by John Barth
“Used to be,” Ned liked to say, “every fucking generation had to have its fucking war. French and Indian War! Revolutionary War! War of 1812! Civil War! Spanish-American War! World Wars One and Two! Now it’s one every goddamn Olympiad: Cold War, Korean War, and next it’ll be Vietnam or Red China! Get us outta here!”
To Canada, maybe? We’ve considered that, not very seriously, as a possible last resort if push actually comes to shove, but meanwhile have our hands full deciding what to do next fall if, as we hope, our Guard units aren’t activated and our draft-exempt status remains valid. Both of us are convinced by now that our vocation is “Creative Rotting,” and both have applied to Master of Arts programs in that field (newly popular in American universities) for further practice and mentoring. Ned, who has published a short story already in The Stratford Review and is beginning a novel, has early-acceptance notices from the University of Iowa’s pioneering two-year M.F.A. program and Johns Hopkins’ newer but also well-rated oneyear M.A. program. Narrator (nothing published yet, but several pieces going the rounds of little magazines) has applied to those and others as well, but has thus far heard positively only from TSU’s own brand-new Master’s program, to be inaugurated next fall. Our current inclination, we guess—“First Thought,” as it were—is to marry our girlfriends if necessary to beat the draft (G. and Marsha, while not officially engaged, have pretty much decided they’ll marry anyhow, either after college or after grad school; Ned and Ginny’s connection is more off-and-on, in several respects), put in a couple years’ advanced apprenticeship somewhere or other, hope to score with a few lit-mags or maybe even a book publisher, and consider teaching to pay the rent, at least until and unless we “make it” as professional fictioneers.
Teaching what? How to be professional amateurs like our own coaches at StratColl and TSU—who, though pretty damn good teachers, are only occasionally publishing writers and/or scholars? Or perhaps some genuine academic discipline, in which we’ll take a bona fide Ph.D. if we find one that really speaks to us? But that would mean setting aside “Creative Rotting” to research and write a scholarly dissertation....
We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, after debating the subject spiritedly en route. Meanwhile . . . spring break! Having long since “lost our cherries” per Ned’s first-day-of-spring Third Thought back in Stratford High—G. in his freshman college year, to the same Marsha Green with whom he has pretty much “gone steady” ever since; Ned a bit earlier, to his high school senior-prom date on, in fact, that event’s occasion (not the girl’s “first time,” she’d confessed with some embarrassment in the rear seat of Ned’s parents’ car, though she was no Ginny Hyman)—we’re currently “shacking up” with our girlfriends in off-campus “married student housing” apartments developed originally for WWII vets attending college on the G.I. Bill, but occasionally taken over by younger unwed couples experimenting with “sexual liberation.” George and Marsha’s is a Murphy-bedded studio apartment in TSU’s teeming College Park area, comfortably distanced from Narrator’s mildly disapproving parents, who anyhow never leave the Eastern Shore (Mom’s health is failing; Dad, retired, has grown ever more retiring) and Marsha’s more shrug-shouldered ones up in Baltimore. Ned’s and Ginny’s is actually just his bedroom in an old Victorian-style house near the StratColl campus, its one- and two-room flats rented by an ever-shifting congeries of married and unmarried student and non-student couples and unattached apartment-mates. Frisky Ginny has a room and roommate of her own in the campus dorms, but “sleeps over” more nights than not with Ned, whose tolerant parents roll their eyes (as much at their son’s choice of partners as at his lifestyle) but try to Understand. The two colleges’ spring recesses roughly coinciding, the foursome have decided on a Senior Spring Fling: load some camping gear into Narrator’s aging but still serviceable two-tone-green Oldsmobile station wagon and camp our way down the coast to Key West, Florida! Southern tip of the USA, which none of them has ever visited: Hemingway country!
“Sounds right nice,” allows G.’s mom from the bed that she less and less leaves (down in the Newetts’ living room these days, as she can no longer manage stairs). And Right Nice it is, at least to begin with: high-spirited fun, laughing at one another’s jokes and teasing horseplay, singing along with the car radio, arguing Life’s Big Questions, smoking pack after pack of the new Kent filter-tip cigarettes while swigging six-packs of beer and improvising makeshift camp-stove meals as we pup-tent south from campground to state-park campground—not down today’s stoplight-free interstate highways, which won’t be built until the upcoming Eisenhower administration, but townto-town along U.S. 1 and sundry state and county roads, daily refilling the gas-guzzling old Olds at 25¢ per gallon through Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.
“On second thought,” Narrator half-seriously complains outside Charleston, South Carolina, after the third or fourth such fill-up (his turn to pay, per the group’s agreement), “maybe we should’ve just stuck out our fucking thumbs and hitch-hiked.”
Objects his ever-sensible Marsha, “Who’d ever pick up all four of us plus our stuff? Nobody I’d trust.”
“No problem there,” Ned teases: “We guys’d stand back and put you sexy types out front, one hand on your hip and the other thumb out.”
Picking up the tease, “Our other thumb?” his Ginny pretends to wonder. “Not our fucking thumb, like you said before?” She examines her two thumbs, then playfully sucks at each. “Which one is that, anyhow? They taste the same to me.”
“Depends on what’s going on, “ Ned reckons with an exaggerated wink. We’re headed by then for Kiawah Island, hoping its barrier beach will be warm enough for camping, if not yet for the skinny-dip swimming that we guys, at least, look forward to down in Florida, maybe even Georgia. G. I. Newett finds Ginny Hyman’s risqué antics interesting; his girlfriend does not. In the Oldsmobile’s backseat he makes a show of sniffing his own thumbs, then reaches for Marsha’s, but she lightly pushes his hands away. In the run-ups to their initial freshmanyear intercourse, as they moved from groping through each other’s clothing to groping under it, Narrator had excitedly index-fingered the girl’s moist Vulva and anon her Vagina (fascinating words, their V’s so evocative of the mons Veneris that G. always visualizes them upper-cased) before first introducing thereinto his shy but ready penis, and routinely does so still by way of foreplay and pre-coital lubrication. He has even, on occasion, lightly fingered her rectum during copulation in a sitting position or supine with Marsha on top (she objects, on hygienic more than on moral grounds, and has made clear that between them there’ll be none of the anal intercourse that Ned claims to have scored now and then with Ginny. No hemorrhoids for her, thanks!). But thumbs?
“Just a finger of speech,” Ned says at that evening’s campfire as we banter about this over beer and hot dogs. Thrusting then at Ginny’s mouth a bunless frank like a toasted phallus while with his fork-free left hand feeding himself some canned baked beans right out of the cook-pot, “Fingers were invented before fucks, right?”
“Thumbs up to that,” is the best Narrator can come back with, although its double entendre isn’t altogether clear to him.
“Up to what?” Marsha pretends to want to know, and Ginny, in the spirit of the thing, makes a show of squeezing her eyes and buttocks tight while saying breathlessly, “Up to the hilt!”
Roused by such raillery, after several more beers the two couples retire, if that’s the right expression, to go to it in their adjacent pup-tents, pitched amid the all but deserted because still chilly Kiawah dunes: Narrator and Marsha quietly front-to-back in the cozy dark confines of their double sleepingbag, he withdrawing before ejaculation because they find condoms distasteful but she hasn’t gotten around to being fitted for a diaphragm yet; Ned and Ginny unrestrainedly in their still lamp-lit tent as if for their neighbors’ benefit: “Yes! Yes!” “How ’bout this?” “Yes!”
“Two thumbs up, d’you think?” their pleasurably-spent nei
ghbors wonder. “Maybe big toe too?” To which Marsha adds, “That girl, I swear: She’ll do anything with anybody!”
“Sounds interesting,” Narrator offers experimentally, and gets no reply.
“On second thought,” Ned says to G. the next day, or the day after, “to hell with getting hitched just to beat the draft.” We’re setting up camp on Amelia Island, just south of the Florida state line, the guys unpacking and pegging the tents while the girls take the car to a nearby general store to stock up on miscellaneous supplies, from ice and food to toilet paper and Tampax, Ginny having announced that she feels her period coming on. (“Tough titty for you guys,” Narrator had teased, to which Ginny had replied, “Says who? There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” “And more than one cat in the bag,” Ned added, “if puss comes to shove.” “Shove that!” Marsha had then scolded, who’ll later complain to G. that he should’ve done the scolding.) “You and Marsh might as well tie the knot, since that’s where you seem to be headed anyhow. But I’m not ready to settle down.” After seventeen straight years of school school school, he declares, kindergarten to the baccalaureate, what he has just about decided is to attend grad school, if at all, as a Journalism major, not a Creative Rotter: a year or two of that at either Johns Hopkins or Iowa, taking his chances on the draft (Hopkins is the better university, he concedes, but its M.A. program includes only one token course in journalism, whereas Iowa offers what looks like genuine hands-on training in newspaper work), and then out of the Ivory Tower into the Arms of Life—like young Hemingway, who’s been more and more on his mind as we head for the Keys.
“Experience, man! Experience of life, not just books books books and talk talk talk, if we’re going to have something real to write about.”
Yes, well: Narrator is impressed, as usual, by his friend’s ideas. But he knows, and declares, that for better or worse the Arms-of-Life curriculum, especially the Hemingway-macho variety, is not for him. Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room, Franz Kafka in his workaday bureaucratic office, William Faulkner in his Mississippi campus P.O.—how Arms-of-Lifey were they, who nonetheless managed to define literary Modernism at least as much as Macho Ernie? And that other navigation-star of ours, James Joyce: How much frontline, go-where-the-actionis Experience did he require in order to move from his quietly realistic Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through the complex “mythic realism” of Ulysses to that virtual last word in avant-garde Modernist lit, Finnegans Wake?
“That says it, right there,” opines Ned as we finish setting up the tents and reward ourselves with the day’s first beer: “After the Last Word, what comes next? Now that the Mod Squad [Narrator recalls his friend’s using that term, a dozenplus years before the debut of ABC’s popular TV series thus titled] has brought down the house, what do we Johnny-Come-Too-Latelys do with our turn onstage?” Anyhow, he goes on, my redneck Willie F., as he recalls, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1918, farted away the war up in Toronto, came home to lie about his combat experience in Europe, and then bummed around New York, New Orleans, and France before settling down in Ole Miss to write his masterpieces. And Joyce’s “Trieste/Zurich/Paris” subscript to the Wake is a long way from Bridgetown/Stratford/College Park, n’est-ce pas?
Those are the issues most on our minds during the run-up to this spring break road-trip and en route down U.S. 1, while our girlfriends listen without much interest or speak of other things (Marsha is on track for elementary-school teacher certification; Ginny aims to be “a dietitian or something”): Just as, in the graphic arts, Impressionism was succeeded by Post-Impressionism and it in turn by Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and the like, so in literature something was bound to supplant the now all-but-exhausted aesthetic of High Modernism that had defined our century thus far. In Ned’s view, the torch is ready to be passed, and the questions are how best to seize it and in what new direction to run with it. By temperament less adventurous, Narrator counterargues that the whole notion of each artistic generation’s need to define itself against the preceding one is a hangover from nineteenth-century Romanticism plus a questionable analogy to scientific and technological Progress. A really new direction for our time, he half believes, might be to quit thinking in those terms and neither imitate one’s immediate forebears nor define oneself against them, but, having duly surveyed the vast corpus of the “already said,” simply go to one’s writing-desk or typewriter, invoke one’s personal muse, and see what happens, living one’s life and paying the rent in whatever manner one chooses, whether as a journalist, professor, doctor, lawyer, office worker, day-laborer, or gadabout hand-to-mouth bohemian. What best suited Henry James, he likes to say, wouldn’t have done for Henry Miller and vice versa, any more than Lord Byron’s lifestyle would have appealed to Emily Dickinson, or Hemingway’s to Kafka, but each did first-rate work of his/ her kind. In short, mightn’t Ezra Pound’s Modernist imperative “Make it new!” (which, after all, Pound translated from Confucius!) already be getting old? Chacun à son goût!
“What?” wonders Ginny Hyman, our girls having returned with the goodies while their partners wrestle these Big Questions.
“French for ‘Each one limps along with his personal gout,’” Ned assures her. Not knowing what “gout” means either, Ginny doesn’t get the joke, but tells him he can French her anytime, period or no period.
“If we-all goût each other in French,” Narrator warns, “we’ll need a circumflex. Did you pick up one of those at the store?”
“Can we please change the subject?” Marsha suggests.
Fifty-plus years later, “I’ll second that,” says Amanda Todd (among other things) upon reviewing Narrator’s first-draft printout of this so-called “Flashbang.” “And if a mere versifier may offer suggestions to a counter-Romantic prose fictioneer, mightn’t it be advisable to give Reader some idea of what these people look like? What they wear, and how things feel and sound? More Sensory Texture, as we say in Cree-ay-tive Rotting One-O-One, other than the Vulval V’s of your firstwife-to-be’s Venusian delta?”
To which Narrator can reply only that her criticism goes without saying, he having often acknowledged both to himself and to her that were he an abler hand at such basics as the Sharp Rendition of Relevant Sensory Detail, he’d be a National Book Award winner instead of a mere Old Fart Fictionist. Chacun à son faute, pardon Narrator’s French....
“We were just four skinny middle-class Caucasian-American twenty-somethings, all of us pretty bright and none particularly wise; the girls quite attractive and the guys not bad-looking, Ned especially. All four of us light-brown-haired: Ned’s and mine cut short, Marsha’s and Ginny’s probably ponytailed. Exact eye colors forgotten—including Narrator’s own, until he checks a mirror. Marsha and I both bespectacled, mine the Dave Brubeck heavy-black-framed kind back then. Jeans and shorts and tees, and that’s enough of that. Speaking of Venusian deltas, how come Anaïs Nin calls pussy ‘the Delta of Venus,’ when the Greek letter has its apex on top? Is the goddess standing on her head, or is Mars sixty-nining her? That’s the sort of relevant sensory detail that Ned and I wrestled with back at spring break time, along with what ought to follow High Modernism in the literary arts and the A.B. in our C.V.”
“Wrestle on,” sighed patient Amanda Todd, and withdrew to her own Muse, as did her spouse to this slow-motion “Flashbang,” wherein
Next morning, as we break camp on Amelia Island and reload the station wagon, your nerdy Narrator, who’s been looking at their Florida road map, wonders aloud whether all hands are aware that the town name Naples, on the west coasts of both Italy and Florida, is derived from Neopolis, which is Greek for “New Town.”
“You don’t say,” says Marsha, probably with a trademark eye-roll not unlike Amanda’s half a century later. Ned re-declares his intention to see the real Napoli ASAP, along with “Trieste/Zurich/Paris” and the rest—and decides on the spot that in the meanwhile, instead of continuing straight down Florida’s Atlanti
c coast to the Keys as planned, we should detour across to the Gulf Coast and have a look at that newer Neopolis down below Tampa and Fort Myers, it being reportedly a jim-dandy beach-out place, and then follow the Tamiami Trail from Naples across the Everglades to Miami and points south. Skinny-dip in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Florida Straits!
“Yeah, right,” says Ginny, “with my Tampax-string hanging out to turn all the guys on.”
“Worth a try,” says Narrator, who Reader may have noticed has been being a bit flirtatious with his friend’s girlfriend. His own Marsha, at least, has noticed; enough to ask him—in a private moment during their lunch-stop somewhere near Ocala, while Ned and Ginny are using the diner’s washrooms—what’s going on. Has her virtual fiancé got the hots for Hot-Pants Hyman?
Yes and no, actually, he realizes and will try to explain to her once he works it out for himself en route from Ocala down past Tampa, Sarasota, and Fort Myers to Naples, still a modest little beach-town back then. He loves, respects, and intends to wed Marsha Green, whom he feels lucky to be loved by in return. For Virginia Hyman he feels neither love nor much respect—nor does Ned, he bets—but she’s undeniably lively, cute, and sexy, and he’ll admit to finding her flirty/frisky frankness sort of fun. . . .
Though not herself a word-player like Ned and Narrator, Marsha will be sharp enough to complain, “All those F’s make it effing clear what’s on my fickle fiancé’s mind.”
As anticipated, Narrator then finds himself explaining—to himself, to Marsha, and to Ned at the first opportunity—that while in principle he believes in sexual fidelity not only in marriage but in any committed love relationship, he can’t help feeling uncomfortable both as a man and as an aspiring writer at having had no real sexual experience other than with the woman he intends to wed and be faithful to. He’s no Lothario, nor does he aspire to be; no rakehell Henry Miller nor even much of an Into-the-Arms-of-Life (and other women) type like Papa Hemingway and Pal Ned. But for his dear One-and-Only to be literally his life-story’s Only One is rather like . . .