Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons

by John Barth

  And there he (by-George) had it, G. realized/hoped/wished/ decided and declared, first to himself and then—over lunchtime pepperoni-mushroom pizza at Bozzelli’s between Mandyclasses—to his mate:

  DREAM/VISION/TRANSPORT/WHATEVER #4:

  The Great American Goddamn Novel?

  Sprinkling extra oregano and hot pepper on her half as she frowned at his page-and-a-half printout, “Nope,” his soulmate finally replied, and bit into her first slice.

  “Whatcha mean, nope? Those pages all but exploded out of my pen this morning! I never felt such a release!”

  “Not even that time in Cancún when we both got dynamite diarrhea? Seriously, Gee: I can see how it must be a Grade-A release—discharge, whatever—to put that Third-Thought-Seasons crap behind you—”

  “Could you maybe change the terminology?” But he understood at once that, as usual, she was right.

  “Sorry there: to get it off your chest, okay? But a Vision it isn’t. So okay: You’ve cleared the decks; you’ve dumped your excess baggage . . . ”

  “Wiped my butt? Flushed my toilet?”

  “Cleaned your slate, hon; settled your accounts. Thing to do now is refill your pen and turn your page.... ” With her pizza-free left hand, she flipped the printout facedown on the not-all-that-clean Formica tabletop, displaying its virgin white backside, excuse G.’s imagery. “Take a deep breath. Exhale. Have yourself a ree-lax and, Muse willing, not just another hallucination, but a bona fide inspiration that’ll kick off George Irving Newett’s long-awaited Meisterstück: the culmination of his career! Sorry to be so stern, love. What’re you staring at?”

  He was, in fact, while perpending her indeed-stern counsel, focusing on his pages’ bare white . . . verso, shall we say: not so virginal after all, he pointed out now to On-Target-As-Usual Mandy, but besmirched or anyhow marked with spots of tomato sauce from their booth’s previous occupants. A metaphor, maybe, for even the most original and innovative writer’s situation? What bard’s slate is ever completely clean?

  “A poem-worthy point,” his wife happily granted, giving him a thumbs-up with her pie-free hand while nudging his leg under-table with her shoe-tip, as was her wont when her husband scored a conversational point. “I’ll see what I can do with it back in the shop. And you’ll see whether you can turn this slop”—by which she appeared to mean, as she handed it back to him, not the pizza-stained verso, but the “goddamn”-rich recto of his morning’s work—“into G. I. Newett’s latest.” It reminded her, she added as the couple stepped out of the pizzeria, pulling up their coat-collars against a chilly northwest wind, of Ezra Pound’s take-off from Anonymous’s “Sumer is icumen in, / Lhude sing cuccu.” Did G. remember it?

  Winter is icumen in, / Lhude sing Goddamm . . .

  “Raineth drop and staineth slop,” as Narrator recalled, indicating with a shrug and sigh his blemished script: “And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm! Pound spells it with two m’s and no n, as I recollect; I’ll do likewise in revision.”

  Parting at their side-by-side parked cars (Her Honda Civic, His Toyota Corolla, both vehicles in their second olympiad) to go their separate ways—she to the Shakespeare House office that had once been His, he to run a few errands before his cold-weather-afternoon workout in the college gym—they gave their closed right fists a comradely dap, Obama-style. Then, “Never mind revision,” advised Amanda: “It’s time to envision. Take that goddamn goddamm and run with it.”

  Yeah, right. Well. Maybe?

  We’ll just see.

  epi-season post-amble:

  “LAST THINGS”

  A HEM?

  Okay.

  21 December 2008: In Stratford/Bridgetown, autumn’s end and winter’s beginning. Likewise in the troubled global economy, in George Irving Newett’s much-morphed opus-in“progress,” and in its perpetrator’s expectable life span. On campus and around the old town and surrounding countryside, all the brilliant maple, birch, and other deciduous leaves have long since fallen except for a few tenacious oak-leaf hangers-on: the sort that, clinging fast right through till spring, reminded old Robert Frost (so Mandy reports) of blown-out-sail shreds on a storm-tossed ship limping into harbor. “He knew there was a Robert Frost poem in that image,” she remembers his saying on a visit to her undergrad college shortly before his death, “but he never figured out what it was.” Severe winter storms there’ve been in fact, from Seattle all the way to Frost’s New England, though only a few flurries here in Avon County—where those same Never-Say-Die (or Maybe-We’re-Dead?) “survivors” on their gaunt bare boughs put Narrator in mind of the few not-yet-discarded leaves of Every Third Thought: the title originally of his lost friend’s lost novel, then of G.’s attempted but soon-abandoned memoir of its author, next (“on Second Thought”) of his likewise abortive effort somehow to reimagine and recreate that novel itself, and finally—surely finally, on Third Thought!—of . . . what? Some Meisterstück of his own? A perhaps valedictory but nonetheless fresh, original, inspired, and lively new work by Aged-but-Still-Vigorous Fictionist G. I. Newett? Or merely the remains of a feeble attempt at some such last hurrah?

  Re-declares its would-be author, We’ll just see.

  In the calendar’s ten remaining days, the sinking DJIA will waver from just above to just below 8K. Multitudes of workers will lose their jobs in the worst recession since G.I.N.’s childhood, threatening—in his Second Childhood?—to become Great Depression II. The “Big Three” U.S. automakers will plead for a thirty-four-billion-dollar bailout from the federal government. Bernard Madoff’s monstrous Ponzi scheme will be revealed to have swindled his investor-clients out of half again that amount. Reduced demand will briefly drop the nation’s regular-gasoline price from its October high of more than four dollars a gallon to less than two. And Israel, frustrated by Hamas’s escalating rocket attacks from Gaza, will counterattack massively with tanks, bombs, and heavy civilian casualties.

  Happy New Year!

  We Todd/Newetts will duly salute it—not at midnight on the year’s last day, we being early-to-bed types, but with a halfglass of Korbel Brut at maybe 10:15 or so—and toast as well G.’s approaching the final metaphoric season of his life, though presumably by no means the final calendar season thereof, he being in good general health and (except for ever-more-frequent “senior moments”) some way yet from that Second Childhood, just as the solstice-time we tell of was some way yet from the above-raised Year’s End toast. It too we greeted, as is our wont, with a bit of bubbly at sundown on Saturday 12/21: the first half of that bottle whose second (like its sippers, not quite fizzled out) we plugged and re-refrigerated until December’s end. As is also our wont on such reflective occasions, “Lucky us,” we agreed, side by side on our rented “family room” couch in our rented lodgings (owners still undecided about selling, they’ve reported from south Florida, but definitely tending that way despite the real-estate scene’s being currently very much a buyer’s market, not a seller’s), champagne-flutes in one hand and partner’s hand in the other: not only still alive and materially comfortable despite our tornado-loss, but looking back on after-all-pretty-damned-fulfilling careers and a fine life together.

  “One suspects,” commented Mandy, “that your Dear Reader has heard that already. Maybe more than once?”

  “So here’s to Him/Her, may She/He fare as well! Here’s to your perky poetry and my plodding prose: Long may they waver?”

  Lucky to see print at all, opines his Ms., in the age of iPods, BlackBerries, and flat-screen/hi-def/digital TVs, “Just as we’re lucky to have a roof over our heads and your pension and my salary, plus Social Security both literal and figurative.”

  “Plus Son in St. Louis and Daughter in Detroit,” her mate risked teasing, “or is it Denver? Grandkids in Greenwich and Grenada!”

  His mate groaned and let go his hand. “Don’t start that again, Gee. We agreed to quit that nonsense.”

  “So we did: sorry sorry sorry, and sorry to have to keep saying s
orry!” But what the fuck, Reader: Now that he’d opened that forbidden door and let chill December in, why not up and confess to her and to Dear Whoever-You-Are that “Ned Prosper,” too—lost asshole Buddy who steered G. I. Newett through boyhood and young manhood like Virgil tour-guiding Dante through the first two precincts of the Hereafter—has likewise been Narrator’s invention all along? . . .

  “What?!”

  . . . That of course one had boyhood pals—a series of them through Bridgetown Elementary, Stratford High, and Tidewater State U.—and the usual initiatory “learning experiences” of one’s pre-teens, teens, and early twenties; but none so singly, consistently, singularly important as was “Ned Prosper” to “G. I. Newett.” Would that one had had, and had him still!

  To his relieved surprise, instead of emptying her drink on his head and dialing 9-1-1, his wife merely rolled her eyes, drew a deep breath, and asked sarcastically, “To ménage à trois with you and me, maybe?” But then added, “No thanks, mate—and you’ve gotta be kidding that he and his Third Thought novel and the rest have been fictions all along, like Son in Schenectady and Daughter in Duluth, or I’m outta here!”

  He re-took her hand. Smiled. Shook his head. “Nah. Sometimes I half wish they were, so I could dream up a Seasons novel from scratch. Whether Ned’s fiction was a fiction, we’ll never know for sure. But his being fictitious is my dumb-assed, impulsive, God-only-knows-why fiction. The guy himself was flesh-and-blood fact.”

  Shaking her head, “So you say now. But by our new president-elect’s Inauguration Day you’ll probably be telling me that you’re him: that you swam ashore down there in Mexico, deserted the Army, took the name George Irving Newett, and lived happily ever after.”

  “Hey, I like that!”

  “Sometimes I really wonder about you, Gee. . . . ”

  Yes, well: me too.

  Another deep breath, exhaled. “Love you anyhow, though.”

  And me too you.

  Presently: “So, then: Are we fictitious too, like your made-up stories and my made-up poems? Figments of somebody-or-other’s half-assed imagination?”

  Shrug: Not for us to say. But from our point of view, at least, here we effing are, love, with a few chapters, verses, and seasons yet to go, we hope, before things get grim—including what looks to be a long winter ahead for that president-elect....

  “So go write yourself another G. I. Newett novel while the iron’s still hot,” recommended Amanda Todd. “Or at least lukewarm?” Forefinger against temple, then aimed more or less Geeward: “Like, to begin with, did your maybe-make-believe buddy’s Last-Things lists include Last Words, and you could take it from there?”

  Glasses empty but bottle still half full, we did indeed then go (next morning) to our separate-but-equal workspaces—where Narrator at His, after thanking once again his Muse of Muses, spent some pleasant December hours recalling and reconstructing a number of those Ned Prosper Last-Things Lists, which he now divided, like the seasons of the year or of one’s lifetime, into serial categories. There were, to begin with, his Last Things of Youth, of which several have been mentioned already, and which typically had a twinge of sadness but not regret, they marking also one’s commencement to some presumably bigger/ better next thing or stage: Last Year or Day of Studenthood at (Wherever)! Last Academic Degree! Last Day as a Virgin! As a Teenager! As a Bachelor or Bachelorette! By comparison, Ned’s Last Things of Mature Adulthood, as he experienced or projected them, had been less exclamatory: Last Day in a particular dwelling-place, job, or town, say, before shifting to some new and presumably better Next, like trading in one’s dear old car for its jim-dandy replacement. Last Year or Day of being in one’s twenties, one’s thirties, forties, fifties.... And then, if one lived so long, the Last Things of Later Age, with their more autumnal flavor: last fulltime job; last year before retirement; last day on job; last regular salary-check before pension. Last new car. Last house before “downsizing” to assisted-living establishment or nursing home, like Mandy’s mom with her daughter’s help. (Who’ll help us? G. wonders parenthetically: Daughter in Dubrovnik? Son in Siam?) There were, Ned had noted, things understood in prospect as one got older to be Probably Last, such as In-All-Likelihood-Last Visit to some favorite European country or to one’s own country’s farther reaches like Alaska and Hawaii—as opposed to such First-Visit-Presumed-To-Be-Lasts as, say, Bora Bora, Tasmania, or Antarctica, none of which N. managed in his abbreviated lifetime nor yet G. as of this re-listing, although who knows, he and Mandy might yet.... And contrariwise, those many things not suspected at the time to be Last which however turn out to have been: Last Tennis Game or Ski-Run before knee or shoulder injury rules out for keeps those so-enjoyed sports; Last Sex before petering out, so to speak, into incapacity and/or indifference. Last Get-Together with Whomever before His/Her untimely demise. Last “Normal” Day—felt at the time to be merely ordinary, but in retrospect to have been bliss indeed—before routine physical exam reveals inoperable pancreatic cancer....

  And Last G.D. List of G.D. Last Things, okay? Because on Third Thought, who gives a flying fuck?

  Well: Old Fart Fictionist George Irving Newett, once upon a time, did in fact give or perhaps receive a Flying Fuck, in the W.C. of a then-new triple-tailed four-engined propeller-driven Lockheed Constellation high over Kansas or maybe Nebraska (on his first-and-only book tour, for his first-and-only published novel), to or from or with Never Mind Whom, he being then between marriages, and rather to his own surprise managed pretty well both that F.F. and that not-yet-O.F.F.’s First Novel, by George, all things considered.

  But that’s another story, declared G.I.N. to his Montblanc Meisterstück on the New Year’s morn, understanding that while his every Third Thought henceforth might be the grave, that still left First and Second Thoughts to get stuff done in—or on, whatever. Like, what the hell, maybe a novel about that? In, let’s say, five “seasons”? Having to do with . . .

  He’d just see.

  “You do that,” seconded Amanda Todd (not aloud, lest she interrupt His musings as he has evidently interrupted Hers, but in effect, by opening the door of His study just enough to wiggle her fingers bye-bye, as she does when stepping out of Hers for a bit on whatever Mandy-errands warrant setting aside her versifying) and followed that “Ta-ta” with her “Backin-a-bit” mwah. . . .

  after words:

  FIVE POSTSCRIPTIVE SCENARIOS

  1. Can You Hear Me Now?

  Hello?

  Having drafted and more or less edited his latest Whatever and, per house custom, passed the ms. to his Ms. for the judicious, sometimes stern but always on-the-mark critical response that she’ll get to in her own good time, Author/Narrator G.I.N. is taking a well-earned breather and, he hopes, refreshing his ever more easily exhausted Muse by touching a few of his favorite literary touchstones, as he inclines to do between projects in hope of re-inspiration by reorientation with those longtime navigation-stars. Also by tending to some not-unimportant domestic and home-office chores.

  Anybody there?

  In the first of these enterprises, Touchstone Retouching, he has, e.g., reskimmed the first-century C.E. Satyricon, by mischievous and lively Petronius Arbiter, both to remind himself of what the randy Romans were up to when not busy conquering the known world and to re-salute the progenitor (whether they knew it or not) of all subsequent comic/satiric prose fictors, from Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne, and Swift down (and he means down) to George Irving Newett. In the same spirit he has unshelved, wistfully hefted, and respectfully reshelved without reopening his much-but-not-recently-thumbed copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, with index-tabs reverently applied back at mid-century in a junior-year Modern Lit class at Tidewater State U. indicating each section’s correspondence to a book of Homer’s Odyssey. “Telemachus,” “Nestor,” “Proteus,” “Calypso,” “Lotophagi,” and the rest: G.I.N.’s baptism by total immersion in the High Modernism that his own literary generation would find to be a hard act to follow. An
d he has picked up, put down, re-picked up, and almost despite himself reread one complete volume of a two-volume Arabian Nights (salvaged, like those other touchstones, from the remains of his&Mandy’s library in their tornado-wrecked Heron Bay Estates home), impressed this time less by the Special Effects—magic carpets, magic words, wish-granting genies in washed-up bottles—than by the descriptive details of bejeweled palace gates, ugly faces, merchandise for sale by wily merchants in the bazaar. In a word, texture: never Author Newett’s strongest suit. Impressed too, as always, by Scheherazade’s skillful nesting of interlinked taleswithin-tales to save her life and rescue the king from his murderous, kingdom-wrecking misogyny—the way G.I.N. nests parentheses within dashes within serial subordinate clauses as if to postpone ending the sentence in progress and having to begin another. In S.’s case, Entertain me or die! In G.’s case . . .

  Don’t ask.

  Whether all this ritual re-touchment will re-inspire or rediscourage the toucher remains to be seen.

  How touching.

  As for Enterprise Two, those not-unimportant domestic and home-office chores: Author/Narrator is not a complete technological illiterate, but he’s a decidedly Senior Citizen who, over the decades between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the current global economic slump (2009 and counting), has graduated from manual to electric typewriters, thence through a series of ever less clunky, ever faster and more sophisticated desktop computers (used in this household only for word-processing, e-mail, a bit of Internet browsing, and simple home-office spreadsheets; never for video games, movie-watching, music-downloading, news-reading, “blogging,” and the like). At his age and stage he can be excused, he trusts, for lamenting the need to replace his also-aging, possibly storm-damaged, anyhow now dead “old” Apple iMac (bought a mere nine years ago!) with its new state-of-the-art flat-screen counterpart in the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, when one was lucky to be a pensioned-off academic in a modest but suburban low-rise condominium on Maryland’s Eastern Shore instead of a laid-off thirty-something trying to meet mortgage- and kids’ tuition-payments. He and Mandy have done their bite-the-bullet bit for the economy, he reckons, by replacing not only his “old” computer but his “old” cell phone as well (popped off his belt-clip, evidently, while he and Ms. Missus—currently at work in her minimal home office across the hallway from his—were bicycling a few weeks ago in nearby Stratford and the adjacent Matahannock riverside park). One hopefully supposes that even a Fart too Old for iPods, MP3s, BlackBerries, Palm Pilots (and whatever high-tech gadgets will have already replaced those by when anybody reads this list) will eventually get the hang of these two new purchases, as he quite got the hang, if by no means mastered the full capabilities, of their predecessors. For the present, however, he’s overwhelmed by all their bells and whistles: so many applications, each with its array of options and settings! And the two hypergadgets interlinked (or at least interlinkable, he gathers, according to their respective User’s Manuals), as their predecessors were not. Why would one’s computer desire intercourse with one’s mobile phone, and vice versa? Ah: because the latter isn’t just a telephone these days, like its lost predecessor and Mandy’s fortunately-still-with-us “old” one, but also a camera (as is the computer too, Zeus help us, he now discovers!), a text-messager, and half a dozen—maybe a dozen and a half—other things as well, whose “files” his computer may want or need to “access” and conversely (or perversely), if he ever learns how to apply those applications.