

  FORTY YEARS LATER SEVENTEEN YEARS SINCE.

  Back in Sixty-three, while Poonie B. was doing his number on you in Centreville, Maryland, I was over in Sagres, Portugal, getting myself de-hicked and recovering from Jean Heartstone of blessed memory.

  K murmurs Yeah: Jean Heartstone. She knows this part of the story, all right: Peter Sagamore’s graduate-school romance, which had led to both his vow of bachelorhood and his precocious bilateral vasectomy. No need for him to retell it. Jean Heartstone was an apprentice poet from Portland, Oregon, who believed, among many another unusual thing, that proper names have the power of self-fulfilling prophecy and that language in general and writing in particular have such magical properties that the future is highly contingent upon what we read and write as well as what we are called. Jean Heartstone had been a little daft and a little scary but also gifted and in her rangy way beautiful when Peter Sagamore met her in Baltimore. Her surname was in fact a corruption of Hearthstone, and by inclination she was both passionate-hearted and domestically inclined, a great baker of fruit breads and maker of love and macramés back before the sixties became the Sixties; a keeper of injured birds in shoe boxes; an antivivisectionist and vegetarian whose zucchini frittatas could make a Bengal tiger forget about meat, briefly. But while the horny young men among her fellow graduate-student apprentice writers spoke yearningly of getting into Heartstone’s jeans, the poet herself took her name as a genealogical instruction to harden herself against consequential emotional attachments (her parents were unamicably divorced) and to give herself altogether to the causes of radical politics and a politico-magical poetry wrought from left-wing charms and curses. In lines as spare as Emily Dickinson’s, though less cool, Jean Heartstone assisted the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro’s Oriente guerrillas and the election to U.S. president of John F. Kennedy—whom she would later inadvertently overcurse for permitting the Bay of Pigs invasion and unintentionally thereby cause to be assassinated. Her guilt in this matter, together with her abuse of lysergic acid and her admiration of the wrong role models among latter-day American poets, would lead before that volatile decade’s end to her severe mental breakdown and ultimately to her suicide by unassisted headlong flight into a Pennsylvania granite quarry in the conviction that she was recycling her flinty heart.

  Jean Heartstone’s interest in Peter Sagamore had begun more with his first name than with his second. He had loved her so furiously from October through May of their one-year graduate program that he took for granted they’d do Europe together upon becoming certified masters of arts and set literature ablaze with their mutual talent and reciprocal passion. During the university’s Easter break, however, he made the misstep of drafting a story about two talented apprentice writers, not unlike themselves, who marry and beget children. The man of the couple becomes an internationally successful poet but a failure as a father; he regards his books as his true offspring, and his merely human ones grow up to despise both him and literature. The woman turns into so excellent a mother that she neglects her fiction, regarding her children as her true creation, and never quite makes it as the novelist she had promisingly bid to become.

  Merely hearing this plot summary of that story had caused Jean Heartstone to conceive Peter Sagamore’s child on Good Friday afternoon despite diaphragm and spermicidal douche—she happened not to trust birth control pills, but they would have availed her nothing in any case against the power of language—and then to abort it “spontaneously” but deliberately two months later, on Commencement Day, having refused in the interim either to terminate the pregnancy or to marry the fetus’s father despite his entreaties to that end and his protests that the story (which became his first published work) was pure fiction, as witness his reversal of the two writers’ métiers. In a desperate effort not to lose her, he talked a progressive young urologist into vasectomizing him and offered to defect with Jean Heartstone to British Columbia in June, though U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was still less than massive at that time. Impressed by the audacity of his gesture, but convinced that that story had irrevocably hexed her literary career, Jean Heartstone dismissed him and became the shrug-shouldered sexual property of perhaps the only overtly lesbian ex-con writer in Greater Baltimore at that time: a pretentious and ungrammatical poetastress with one-tenth Jean Heartstone’s talent, who was not at all nice to her but had done time in both the Rosewood Training School for delinquent girls and the Patuxent Institution in Jessup and was never dope-less. In short order, this person pimped Jean Heartstone out to a number of her male drug connections, some one of whom impregnated her. This second fetus she carried with her on her short flight into that granite quarry.

  But by then, heart-wounded Peter Sagamore had hitchhiked and backpacked from Le Havre down through France and Spain and over to Portugal, in defiance of Jean Heartstone’s metered curses upon Messrs. Franco and Salazar and the tourist dollars that helped support their governments; he was wintering cheaply out on the Sagres end of the Algarve, in those days and in that season still richer in fisherfolk than in tourists. For months he watched the Atlantic roll in from the wrong direction and searched the rock-locked beaches in bemused vain for those water messages he had dispatched as a boy from Hoopers Island. He was neither lonely nor self-sorry, though when word reached him of Jean Heartstone’s end, he spent a d
evastated week on the dizziest cliffs of the Sagres headland, where Prince Henry the Navigator’s navigators’ college was, imagining how it would be to smash himself like the surf upon those rocks a hundred meters below. He resorbed into his bloodstream nearly a billion of his spermatozoa and dedicated his more or less enforced celibacy to his late lover. He did not regret having had himself sterilized except for the metaphorical implications, to counter which—since his bereavement and isolation precluded ready sexual encounters despite his good looks and his ease with strangers—he engendered a very swarm of fiction, and in the process discovered his authorial voice and his essential subject matter. He completed his apprenticeship under no further masters save the mighty dead, and commenced his professional writing career. By the time he rearrived in the USA, he would find himself arriving in its literary magazines, have an agent and a contract for his first novel, and be busily drafting his second and planning his third. Meanwhile, having mourned Jean Heartstone in energetic celibacy on the Ponta da Piedade, through the rest of his European reconnaissance he exorcised her the other way, sowing his semen but not his seed in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Scotland, and Wales. The more he traveled, the more his imagination fixed fruitfully upon the lower Dorchester marshes; once home, he took a writer-in-residency at Oregon State University, in honor of Jean Heartstone, but spent that fine rainy Northwest year telling mid-Atlantic-modernist tideflat tales. There followed similar appointments in New York and Boston, in which latter city began the next major chapter of his romantic-erotic life, starring Marcie Blitz née Blitzstein—and that is where the reader came in, but it is not the story P’s telling K now to whistle up a breeze behind Big Island.

  Back there on Ponta da Piedade, he declares, I could read Spanish okay and Portuguese poorly and neither well enough to enjoy books in the language. I was so thirsty for written English that I reread over and over the few books I’d brought with me: The Odyssey, the Modern Library abridgment of The Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn—even my pocket dictionary and encyclopedia and my own manuscripts. It was partly to have something new to read that I wrote so much that year; I even transcribed my dreams every morning before breakfast, and here we go:

  My undergraduate dreams at College Park were the dullest I ever heard of; I seriously used to wonder whether anybody whose unconscious was so tiresome could ever become the writer I’d made up my mind to try to be. In graduate school, they got even worse. Day after day from dawn till past midnight I wrestled with literature and language and lean Jean Heartstone, and night after night all I’d dream was my voice saying things like In graduate school comma they got even worse new sentence. By Thanksgiving, my dreams were like the hum of an electric typewriter between typings; by Christmastime, they were like the ongoing intergalactic echo from the Big Bang, detectable only by the most discerning sensors.

  Jean Heartstone, who happened to be both an expert on dreams and an expert dreamer, told me that my trouble was I didn’t take dreams seriously, which was true. It was part of Heartstone’s Magic Language Theory that to dream more interesting dreams, I’d have to take more interest in them, and that the way to do that was to resolve—in writing—to keep a detailed written record of them, as she did.

  For a while, it worked. As soon as I decided to write the damn things out every morning, a whole Dickensload of memorable characters swarmed onstage night after night. The scenes and situations were terrific; the action was lively; the plots weren’t half bad even when I recollected them in the morning. I was particularly impressed that these dreams had nothing whatever to do with my waking concerns—not even symbolically, as far as I could see. Both asleep and awake, I related to those dreams the way a good reader relates to a good novel: with detached but total absorption.

  As my dreams got better, my fiction got worse, so I gave up transcribing my dreams for Lent and wrote that fatal Easter-vacation story, but that’s beside the point of this digression. The point of this digression is that since dreams belong in the category more of things that happen to us than of things we do, the Heartstone dream-improvement theory really was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the bearing of that point upon the story of my meeting myself in mid-ocean is that almost the only thing I could find to read in English in my part of Portugal, other than the household gods in my backpack, was a couple of Bollingen Press mythology books by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, left behind by some tourist in the library of a little beach hotel in Lagos near where I lived on Piety Point. Reading Jung got me to dreaming so strongly about old Jean Heartstone that once again I had to quit writing my dreams down so they’d get less interesting. Without any dreams to record, I had more time to write my stories, which perked right up as my dreams got dumber, and also to read Campbell and company on the subject of the ground-myth of the wandering hero, which became more important to me than it would’ve become if there’d been more stuff to read in Lagos.

  Okay, reader: Campbell says that your typical mythical wandering hero, whose biography corresponds to Jung’s individuation-psychology and Erik Erikson’s rites of passage and other stuff, at a certain point in his heroical career sets out westward on a night-sea voyage or what have you to his True Original Home, in the course of which he undergoes various initiation trials and sheds various ego trappings and dives down to the heart of mystery, et cetera. Among his typical adversaries, along with physical obstacles and father types like dragons and ogres and wicked magicians, will be assorted alter-ego figures: dark brothers, mirrors, tar babies—and doubles. When the time came for me to quit bopping around Europe and come home, instead of flying I took a Greek Line ship that happened to be sailing from Southampton to New York. I was all but broke, but I couldn’t say no to a westbound homeward voyage on a Greek boat setting sail in the evening of the summer solstice. I was ten years under age; your proper mythic hero does his thing somewhere between thirty-three and thirty-six. But as it happened, the story I was working up at the time had to do with a latter-day marsh-country messiah who becomes as aware of this pattern of mythic herohood as an actor is aware of his script, and yet who feels authentically called to some kind of mythic herohood—he’s not sure exactly what kind. This paradox reminds him of the New Testament Jesus, who for example healed the sick, Saint Matthew says, in order that Esaias’s prophecy might be fulfilled: that the Messiah would heal the sick. Jesus knows the Old Testament messianic prophecies like the back of his hand; he also knows he’s the Messiah. My tidewater webfoot hero knows the prophecies plus the Jesus story plus all the wandering-hero-savior myths of other cultures, and I myself had digested all those plus that heavy diet of Jung and Campbell plus my story-in-progress, which was threatening to collapse from sheer vertigo, plus my notes for its continuation. Wherein, having survived those initiatory ordeals and made his westward night-sea journey from Hoopers Island across the Chesapeake to maybe Washington, D.C., the hero must confront his mysterious destiny.

  Now, then: Cocky as I was at age twenty-three and -four, I’ve never felt called to any vocation more heroical than making up English sentences about imaginary people. But there I was, circling homeward on a literal night-sea voyage and farther westbound yet, feeling truly summoned as a writer but still at sea and in the dark about every other aspect of my life. What was happening was happening in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Heartstone the prophet, saying, Dreams are causes, not effects; what we write is not autobiography, but prophecy in disguise. I understood then that her restless ghost was playing the role of Hero’s Helper: Venus to my Aeneas, Virgil to my Dante. As the boat left port, I poured a libation of Metaxa brandy over the taffrail, to Jean Heartstone, and waited to see what would happen next. Whirlpool? Sword bridge? Sea monster?

  Half an hour later, I saw my double sitting across from me at a U-shaped bar just off the tourist-class sun deck.

  He didn’t look like my father or my brother, Kath; he was my clone, only o
lder. He didn’t look like what I look like now, seventeen yearsworth of stories later; he looked like what I’ll look like another twenty-some yearsworth of stories from now, with luck.

  I suppose with luck. My double looked physically fit for a man in his sixties, but not at all animated, and neither happy nor unhappy. He had curly gray hair and okay teeth and a moderate tan; he wore no glasses except to read, and his eyes were clear but tired-looking. Other than our age and clothing, the only difference I could see between us was our taste in nightcaps: his was Amstel dark beer; mine was Metaxa. It surprised me that neither the bartender nor the other passengers in the room nor either of us commented on our likeness, which was truly remarkable, but we didn’t. We drank our drinks and went our ways.

  Through the five days of our passage, I never saw my double smile or frown or for that matter speak to anyone. He dressed in ordinary conservative taste: light slacks and pullover sweaters by day—it was cool out there, even in late June—business suits in the evening. I’d see him strolling the decks and corridors, reading in the ship’s library, or leaving the first sitting in the tourist-class dining room as I was going in for the second. He sat and walked very erect, shoulders back. He was always alone. I imagined him to be a professional man: maybe a doctor or a dentist; maybe a lawyer in estates and trusts. He seemed to me to be retired as well as retiring: a successful oral surgeon or orthopedist who’d made prudent investments and quit early. A widower, maybe, whose grown children had urged a change of scene upon their straitlaced father, still bereft some years after their mother’s death.