The Floating Opera

by John Barth

  It was amazing. Ship’s bells clanged. Orders were shouted, soundings called. The great pumps thundered. The stern wheel spun. A deep blast of the whistle announced the Lee’s departure. Some moments later a deck hand cried “Steamboat ’round die bend!” and a faint shrill whistle identified the Natchez ahead. Prof. Eisen insinuated soft, excited music under the throb of the engines. Toot toot! The Lee flung down the gantlet. Peep peep! The Natchez accepted the challenge. A race was on! More orders, excited cries, signal bells. The engines accelerated, the music likewise.

  I glanced at Capt. Osborn: he was entranced. At the house in general: enthralled. At my wrist watch: ten o’clock. A spotlight directed at Burley Joe was the only illumination in the house at the moment. Quietly, but with no particular attempt at secrecy, I left my seat, slipped down the aisle next to the starboard wall, and stepped out through a side exit, attracting little attention. Inside, the Lee gained slowly on the Natchez.

  It was, of course, entirely dark outside except for the Opera’s lights. I found myself, as I’d planned, on the outboard side of the theater. No watchman was in sight. I walked swiftly down the starboard rail to that small companionway in the stern which I’d fixed in my mind during the afternoon’s tour, and let myself into the dining room, under the stage, closing the door behind me. Over my head the Lee and the Natchez were side by side. The music was louder and faster; the minstrels called encouragement to one or the other of the ships; an occasional excited cry broke from the audience. I struck a match and lit three kerosene lanterns mounted along the dining-room walls, then went to the valve labeled DO NOT OPEN UNTIL READY TO LIGHT FOOTLIGHTS and turned it full on, feeling under my hand the rush of acetylene to the stage. Finally I entered the galley, a few feet away, put a match to one burner, and turned the others (and the oven and the broiler) full on, unlighted. A strong odor of bottled illuminating gas filled the little room at once.

  Upstairs the Robert E. Lee forged slightly ahead of its rival, and the audience cheered. Gas hissed from the burners.

  Re-entering the dining room, I glanced around carefully, checking my work. As a last touch I removed the chimneys from all three lanterns and turned up the wicks. Then I slipped out as I’d entered and took my place again in the audience, now wonderfully agitated as the Natchez threatened to overtake the valiant Lee. My heart, to be sure, pounded violently, but my mind was calm. Calmly I regarded my companion Capt. Osborn, shouting hoarse encouragement to the Robert E. Lee. Calmly I thought of Harrison and Jane: of perfect breasts and thighs scorched and charred; of certain soft, sun-smelling hair crisped to ash. Calmly too I heard somewhere the squeal of an overexcited child, too young to be up so late: not impossibly Jeannine. I considered a small body, formed perhaps from my own and flawless Jane’s, black, cracked, smoking. Col. Morton, Bill Butler, old Mr. and Mrs. Bishop—it made no difference, absolutely.

  My heart thumped on like the Robert E. Lee, and I smiled at the thought that I might expire of natural causes before the great steamboat explosion. The audience was wild.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” shouted Capt. Adam, standing in the interlocutor’s chair. “Please make ready for the great explosion of the sidewheeler James B. Taylor! Do not leave your seats!”

  Some women cried out, for no transition had been made at all from the one act to the other, nor did the $7,500 Challenge Maritime Band pause for a quaver: indeed, they redoubled their efforts. But the race, apparently, was forgotten. From the pit, under the frenzied music, came a slow rumbling as of tympani, its volume gradually increasing. From Burley Joe—now rising slowly from his knees, arms outstretched, eyeballs bulging—came a hackle-raising hiss like escaping steam. The drums thundered; trumpets whinnied like horses; children grew hysterical; Tambo and Bones hid behind their neighbors. From high on his chair Capt. Adam regarded his brood with an olympian smile—and calmly, more godlike than he, I too smiled.

  Like some monstrous black serpent, Burley Joe poised now on tiptoe, arms overhead. The hissing and the music peaked; there was a double flash from the wings, a choked scream, a stunning explosion; the stage filled at once with thick white smoke.

  After an instant of complete silence, Evelyn Morton, on the front row, quietly fainted; the Colonel caught her as she keeled. Then Prof. Eisen tore into “Lucy Long,” the smoke began drifting away, and the minstrels appeared in a laughing, dancing row on the stage: Tambo, Bones, J. Strudge, Burley Joe Wells (bowing), the two guitarists, Capt. Adam himself (bowing)—and with them Sweet Sally Starbuck and Miss Clara Mulloy, dewy-eyed and blowing kisses. The audience laughed and exclaimed sharply to one another. Husbands looked at wives, wives at children, with an instant’s new eyes.

  “Lucy Long!” “Lucy Long!” The wonderful panithiopliconica, it turned out, was not more nor less than a grand old-fashioned minstrel walk-around—bones, tambourines, banjos, guitars. The minstrels danced, sang, leaped, cartwheeled. “Lucy Long” became “The Essence of Old Virginny”; faster and faster the minstrels cavorted, to a final, almost savage breakdown. The cymbals crashed, the performers bowed low, Tambo and Bones tumbled into the orchestra pit, and our wild applause saluted the curtains of the Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera.

  XXVIII. a parenthesis

  If you do not understand at once that the end of my Floating Opera story must be undramatic, then again I’m cursed with imperfect communication. Say what you wish about the formal requirements of storytelling; this is my opera, and I’ll lead you out of it as gently as I led you in. I’ve little use, as a principle, for slam-bang finishes like Burley Joe’s.

  I helped Capt Osborn to his feet (he was still shaken with the excitement of the steamboat race) and ushered him out with the crowd. There was still a possibility, of course, that the theater might explode—gas accumulated in the bilges of a vessel is particularly volatile—but I rather suspected that either some hidden source of ventilation (Capt. Adam had claimed the Opera was safe) or wandering member of the crew had foiled my plan. Need I tell you that I felt no sense either of relief or of disappointment? As when the engine of the law falls sprawling against my obstacles, I merely took note of the fact that despite my intentions six hundred ninety-nine of my townspeople and myself were still alive.

  Why did I not, failing my initial attempt, simply step off the gangplank into the Choptank, where no fluke could spoil my plan? Because, I began to realize, a subtle corner had been turned. I asked myself, knowing there was no ultimate answer, “Why not step into the river?” as I had asked myself in the afternoon, “Why not blow up the Floating Opera?” But now, at once, a new voice replied casually, “On the other hand, why bother?” There was a corner for you! Negotiated unawares, but like that dark alleyway in Baltimore which once turned me dazzled onto the bright flood of Monument Street, this corner confronted me with a new and unsuspected prospect—at which, for the moment, I could only blink.

  We met Harrison, Jane, and Jeannine at the foot of the crowded gangplank.

  “How’d you like the show?” Harrison laughed “The folks really eat that stuff up, don’t they?”

  “And so do I,” I said.

  “Oh, well, I enjoy it, too, in a sense,” Harrison chuckled briskly. “Hear those horrible old jokes again. Jeannine liked it, anyhow.” He indicated his daughter, lying like a sleeping angel in his arms.

  “We’d better get her home, I guess,” Jane said pleasantly. I believe she and Harrison both were somewhat uncomfortable in Capt. Osborn’s presence—though certainly no more so than was that gentleman in hers. “Good night, Toddy,” she smiled, still pleasantly, but without warmth. “I guess we’ll be seeing you around.”

  “Of course,” Harrison agreed at once, moving off.

  “Certainly,” I said at the same time, pleasantly but without warmth, and we parted. I’ve spoken to my friend Harrison on three separate occasions since then; to Jane only once, during a party in 1938 celebrating the final decision of the Maryland Court of Appeals in Harrison’s favor (his presence hadn’t been n
ecessary when I argued the case, and he sent the firm a $50,000 check via a vice-president of the pickle company); to my beautiful Jeannine, now a twenty-one-year-old debutante of Ruxton and Gibson Island, not at all, though I note her activities occasionally on the society page of the Baltimore Sun. Upon their return from eighteen months in Amalfi, Cannes, and Biarritz, the Macks settled just outside Baltimore to live, and so there is nothing remarkable in the fact that I don’t see them any more.

  Capt. Osborn and I walked back up High Street to the hotel then, and I bade him good night in the hallway.

  “Hold on, Toddy,” he grinned. “C’mon in my room here; I got a s’prise for ye.”

  I followed him in, and smiling broadly he presented me with a pint of Southern Comfort.

  “There, now!”

  “What’s this for?” I broke the seal and sniffed appreciatively.

  The old man blushed. “I owed it to ye. That little business we was talkin’ about this mornin’, for one thing.”

  “Come on, then, let’s drink it up,” I said. “You’ll need it as badly as I will, because that particular show’s all over with.”

  “Shucks, it would’ve been all over with anyhow, far’s I’m concerned,” Capt. Osborn declared.

  “How about Young Haecker?” I suggested. “Suppose we cut him in on it, too?”

  I went up to the top floor to Mister Haecker’s little dormer room and knocked, but though a flickering light shone under the door, he didn’t reply.

  “Mister Haecker?” I turned the knob, for it was doubtful that a man of his age and circumstances would be either out or asleep at ten-thirty.

  The door opened onto a strange scene: a single tall white candle burned in a brass holder on the writing desk beside the bed, and flickered in the small breeze from the window. Also on the writing desk, as I saw on approaching it, were an alarm clock stopped at ten-fifteen; a volume of Shakespeare opened to Act Three, Scene One, of Hamlet (with, believe it or not, the words not all noted in the margin opposite the line Thus conscience does make cowards of us all); a stack of thirteen fat notebooks each labeled Diary, 19— (I never had nerve enough to examine those); and a glass bottle with two sleeping pills left in it. On the bed Mister Haecker lay dressed in black pajamas, his eyes closed, his arms crossed in the manner of Miss Holiday Hopkinson, next door, his features calm (composed is a more accurate adjective), his pulse and respiration—as I discovered upon snatching up his wrist and putting my ear to his chest—almost imperceptible.

  As far as I could see there was nothing to be done in the way of first aid; I hurried downstairs and notified Hurley Binder, the night clerk, who in turn telephoned the hospital for an ambulance. Then the two of us returned to Mister Haecker’s room with Capt. Osborn, who pleaded with us to help him up the stairs so that he wouldn’t miss the excitement, and had our drinks there while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Hurley Binder and Capt. Osborn clucked their tongues and shook their heads and drank their Southern Comfort, mightily impressed by Mister Haecker’s elaborate preparations for departure.

  “What d’ye think of that?” Capt. Osborn said several times. “And him such a educated feller!”

  From time to time I felt Mister Haecker’s pulse: he seemed to be losing no ground—but then there was little to lose, for pulses do not beat much more slowly. Presently the ambulance cried up past Spring Valley, and Mister Haecker was carted off to the hospital, black pajamas and all.

  “Makes a man stop and think now, don’t it?” Capt. Osborn said.

  “It does indeed,” I agreed mildly, and said good night. What I thought, personally, was that should he live through this foolishness, Mister Haecker might find the remaining years of his life less burdensome than the ones recently past, because both his former enthusiasm for old age and his apparent present despair of it were (judging from appearances) more calculated than felt, more elaborate than sincere. I should enjoy saying that history proved me correct; in fact, however, upon recovering from his generous dose of barbiturates Mister Haecker went from the hospital to a sanitorium in Western Maryland, it having been discovered that he was incipiently tubercular; there, in 1940, he attempted once again to take his life, by the same means and with as much flourish as before, and succeeded.

  Alone in my room then, I sat on the window sill and smoked a cigar for several minutes, regarding the cooling night, the traffic light below, the dark graveyard of Christ Episcopal Church across the corner, and the black expanse of the sky, the blacker as the stars were blotted out by storm clouds. Sheet lightning flickered over the Post Office and behind the church steeple, and an occasional rumbling signaled the approach of the squall out over the Chesapeake. How like ponderous nature, so dramatically to change the weather when I had so delicately changed my mind! I remembered my evening’s notes, and going to them presently, added a parenthesis to the fifth proposition:

  V. There’s no final reason for living (or for suicide).

  XXIX. the floating opera

  That’s about what it amounted to, this change of mind in 1937: a simple matter of carrying out my premises completely to their conclusions. For the sake of convention I’d like to end the show with an emotional flourish, but though the progress of my reasoning from 1919 to 1937 was in many ways turbulent, it was of the essence of my conclusion that no emotion was necessarily involved in it. To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic, or a suicide on principle, one hasn’t reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet’s question is, absolutely, meaningless.

  While finishing my cigar I made a few more idle notes for my Inquiry, which was, you understand, open again. They are of small interest here—which is to say, they are of some interest. It occurred to me, for example, that faced with an infinitude of possible directions and having no ultimate reason to choose one over another, I would in all probability, though not at all necessarily, go on behaving much as I had thitherto, as a rabbit shot on the run keeps running in the same direction until death overtakes him. Possibly I would on some future occasion endeavor once again to blow up the Floating Opera, my good neighbors and associates, and/or my mere self; most probably I would not. I and my townsmen would play that percentage in my case as, for that matter, we did in each of theirs. I considered too whether, in the real absence of absolutes, values less than absolute mightn’t be regarded as in no way inferior and even be lived by. But that’s another inquiry, and another story.

  Also reopened were the Letter to My Father and that third peach basket, the investigation of myself, for if I was ever to explain to myself why Dad committed suicide, I must explain to him why I did not. The project would take time. I reflected that Marvin Rose’s report on my heart would reach me in the next day’s mail after all, and smiled: never before had the uncertainty of that organ seemed of less moment. It was beside the point now whether endocarditis was still among my infirmities: the problem was the same either way, the “solution” also. At least for the time being; at least for me.

  I would take a good long careful time, then, to tell Dad the story of The Floating Opera. Perhaps I would expire before ending it; perhaps the task was endless, like its fellows. No matter. Even if I died before ending my cigar, I had all the time there was.

  This clear, I made a note to intercept my note to Jimmy Andrews, stubbed out (after all) my cigar, undressed, went to bed in enormous soothing solitude, and slept fairly well despite the absurd thunderstorm that soon afterwards broke all around.

  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, 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 n
ovelists 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

  “Why The Floating Opera? Well, that’s part of the name of a showboat that used to travel around the Virginia and Maryland tidewater areas, and some of this book happens aboard it… 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 wait 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…”

  This edition presents the complete text of John Barth’s first novel, including those passages deleted in previous editions and “the original and correct ending to the story,” which was changed as a condition of the book’s first publication.

  Written in 1955 when the author was twenty-four, The Floating Opera makes it clear that Barth was always peculiarly Barth. This novel is part of the same cloth that made The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy.