Day of the Zenith

My favorite author and novelist, John Barth, died yesterday. He was 93 years old, but still, impermanence is swift.

In the bicentennial summer of 1976, my college girlfriend, Mara, suggested that I read a novel titled The Floating Opera that she had been assigned the previous semester for some English lit class or another. I think her course was "American Existentialists" or some such thing. Anyway, she said, "I think you'll like it," and I did.

To be very specific, the book she lent me was the 1972 Bantam Books paperback edition of The Floating Opera with a pink cover and a cartoon illustration of three very drunk-looking characters, two men and a woman, wearing Gatsby-era clothing. One of the men, pants-less, is fondling the woman's breast over her flapper-style dress as she has an arm around the necks of each. A bawdy cover picture to be sure, and the text on the cover claims that "Compared to Tristram Shandy, Candide, the works of Celine and Camus! However, The Floating Opera is indisputably a novel by John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy." 

I got quite a kick out of the book due to its humor and cynical observations on life, love, and American culture. It reminded me of the best of Vonnegut and Twain, and I reread the book that summer and I've probably read it from start to finish at least a half-dozen times since then. Not that the paperback Mara lent me survived the years - I've bought several copies of the book over the years, always and specifically the pink-covered Bantam Books edition. If I ever see a copy in a used book store, garage sale, or whatever, I always buy it without hesitation. I've sometimes had two or three copies of the book on my shelves, and have assigned it to girlfriends over the years with the instructions to read it they wanted to understand me or know how my mind worked.

Jackassy House Speaker Mike Johnson once said if you wanted to know his worldview, just read the Bible.  "That's my worldview, right there," he said. If you want to know my worldview, read The Floating Opera.    

Todd Andrews, the protagonist of the book, was born in the year 1900 and is therefore an embodiment of the 20th Century. The book was first published in 1956 (it's Barth's first novel) but the action takes place in the 1920s and '30s. Andrews had been diagnosed with a heart condition that could either kill him at any moment or just as likely keep on ticking indefinitely - an existential condition - so that he's keenly aware of the impermanence of his life and the futility of placing any value on his future ("Todd" is the German work for "death"). With no reason for living, he decides to commit suicide because, ultimately, there's no reason not to do so, and he decides he'll do it by blowing up a stage show traveling on a barge, the titular Floating Opera, taking a number of fellow citizens out with him. Mind you, this is all established in the first few chapters, so these aren't spoilers.

        

Anyway, most of the book is about Andrews' day-to-day life before his murder-suicide. There's a lot of sex - a menage-a-trois (a frequent situation in Barth's books), a wet dream from which he awakens to find the object of his nocturnal emission sitting on the side of his bed watching him ejaculate, and a hilarious recollection of the first time he had intercourse. As they're going at it, he catches a glimpse of them in a bedroom mirror with "Betty June's face buried in the pillow, her scrawny little buttocks thrust skyward; me gangly as a whippet and braying like an ass." He explodes with laughter at the absurd vision, humiliating poor Betty June. That unflattering image, "gangly as a whippet and braying like an ass," has stuck with me over the years, and on more that a few times the phrase has come to mind and deflated my ego (and more) when I've been in coitus delicatus and imagining myself to be some sort of studly master of sex.

Beyond the sex, the book pokes fun at a great many topics. Andrews is an attorney, and recognizing the absurdity of law, takes great pleasure in turning the rule of law on its head, not for fortune or personal gain, not to win or lose cases, but just to see what bizarre outcomes he might create. Just to see what happens. I didn't practice law in my career, but as an environmental consultant, I've had to interpret state and federal rules and regulations for clients and advise them on strategies to maintain compliance with various acts, statutes, and guidance. I wouldn't be honest if I didn't admit that on more than a few occasions, I advised clients to do something not anticipated by the rules of the game. I never knowingly advised someone to do something against their own interests - that would be professional misconduct -  but I did delight in seeing state and federal regulators squirm and wriggle as I presented them with situations and scenarios clearly outside of their guidance documents and counter to their goals and objectives, just to see what happens. No doubt, I developed this interest from Todd Andrews.       

But most relevant to today, there's a chapter titled bottles, needles, knives (all the chapter titles are stylized in lower-case letters) wherein Andrews discusses his reluctance to see a doctor. I've shared his reluctance to medicine, even though I don't share his myocardial endocarditis, and have avoided the doctor for nearly 20 years until an incident last summer landed me in the Emergency Room. Since then, I'm being treated for hypertension, prediabetes, and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Impermanence is swift. There's a passage in the chapter when Andrews finally does visit his doctor:

"How's the old prostate? Keeping her empty?" 

"No trouble," I said.

"Sure raised hell that one time, didn't it? I swear I wanted to cut her out for you, Toddy; you wouldn't have had another twinge. But that screwball Hodges - remember him? the resident? - he was having a feud with O'Donnell, the surgeon, that year, over politics, and wasn't letting anybody get cut. Goddamn Hodges! I swear he'd have tried to amputate a leg with his damn internal medicine! What a bunch!"  

A great deal of my attitudes, opinions, and outlook on things, as well as turns of phrases, maxims, and mantras, are from The Floating Opera and other books of Barth's. 

I've known he would be leaving this mortal coil for a long time now. He's prefaced a couple of his later books with the observation that he thought this might be his last. I've even checked on Wikipedia from time to time just to see if I hadn't somehow missed his obituary. But still, it feels like some small part of my own mind, some imaginary spot that was my repository of Barth quotes, anecdotes, and wisdom, has passed along with the man.

Rest in peace, Professor.