Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons

by John Barth

  In the dozenth year of their union—1980, to be precise, by when she’d attained what had been her bridegroom’s age at their wedding—she published her first-and-thus-far-only book: a small volume of poems from the Johns Hopkins University Press that earned her promotion from the rank of Associate Professor, which she’d held by then for some half-dozen years, to Full. Her husband’s long-since-completed second novel, having made its futile rounds of the New York trade houses with some mildly complimentary responses but no takers, was being nudged to no better avail through an ever-diminishing list of smaller, “independent” presses by its author’s ever-less-interested agent’s ever-changing young assistants. But he still published the occasional short story in this or that quarterly, and was reluctantly adjusting to composition for its own sake and a readership essentially of two. As he had foretold or forewarned, the couple’s scribblings were their only offspring. That the “parents” would be those scribblings’ all-but-only readers had not been by him foreseen: a state of affairs less easily accommodated by a would-be novelist, perhaps, than by a late-twentieth-century poet.

  “Trust me,” his wife assured him: “You’ll get used to it.” For it was her conviction, which G. found inarguable, that in the age of video and the Internet, the audience for Literature had grown vanishingly small. “Which doesn’t mean . . . ” she liked to add, leaving the sentence suspended. And—not blind to the fact that among their contemporaries there were still a few who not only won major literary prizes but even managed on rare occasions to climb briefly onto the best-seller lists—they would shrug and click their wineglasses, or whatever.

  Plus, they agreed, although childless they had another category of offspring: their young Shakespeare House workshoppers, who, if not quite disciples (who wanted disciples?), were the warmly appreciative mentees of their department’s two perhaps-most-popular mentors. “’Twill suffice,” Mandy would assure her mate as they cleaned up after one of their end-ofsemester parties for those protégés.

  Perhaps so. But at times, anyhow, George Irving Newett nevertheless still felt himself to be (and we re-quote him with his permission) “a fucking failure” with both Muse and Mrs.: by no means impotent on either front, but infertile, his penned scribblings and penile dribblings equally Dead On Arrival at their respective destinations. Adoption? They briefly pondered it early on, and agreed that like book-reviewing, for example, it was an altogether commendable enterprise—but not for them.

  “So what about artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization?” G. half-heartedly suggested in the front end of the 1980s, when “test-tube babies” began making headlines. “All those healthy eggs of yours going down the toilet . . . ” To which his wife replied A, that for all the two of them knew, her monthly ovulations were no more viable than his twice-or-thrice-weekly ejaculations, and B, that even if they were, she wanted nobody’s stuff in her private test tube or personal petri dish except her spouse’s, thanks. “What the fuck, Gee: We don’t even like house pets!”

  True. And so it came to pass that by Mandy’s menopause in the late 1980s, the subject of Todd/Newett offspring was as comfortably behind them as was any serious hope or expectation of their hitting it big in the poetry-and-fiction way. In the decade to follow (the “Autumn” of their lives and of its present chronicling), when numerous of their Stratford colleagues and neighbors had adult children and young grandchildren to visit or be visited by, the couple will sometimes wistfully pretend the same and speak of “our daughter in Dallas” or “our son in St. Louis”—even of Amanda’s “brother in Buffalo,” George’s “sister in Seattle,” and the similarly alliterative offspring of those nonexistent siblings, the “nephew in New York” and “niece in Naples.” But the practice of their deeply-felt shared vocation—more than a hobby, if less than a markedly successful profession—continued, like their sexual connection, to give them much mutual pleasure in and of itself through their lifetime’s Summer and beyond.

  A season whose end, both literal and figurative, now approaches. The calendric September of its inscribing kicked off with Hurricane Gustav’s re-pounding of New Orleans, still struggling to recover from Katrina’s devastation three years previously. Having been much criticized for their inattention to that earlier tempest, President Bush and Vice President Cheney canceled their scheduled appearance that day at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where in any case their nationwide unpopularity would have been no asset to the party’s about-to-be-nominated candidate, Senator John McCain. Five days later, Tropical Storm Hannah only minimally damaged us East Coasters, but its mid-month Gulf Coast successor, Hurricane Ike, wrecked Galveston, flooded Houston, and left millions powerless along its path to the Great Lakes....

  And here we are—were, rather, on 9/14/2008: the eve of that year’s Harvest Moon, with G.I.N.’s “memoir” of Ned Prosper not much farther along than when he resolved a full season past to write it, and his so-called Vision #3: 1968 not really a bona fide Vision like its two forerunners, but a mere mini-narrative of his and Mandy’s marital “Summer.” Which, what the hell, he might as well wrap up: By May 1988, their twentieth wedding anniversary, this childless and siblingless couple were all but parentless as well, having seen both of G.’s through their ripe old age, separate deaths, and interment in the Avon County Cemetery, Amanda’s heart-attacked dad through his western Maryland cremation, and her ailing mom into a Stratford assisted-living facility, where her daughter could less inconveniently manage her finances and keep general tabs on her through the brief remainder of her life. Two years later, at the close of academic year 1989/90, the male of this couple accepted with mixed feelings the directorship of StratColl’s Shakespeare House Creative Writing Program, in which he had taught by then for nearly three decades: feelings mixed because while he welcomed but didn’t really need the small salary-increase, he regretted any additional impingement on his writingtime and had long since made clear to his colleagues that he had no particular relish for administrative responsibilities—which however he felt (correctly, it would turn out) he could manage rather better than the program’s unimpressive retiring director had done. Appointment effective as of the approaching fall semester, when too the appointee would reach age sixty. Which was and is to say . . .

  “The happy ending of our life’s long Summer?” Mandy offered eighteen years later, “and its modulation to mellow Autumn? Here’s to it.”

  Yet another clink of what Reader might fairly mistake to be our ever-present wineglasses, although in fact we typically have only one glass at afternoon’s end (or, on hot days, gin and tonic on the rocks), perhaps a second (wine only) while preparing dinner together, and a third while eating it: jug wines, mostly, except on such special occasions as toasting the rise of a full Harvest Moon over the Matahannock on a warm mid-September night in the blessedly final year of a ruinous presidential administration, which call for champagne.

  “To the year’s autumn and ours,” her mate seconded—avoiding, as had she, the ominous word fall.

  “And to your Memoir-Muse?” his mate suggested with a smile. “May she wake up already and get with it?”

  “Ah, well, Man . . . ” G. calls her that sometimes. “I don’t know: I think I’m having second thoughts about that whole project. . . . ”

  And mirabile dictu, no sooner did hear himself say second thoughts than—transfixed, gazing at the moon with raised champagne-flute in hand—he experienced an unequivocal revelation /sensation, no less strong for its being over in a flash: the for-real

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #3:

  On Second Thought

  At first just those words, as if in boldface small capitals and italics, but followed at once by recollection of Ned Prosper’s habitually declaring (left thumb up and forefinger extended, as mentioned already in Narrator’s memoir-notes and -sketches of his late friend), “On second thought . . . ” —“Let’s not jump off the Matahannock Bridge; let’s go splash Ruthie and her friends instead
.”

  —“Let’s not add these Spicy Detective magazines to the Boy Scout waste-paper-collection drive; let’s squirrel ’em away for later.”

  Et cetera, those Second Thoughts canceling whatever had preceded them....

  Touching her husband’s knee, “You okay?” Mandy wondered.

  G. opened his eyes, realizing only as he did so that he’d squeezed them shut; exhaled and gave his head a wake-up shake. “Yeah, yeah. But you know what?”

  “You have my attention.”

  “On second thought, to Hell with that memoir project: I’m a maker-upper, not a tell-aller! Never mind the Story of Ned Prosper; I’m going to write Ned Prosper’s story: that novel that he never got to finish and I never got to read! Autumn, here we come!”

  As if on cue, at his salute they heard, not summer’s “lhude cuccu,” but the season’s first flock of migratory Canada geese honking faintly and then cacophonously downriver: a long V of them silhouetted against the full moon en route to settling in nearby creeks and coves. Entranced, the pair watched their passage.

  With a sigh, “Autumn, here we are,” G.’s patient longtime mate then corrected. “Last time I looked I was sixty-five, and a week from now you’ll turn seventy-eight! Better get on with your Second Thought there, love, and good luck.”

  5

  second fall?

  first fall ii?

  this fall?

  last . . . ?

  Where have all the flowers gone?

  IN JUNE OF C.E. 1970, the second year of their marriage, forty-year-old George Irving Newett and his twenty-eight-year-old bride Amanda Todd took out a twenty-year mortgage to buy their first house, the earlier-mentioned white clapboard Stratford bungalow that they’d been renting. To young Mandy especially, the idea that its so-distant pay-out date would ever actually arrive was almost amusing: 1990? She nearing fifty, her lively husband sixty, and their life’s just-begun Summertime yielding the stage to Fall? Unthinkable! But in a very short while, so it seems to them now, that came to pass. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford, and was himself defeated four years later by Ronald Reagan. The USSR invaded Afghanistan; Mount St. Helens erupted; the space shuttle Challenger exploded; President Reagan’s reputation, blemished by the Iran-Contra scandal, was re-boosted by four productive summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, presaging an end to the long, apocalypse-threatening Cold War. Et cetera (per The World Almanac, which Narrator is obviously consulting)—and in a flash, so it seems in present retrospect, their life’s longest season was behind them.

  As was this summer of its chronicling, whose wrap-up Harvest Moon coincided with the giant Lehman Brothers Bank filing for bankruptcy, the stock market sinking ever lower, and other signs of a worldwide economic bust ahead. The Newett/Todd “Autumn” that followed—1990–2009—while not quite concluded as of G.I.N.’s first-draft penning of it in late November 2008 (This Fall? Second Fall? Next Fall? First Fall II?), has passed even more swiftly, both because its allotted span is a mere nineteen years instead of Summer’s twentynine (“cold contracts,” although ’08’s autumn thus far has been unseasonably warm) and because time flies faster for us Aging if not-quite-Old-yet Farts. In the literal first month after Narrator’s equinoctial birthday and first anniversary of his Shakespeare’s House head-bang, there was near-panic in world markets as the Dow dropped into the 8000s. Senators Obama and McCain went head-to-head in the presidential campaign debates; Hurricane Omar, after deflowering the Virgin Islands with Category 3 winds, fizzled out in the North Atlantic, officially ending the storm season that had jumped its official starting-gun with Tropical Storm Arthur back in late May.14 And G. I. Newett—remember him?—addressed and daily readdressed the unenviable, self-imposed, and admittedly faute de mieux task of dreaming up from virtual scratch the late Edward “Ned” Prosper’s long-lost novel, with little more than its Shakespearean title to work from: an in memoriam instead of that originally-planned memoir.

  Like, uh (he began typing back in early October), maybe EVERY THIRD THOUGHT: A Novel by Edward “Ned” Prosper, by George Irving Newett, by and large? And for starters, let’s see, maybe, “Once upon a time . . . ”—or has that been said somewhere already? But shit: By the October of one’s life as a reader, writer, and professional professor of literature, what hasn’t been said already? Tens of thousands of made-up stories under one’s bulging belt, from the earliest oral epics to last month’s “electronic literature” experiments! Enough to set a chap to musing (on Second Thought, sort of, although without thinking of it as such) about autumnality in general and in particular one’s own, which in G.I.N.’s case Narrator would divide into two unequal segments: 1) the five too-busy but nonetheless pleasant years of his Shakespeare Literary House directorship, culminating in his 1995 academic retirement, the hand-off of that directorship to popular poet/professor Amanda Todd, and the exchange of their paid-off Stratford digs for a jim-dandy, more easily maintained “coach home” in the Blue Crab Bight subdivision of a new gated community called Heron Bay Estates, a few miles downriver; and 2) the so-far-thirteen years since, leading to Mandy’s own approaching retirement at the close of the current academic year15 and including, alas, the “pre-fall” to this narrative’s First Fall: that infamous late October of 2006, when the Newett/Todds’ dear coach home at 1014 Oyster Cove was tornado-trashed by T. S. Giorgio as afore-chronicled, along with most of the rest of Heron Bay Estates. A loss still painful to recollect, and from which, given their age, the couple do not expect ever to quite recover, although (thanks largely to House-Manager Mandy) they’re managing....

  So how’s that for your big-deal novel’s fanfare, Nedwardio mio? Okay, okay: We can imagine you, back there in your damned eternal springtime, giving it the finger. But just as the muralist Diego Rivera famously declared, “I paint what I see,” so your ex-Muse-Mate—less adventurous than you, but perhaps therefore longer-lived—writes whatever dribbles from his Montblanc, take it or leave it.

  Suggested Current Muse-Mate M. on 29 October 2008, the second anniversary of that tornadoing, “I say leave it. This so-called Second Fall or whatever is more than a third done already, no? Your birthday’s a whole month behind us. We’ve had our first frost; all the leaves are turning, and the U. S. of A. is about to elect its first-ever African-American president, Zeus help him. Seems to me you’re overdue for another Capital-V Vision—number four, is it, or have I lost count?”

  Number four it would be, if one could have it. Ms. T. hadn’t lost count, but her spouse—having lost to the passage of his prime-time season most of his hair and not a little of his libido, general pep, mental acuity, and . . . he forgets what-all else—is clearly also losing his visionality, let’s call it. The forehead contusion that occasioned First Fall Vision #1 was long since healed, sans stigmata. Vision #2 had been more or less in synch with the vernal equinox, but #3, such as it was, had arrived a full two months past the summer solstice and (who knew?) might turn out to have been his last.

  Almost to his own surprise, God damn you anyhow, Ned Prosper! he found himself writing on Wednesday, November 5, the morning after Barack Obama’s historic election, which the Todd/Newetts had celebrated with friends at a colleague’s largescreen-TV’d house in Stratford’s renovated Bridgetown neighborhood. How is it you never showed and shared your goddamn Every Third Thought thing with your oldest/best friend, the way he showed and shared his first novel-in-progress with you, chapter by chapter and draft after draft, and we showed and shared every goddamn other thing, from our naughty fifth-grade “pop-went-the-snaps” poem to each other’s adolescent weenies and their post-adolescent adventures? What was so goddamn special about it, to keep it such a goddamn secret? Maybe you realized from Square One that it was a worthless piece of shit, and couldn’t admit that your buddy was turning out to be the writer you thought you’d be? Or hey: Maybe your big-deal magnum opus didn’t actually exist at all! Better yet, on Second goddamn Thought, maybe this is it, right? The Great American Novel, beginn
ing with the immortal invocation/execration “God damn you anyhow, Ned Prosper,” lost asshole buddy that George Irving Newett loved almost to the point of bifuckingsexuality! There, he’s goddamn said it—or rather, you’ve said it, in this goddamn Third Thought thingamafuckingjig that, what the hell, on Third Thought might as well kick off with PRE-AMBLE: CLEARING GEORGE I. NEWETT’S NARRATIVE THROAT and carry right on to this goddamn “sentence” in goddamn “progress. ” . . . Why’d you up and die on me, old buddy, and who gives a shit half a century later except, well, obviously, still-desperately-scribbling G. I. Newett, and Mandy’ll understand, I hope, bless her: She’s what one has instead of kids and grandkids and fame and fortune—well, never mind goddamn fortune, but an undestroyed house anyhow and youthful summertime or at least mid-autumn vigor instead of late-November almost-winterhood, but what the fuck, we Todd/Newett//Newett/Todds have each other plus our separate-and-together scribblings and a (rented) roof over our gray- or scarce-haired heads, the pair of us still “perpendicular and taking nourishment,” thank you very goddamn much, Zeus-or-whomever, plus writing—who knows, maybe even finishing!—Ned Goddamn Prosper’s goddamn Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons, and there you goddamn have it: THE (by-George) END!