Every Third Thought

by John Barth

  On a hot, humid, mid-to-late-June afternoon in 1948 (Ned, being Ned, recalled it as Last Day of Spring), the pair are stretched out on that mud/sand “beach” near Stratford’s Matahannock River bridge, reviewing yet again the StratColl and TSU course-catalogues in search of a major more specific and to their taste than General Arts & Sciences while also idly watching a clutch of their fellows diving into the river from a high platform that the town recently added to the (newly improved) waterfront park in hopes of discouraging use of the highway bridge itself as a launch pad. Art History. Botany. Chemistry. French. Geology. Literature. Philosophy. Physics. Psychology. Zoology. Such a smorgasbord of ways to spend one’s working life, one’s mortal prime time! And there exactly, they agree, is the rub: If one had fifty lives to live, or even the modest feline nine, one could do A for a career this time, try B next, then C and D or G and H or even A again, reliving and improving upon one’s prior go at it. But with only a single measly ride on the carousel, how to choose among Horse and Lion, Rhinoceros and Giraffe, as one’s mount for the too-quick spin?

  Out on the platform, meanwhile, some do the swan, some the backflip, some the cannonball, some the unintended, ignominious, and painful bellyflop. In every case, it’s Climb, Dive, Whatever, Splash.

  “That there is life,” observes Ned. “Except in life we get just one dive.” Both then and upon subsequent recollection, “Crock of shit,” the two agree (a popular negative in that time and place): Four quick decades after college, if they’re lucky, before they’ll be old farts on a pension—and already at age eighteen they’ve spent nearly half that much time getting ready to get ready! Will they end up like the fellow they now remark out there who, when his turn comes at the springboard’s tip, merely shrugs his shoulders and steps off, turns up his palms as he falls feet-first, and goes under having attempted nothing en route?

  “At least he made a splash,” ventures G.I.N.: “Better than sinking without a trace, like most.”

  “Plus he entertained us all for about two seconds; let’s grant him that. But shit, man: We want to do more than just make a splash, don’t we? Something worthwhile . . . ” That last inflected à la his parents, who hope their son will “find his calling” in one of the do-good professions: medicine, scientific research, the law (in its less venal aspects)—perhaps even (like themselves) education?

  Once again his friend envies Ned Prosper such parents. Enough for Fred and Lorraine Newett that their son will be “going off to college,” the first in either of their families ever to have had that privilege. They would not presume to suggest a career major, although Dad has heard tell of something called Business Administration, and Mom agrees that that sounds Nice.

  “Me,” says Ned now, “I want a damn Nobel Prize—and not just ’cause it’d make me famous, but ’cause I’d be famous for doing something worth doing, y’know? Something worthwhile.”

  Responds much-impressed G., who could never have presumed to such lofty ambition, “Wow! Okay! So come on, man: I’ll race you!”

  “To Stockholm?” Ned pretends to wonder. “You’re on, pal!”

  But it’s into the sea-nettled Matahannock that they run, risking a sting or two for the pleasure of a cool-off in the still spring-chilly river.

  “And four years later,” observed Ned Prosper four years later at the last-night-of-spring get-together that prompted the above recollection, “here we are: two wannabe Cree-ay-tive Rotters still looking for the road to Stockholm.”

  “Speak for yourself,” advised George Irving Newett: “Me, I’m still clearing my narrative throat, trying to find my Capital-V fucking Voice.”

  “Likewise—though I suspect I may actually be finding it in this new Seasons thing I’m into. I’ll let you know. So . . . ” Last clink of near-empty bottles: “May our testicles finally descend and our throats clear, and may the better Rotter take the Prize.”

  He had, by the way, he then added, formulated a proper definition of our presumptive calling as pronounced by that Deep-South undergrad writing-coach of mine over at Tidewater State—a definition that G.I.N. was free to pass along to the guy at baccalaureate time: “Cree-ay-tive Rotting is, quote, the active decomposing and digesting of life-experience and the corpus of literature, followed by their artful recomposing into new fiction and verse, end of quote. Shall we get on with it, in the arms of our separate and different muses?”

  “Good idea,” declares Amanda Todd 5.6 decades later, when her husband finally winds up, for the present, his account of this Spring Break Flashbang Vision/Whatever: “And a not-bad definition of your and your pal’s quote Cree-ay-tive Rotting—always bearing in mind, however, that what most often follows Decomposition and Digestion is a load of shit.”

  “Q.E.D.?”

  “No no no. I’m enjoying this, actually: my One-and-Only’s pre-Me years, composted. Quite a buddy you had there.”

  “That he was, love: Taught me more than just how to jerk off and make out and smoke and drink. Taught me how to swim; how to drive a car; how to go to college. Taught me to love the arts, especially Capital-L Literature, and even to have Capital-A Ambitions in that department.”

  “I’m grateful to him for all that, Gee. Wish I’d known him.”

  “Just as well you didn’t, or you’d likely be in his pup-tent instead of mine.”

  All this on a late-spring evening in C.E. 2008: not the last of StratColl’s spring break (by then well past, along with the academic year) nor the last of the season itself, still a few weeks from its solstitial close, but an early-June post-dinner P.M. In the course of which, appropriately, as wife and husband retired to their separate spaces for their routine hour of pre-TV-&-bedtime reading, a fast-moving thundershower rolled by to south of us, as if conjured by G.I.N.’s recollected vision. Nothing destructive, like those that had lately flooded Iowa and Indiana and broken levees along the Mississippi, not to mention the typhoon that would drown the Philippines on the approaching equinox: just a bit of wind and rain, one blink of the neighborhood lights (requiring all digital clocks to be reset, but no auxiliary power-generators to be fired up), and an appropriately impressive display of lightning well downriver from Stratford/ Bridgetown, which we set aside our reading to admire together.

  “Bye-bye springtime; come on summer,” Mandy commented. “When, as Gee Gershwin tells us, the livin’ is easy, even for us not-yet-retired academics.” More seriously then, “Ma Nature is obviously in synch with your and your late friend’s equinox/solstice/seasons thing: Let me know what y’all come up with down the road, OK? On the shortest night of the year?”

  “My midsummer night’s dream?” it occurred to Narrator to wonder. “Or would that be in mid-August, since the equinox just begins the season? I’ve never been sure which.”

  “So go Google it, and let me know,” his Ms. suggested, and returned to whatever she’d been reading.

  As did Narrator to whatever he’d been, but found himself too distracted, even overwhelmed, by the confluence of associations—seasons /Seasons, timely tempests, and the prospect of an upcoming midsummer night’s Dream/Vision/Whatever #3—either to read or to reboot his closed-for-the-night computer. When he does, next morning, he’ll learn from Wikipedia that the European “midsummer” holiday, pre-Christian in origin, marked the ancients’ “middle of summer,” later the astronomical beginning of that season, and by coincidence the nativity of St. John the Baptist (“St. John’s Day”), and is celebrated in North European countries especially by festivals, bonfires, and—in Sweden anyhow, where warm weather arrives late—by Maypole-dancing in the last week of June rather than on May Day. But by then (last week of spring: Senator Hillary Clinton has finally conceded the Democratic presidential nomination-race to Barack Obama; the price of regular gasoline in the USA has for the first time in its history topped $4 a gallon; Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s thugs have stalled that nation’s runoff election by murdering numerous of his opponent’s supporters; wildfires are blazing in northern California
; and deadly Typhoon Fengshen is bearing down on the Philippines) what’s really mushrooming from his imagination’s compost-pile is, on First Thought anyhow, his Next Big Project: not another O.F.F.-novel, but a memorial-memoir of growing up with Ned Prosper, who if he’d lived might well have become the Capital-W Writer that George Irving Newett didn’t. The “Winter” of their Bridgetown childhood and preadolescence, as suggested by Narrator’s solstitial fire-tower vision, followed by the Springtime of their adolescence and vigorous young adulthood: 1944–54 for unlucky Ned; for his memoirist, 1944–59, maybe? Mid-teens to late-twenties, by when his own attempts at fiction were going the rounds in notalways-unsuccessful search of publication? 8

  Problem: This long-since-sprung “Spring” chapter of this whatever-it-turns-out-to-be is clearly winding down, but our guys are still only at the beginning of their twenties. Seven Spring-years yet to go for G., in the course whereof he’ll complete his Master of Arts degree at TSU, wed his self-designated “Mistress of Artist” Marsha Green, score an entry-level instructorship in English Composition down at Marshyhope State College on the lower Eastern Shore, manage after all to place a few short stories in those more or less obscure lit-mags, complete his first (and thus far still his only published) novel, and terminate by mutual consent (Irreconcilable Differences) that short-lived first marriage. Only two more years for his nipped-in-the-bud buddy before N.’s Arms-of-Life curriculum* leads him—evidently by meaningless, random accident—into the arms of death. Experience-rich, lesson-teaching years for both, well worth memoiring! But always at his back Narrator hears, not “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near” (as in Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century lyric pitch “To His Coy Mistress,” a favorite of both of these twenty-somethings), but rather . . . some sort of birdcall, is it?

  Pigeon? Dove? Canada Goose?

  Cuckoo?

  4

  summer

  Sumer is icumin in,

  Lhude sing cuccu.

  Groweth sed and bloweth med,

  And springth the wude nu—

  Sing cuccu!9

  ON A MID-JULY Maryland mid-day some three weeks past the summer solstice, Poet/Professor/Life-Partner/Critic Amanda Todd, having reviewed at her mate’s request the foregoing chapter (“Spring”) of his whatever-it-might-turn-out-to-be, declared or announced to its author, “Two questions-slashcomments, okay?”

  “Slash away.” No Vision/Transport/Whatever #3 as yet, to George Irving Newett’s perplexed disappointment. But while he’d been awaiting its arrival, Tropical Storm Arthur and Hurricane Bertha, as if summoned by his tempest-tossed Vision #2, had kicked off in the Caribbean what looked to be another busy Atlantic hurricane season. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average had dropped from its record high of 14,000 the previous October to below 11,000 in the subsequent worldwide economic recession, and continued its alarming downward slide. And we Newett/Todds, the night before this lunch-hour conversation, had enjoyed a gorgeous full Buck Moon10 and brilliant Jupiter gleaming over Stratford/Bridgetown. Now, having finished our morning’s separate muse-work, we were sipping smoothies and nibbling granola-bars in the air-conditioned kitchen of our rented condominium, it being too hot and humid outside to lunch on its little screened porch.

  “Well: To begin with?” Mandy began, with the interrogative rising inflection lately picked up from her students. “If I remember correctly—which I do, because I checked it?—back in your ‘Winter’ chapter, when your Narrator-guy steps up into StratColl’s Shakespeare House to meet his missus for lunch on the December solstice, he’s reminded of his trip-and-fall in Shakespeare’s house on the September equinox, right? And that—plus the sight of that of that kid with the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower mag—reminds him of his fire-tower climb with Pal Neddie’s family in their kiddie-days, when he first learned about equinoxes and solstices—which leads to his so-called Solstitial Illumination of Post-Equinoctial Vision #1. All reasonable enough. You with me so far?”

  Her husband supposes so: “I mean, I wrote the freaking thing. . . . ”

  “Then maybe you can explain what Narrator doesn’t: why it is that what also jump-starts his fire-tower illumination is the kid’s Everyman edition of Will’s comedies. I remember how you went on about that over lunch at Bozzelli’s, but I don’t think you’ve ever said exactly what its relevance was, other than Shakespeare House/Shakespeare’s house/Shakespeare’s plays. Are we supposed to think of that big-deal Illumination as G.I.N.’s Midwinter Night’s Dream, or what?”

  Well, now: Author realized and readily admitted that in fact he hadn’t known exactly what the connection was: only that it was sudden and strong. His mate’s suggestion struck him as both plausible and too clever by half; now that she’d raised the question, however, its answer seemed evident, especially in retrospect from that storm-fraught Spring Break Flashbang Vision #2: The Shakespeare Connection was not A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but that grimmer “comedy” The Tempest. Prosper=Prospero, the storm-conjuring wizard protagonist of that play, who predicts at its close (how had G. not seen so obvious an echo before, especially given the last working title of Ned’s lost opus-in-progress and his friend’s habit of naming First, Second, and Third Thoughts?) that henceforth his “every third thought shall be the grave”!

  “Hiding in plain sight,” supposed Amanda, to whom the connection had seemed self-evident enough not to need remarking. And Ned himself, oddly, back in their apprentice-writer days, had never, as far as G. can recall, ever linked his surname to that of Shakespeare’s island-stranded Duke of Milan.

  “What I do remember his saying early on is that if a story-teller hung a name like ‘Mister Prosper’ on his tale’s eminently successful protagonist, we would wince at his heavy-handedness—unless the piece was a Capital-A Allegory or a flat-out farce, with supporting characters like Suzy Spendthrift and Mary Miser.”

  “Or,” Mandy added, “unless Protagonist P. at the end of the day turned out despite his name to be a loser at everything he set his hand to, in which case he himself might gnash his teeth at life’s ponderous irony, not the author’s. Right? I remember your telling me all this forty years ago, when you and I were a hot new item.”

  To the tune of the Mary Hopkin recording from back then, “Those were the da-a-ays, my friend,” G. crooned to his stillbeloved; “we thought they’d ne-ver end. The blooming summertime of our lives.”

  “So go have yourself a Capital-V Vision about it.”

  He’d work on it, Narrator promised. But he believed she mentioned two question/comments regarding his tentative draft-thus-far. What was the second?

  “Well . . . ” Final slurp of smoothie. “You’re supposed to be the story-maker-upper in this condo, and me the mere lyric poet—”

  “Mere shmeer,” her husband interrupts to tut-tut.

  “But I can’t help thinking that something more interesting ought to be going on in the present time of this narrative than just a series of visions that trigger Narrator’s recollections of his boyhood with Ned Prosper, and the ho-hum suspense of whether they’ll add up to another G. I. Newett-book. . . . ”

  “Something like what?, its author wonders,” its author wondered.

  “Oh, you know . . . like maybe some major bump in the long happy road of Narrator’s marriage, for example, to rev up the story? Suppose I confess an ongoing late affair with one of our StratColleagues, e.g., or maybe discover that you have a grown illegitimate son or daughter by some pre-Me fling of yours that you never got around to telling me about? That would juice things up!”

  Parodying Andrew Marvell’s aforecited lyric, “Help like that I shall refuse,” Narrator intoned, “till the conversion of the Juice—into Manischewitz blackberry wine, maybe, or something else non-toxic. So who’d you hump, luv? And when, and why?”

  She smiled one of her Mandy-smiles and raised her smoothie-glass in salute: “See? Situation revved up; Reader hooked. Lhude sing cuccu!”

  “Hooked?” would-be-Author protested. “By such co
rnball chick-lit plot IEDs11 as those? But thanks for trying.”

  “My pleasure—as has been the all-but-bumpless story of Us. May it remain so.”

  “Here’s to that: No Plot-Complications or Rising Action in our story, s.v.p.”

  Click of empty glasses (no symbolism intended).

  “So on with your Summer,” then bade George Irving Newett’s virtual muse. “And if you include this conversation in your chapter-in-progress, consider changing cornball chick-lit plot-hooks to cuckoo chick-lit et ceteras. Another wink at Dear Reader?”

  “Gotcha. I think?”

  Heat expands; cold contracts. Although the calendric seasons are of equal three-month length, their days get longer as winter warms into spring and spring into summer, as do the corresponding life-seasons in this narrative. The “Winter” of Ned Prosper’s and George Newett’s childhood was a mere dozen years, 1930–42; the “Spring” of their adolescence and young adulthood was meant to be sixteen years (1943–59, through their teens and twenties), and in G.’s case was. But the “Summer” of Narrator’s full and more-or-less-robust maturity—from his thirties through his fifties, as G. sees it—1960 through 1989, let’s say—is nearly twice that span. How to squeeze it into a single chapter?, he wonders to his balky Muse. And what has it to do with nipped-in-the-bud Ned, who didn’t live to live it, and of whom one understood this rambling narrative to have become a memoir?

  What appeared to be the case, its perpetrator realized as Common Era 2008 approached its literal midsummer (i.e., August 21, midway between June solstice and September equinox), was that nothing of Ned Prosper remained to memoirize except his end—a tale quickly told, as there’s frustratingly little of it to tell:

  On a mid-June Saturday in 1954 (stalemated Korean War ended by armistice dividing country at 38th Parallel into communist North and democratic South, but Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting witch-hunt continues, and publicinstitution academics like George Irving Newett—entry-level Instructor of English Composition at Marshyhope State on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore—must grit teeth and sign loyalty oath denying past or present Communist-party membership), twenty-four-year-old Second Lieutenant Edward “Ned” Prosper, on weekend leave from the Army Language School, drove with one Ms. Lucinda Barnes, a young civilian employee in the ALS library and his girlfriend-of-the-moment, from Monterey down to Baja California in her bucktoothbumpered cream-and-green Buick Special sedan in search of warmer-water surfing than could be found nearer by: ideally (Ms. Barnes would later report), a spot isolated enough for them to ride the waves and each other au naturel. Somewhere below Tijuana they located an adequately secluded stretch of beach and commenced what sounds like a replay of that earlier-narrated southwest Florida Spring Break Flashbang of 1952, but with only one couple this time, and thus no partner-swapping. Consumption of mucho tequila and Acapulco Gold pot while singing with mock-military zest the Latino lyrics of La Cucaracha,12 duly followed by naked woozy frisking on the sand and in the surf, including not-very-successful attempts to ride the waves while both liquored and stoned. Project soon abandoned (“On Second Thought,” G. imagines N. proposing) in favor of mere splashing and body-surfing in the breakers, and that in turn, by Ms. Barnes anyhow, for passing out on their beach-blanket while her boyfriend carried on out there. “Bit more of a swim,” she believed she remembered his calling after her as she staggered to shore, “and then I’ll join you.”