John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

Lest it be objected by a certain stodgy variety of squint-minded antiquarians that he has in this lengthy history played more fast and loose with Clio, the chronicler's muse, than ever Captain John Smith dared, the Author here posits in advance, by way of surety, three blue-chip replies arranged in order of decreasing relevancy. In the first place be it remembered, as Burlingame himself observed, that we all invent our pasts, more or less, as we go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nill-we, the lot of us must sculpt. Thus Being does make Positivists of us all. Moreover, this Clio was already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her; it wants a nice-honed casuist, with her sort, to separate seducer from seduced. But if, despite all, he is convicted at the Public Bar of having forced what slender virtue the strumpet may make claim to, then the Author joins with pleasure the most engaging company imaginable, his fellow fornicators, whose ranks include the noblest in poetry, prose, and politics; condemnation at such a bar, in short, on such a charge, does honor to artist and artifact alike, of the same order of magnitude as election to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum or suppression by the Watch and Ward.

Thus much for the rival claims of Fact and Fancy, which the artist, like Governor Nicholson, may override with fair impunity. However, when the litigants' claims are formal, rather than substantial, they pose a dilemma from which few tale-tellers escape without a goring. Such is the Author's present plight, as he who reads may judge.

The story of Ebenezer Cooke is told; Drama wants no more than his consent to Joan Toast's terms, their sundry implications being clear. All the rest is anticlimax: the stairs that take him up to the bridal-chamber take him down the steep incline of denouement. To the history, on the other hand, there is so much more — all grounded on meager fact and solid fancy — that the Author must risk those rude cornadas to resume it, and trust that the Reader is interested enough in the fate of the twins, their tutor, Bertrand Burton, Slye and Scurry, and the rest, to indulge some pandering to Curiosity at Form's expense. .

Andrew Cooke's conviction (which he voiced innumerable times in the course of that night's rundlet and next morning's wedding breakfast) that the sun had set on their troubles forever and would rise thenceforth not only on a happy and prosperous family, but on a happier and nobler Province as well, was — alas! — by no means entirely borne out by history. Indeed, with the possible exception of William Smith the cooper and Captain Mitchell the opium merchant — both of whom disappeared from Clio's stage not long afterwards, never to be heard from to this day — it cannot be said that the life of any of our characters was markedly blissful; some, to be sure, were rather more serene, but others took more or less turns for the worse, and a few were terminated far before their time.

Tom Tayloe, for example, the corpulent dealer in indentured servants, was released from his own servitude at Malden immediately upon promising to press no charges against McEvoy; one hoped his experience would lead him into a less unsavory trade, but within the week he was peddling redemptioners again all over Talbot County, and a few years later he was throttled to death on Tilghman's Island by one of his investments — a giant Scot with all of McEvoy's passion for liberty and none of his resourcefulness. No more fortunate was Benjamin Spurdance, "the man who had naught to lose": Andrew discovered him in the jail in Annapolis, serving a sentence for petty thievery, and restored him to his former position as overseer of the tobacco-fields on Cooke's Point, but vagrancy and despair had so debilitated him that, the very next winter, an ague robbed him forever of the only thing he had not previously lost.

It may be said of Colonel Robotham, who succumbed to a like infirmity in April of 1698, that Life owned him no more years; but who will not regret that his journey ended, not in disgrace — which, when complete, can be as refreshing as success — but in embarrassment? A collaborator in the revolution of '89 and a Councilman under both royal governors of Maryland, he and four similarly flexible statesmen fled cravenly to England in 1696, when Nicholson opened his prosecution of their former leader. To add to his humiliation, Lucy never found a husband. Her child, a girl, was born as it had been conceived, out of wedlock, and raised on the Colonel's estate by his widow. Lucy herself fell farther and farther from respectability: abandoning her child, she lived openly in Port Tobacco as the mistress of her seducer, the Reverend Mr. Tubman, until that gentleman and his colleague, the Reverend Peregrine Cony, were suspended by their bishop in 1698 on charges of drunkenness, gambling, and bigamy. Of her life thereafter nothing positive is known, but one is distressed to hear of a young prostitute in Russecks's Tavern (which Mary Mungummory purchased from Roxanne's estate and operated jointly with Harvey Russecks) who achieved some fame among the lower-Dorset trappers by reason of "a Beare upon her bumm" - could it have been a freckled Ursa Major?

At least the Colonel was spared the chore of arranging a second annulment for his daughter, inasmuch as she became a widow before she was a mother. Poor Bertrand, after that final lucid hour with Ebenezer, lapsed first into prolonged delirium, in the course of which he accepted the worship of "Good Saint Drakepecker," held forth as Poet Laureate of Brandon's Isle, and deflowered harems of Betsy Birdsalls and Lucy Robothams; then he sank into a coma, from which Burlingame and a physician strove in vain to rouse him, and three days later died in his bed at Malden. Ebenezer was greatly saddened by his death, not only because he felt some measure of responsibility for it, but also because the ordeals they had survived together had given him a genuine affection for his "adviser"; yet just as scarlet fever may cure a man of the vapors, so his distress as losing Bertrand was eclipsed by the far more grievous loss that followed on its heels: Joan Toast, as everyone expected, succumbed before the year was out — on the second night in November 1695, to be exact — but it was neither her opium nor her pox that carried her off. Without them, to be sure, she would have survived; they felled and disarmed her; but the coup de gr âce — by one of those monstrous ironies that earlier had moved Ebenezer to call Life a shameless playwright — was administered by childbirth! Hear the story:

After that evening which regained Cooke's Point for Ebenezer (and ended our plot) there was a general exodus from Malden. Governor Nicholson, Sir Thomas Lawrence, William Smith, and Richard Sowter sailed for Anne Arundel Town the next day, and the militiamen went their separate ways; Burlingame tarried until he could do no more for Bertrand and then struck out alone on his perilous embassy to Bloodsworth Island, promising to return in the spring and marry Anna — to which match her father had consented. John McEvoy and Henrietta, on whom Andrew also bestowed his blessing, were married soon after in the parlor at Malden (to the tearful joy of the Parisienne in the kitchen) and sailed for England as soon as Sir Harry's will was probated; moreover, contrary to the general expectation, Roxanne went with them, whether because her old love for Andrew had not got the better of her grievance, or because she deemed herself too old for further involvements or too scarred by her life with the brutish miller, or for some other, less evident reason. Andrew followed them, leaving Malden to the care of his son and Ben Spurdance, and it pleased the twins to conjecture that Roxanne meant to marry their father after all, but not before repaying him in his own coin. However, if Andrew entertained hopes of winning her by siege, they were never realized: on the income from her estate she toured Europe with her daughter and son-in-law. McEvoy went through the motions of studying music with Lotti in Venice, but apparently lost interest in composition; he and Henrietta lived a childless, leisurely life until September of 1715, when they and Roxanne, along with fifty other souls, set out from Piraeus in the ship Duldoon, bound for Cadiz, and were never heard from again.