John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

These marvels alone, it seems to the Author, are sufficient evidence to convict Mistress Clio on the charge of shamelessness once lodged against her by our poet; what then is one to think on seeing this same young Baltimore, in 1728, offer to Ebenezer Cooke a bona fide commission as Poet and Laureate of Maryland? "On to Hecuba!" as our poet was wont to cry. Or, after the manner of his hybrid metaphors: let us plumb this muse's farce to its final deep and ring the curtain!

First, the Reader must know that after the burst of inspiration which drove him, during his convalescence at Malden in the winter of 1694, to compose not the promised Marylandiad but a Hudibrastic exposé of the ills that had befallen him, Ebenezer wrote no further verse for thirty-four years. Whether this fallowness was owing to the loss of his virginity, dissatisfaction with his talents, absence of inspiration, alteration of his personality, or some more subtle cause, it would be idle presumption to say, but Ebenezer was as astonished as will be the Reader to find that precisely during these decades his fame as a poet increased yearly! The manuscript of his attack on Maryland, one remembers, Ebenezer had taken with him on his shameful flight from Malden and entrusted, via Burlingame, to the captain of the bark Pilgrim. At the time, Ebenezer had been apprehensive over its safety and had exacted assurances from Burlingame that the captain would deliver it to a London printer; but in the rush of events thereafter, he forgot the poem entirely, and when, after the christening of Andrew III, Life eased its hold upon his throat, he only wondered disinterestedly whatever became of it.

His slight curiosity was gratified in 1709, when his father sent him a copy of The Sot-Weed Factor under the imprint of Benjamin Bragg, at the Sign of the Raven in Paternoster Row! The Pilgrim 's captain, Andrew explained in an accompanying letter, had delivered the manuscript to some other printer, who, seeing no profit in its publication, had passed it about as a curiosity. In time it had fallen into the hands of Messrs. Oliver, Trent, and Merriweather, Ebenezer's erstwhile companions, who, upon recognizing it as the work of their friend, created such a stir of interest that the printer decided to risk publishing it. At this point, however, Benjamin Bragg got wind of the matter and asserted a prior right to the poem, on the ground that its author was still in his debt for the very paper on which it was penned. There ensued an exchange of mild threats, at the end of which Bragg intimidated his rival into relinquishing the manuscript and brought out an edition of it at 6d. the copy. The first result, Andrew declared, was a vehement denial from the third Lord Baltimore that he had in any way commissioned Ebenezer Cooke — a perfect stranger to him — as Laureate of Maryland or anything else, and a repudiation of the entire contents of the poem. There were even rumors of a libel suit against the poet, to be brought by the Lord Proprietary at such time as the King saw fit to restore him his province; in time, however, the rumors had ceased, for some favorable notices of the poem began to appear that same year. Andrew included one in his letter: "A refreshing change from the usual false panegyrics upon the Plantations. ." it read in part.". . admirable Hudibrastics. . pointed wit. . Lord Calvert's loss is Poesy's gain. ."

"What a feather in thy cap!" Anna cheered upon reading it. "Nay, i'faith, 'tis a very plume, Eben!"

But her brother, surprised as he was to learn of his sudden notoriety, was unimpressed. In fact, he seemed more annoyed than pleased by the review.

"The shallow fop!" he exclaimed. "He nowhere grants the poem's truth! 'Twas not to wax my name I wrote it, but to wane Maryland's!"

Nevertheless, in the years that followed, The Sot-Weed Factor enjoyed a steady popularity among literate Londoners — though not at all of the sort its author wished for it. Critics spoke of it as a fine example of the satiric extravaganza currently in vogue; they praised its rhymes and wit; they applauded the characterizations and the farcical action — and not one of them took the poem seriously! Indeed, one writer, commenting on Lord Baltimore's wrath, observed:

It is a curious thing that Baltimore, so anxious to persuade us of the elegance of his former Palatinate, should so hardly use that Palatinate's first Poet, when the very poem he despises is our initial proof of Maryland's refinement. In sooth, it is no mean Plantation that hath given birth to such delicious wit as Mister Cooke's. .

Such accolades chagrined and wisened the poet, who accepted not a word of them. In 1711, when old Andrew died and Ebenezer was obliged to sail to London for the purpose of probating his father's will, he permitted himself to be wined and dined by Bragg and Ben Oliver, who had become his partner in the printing-house (Tom Trent, they informed him, had renounced poetry and the Established Church to become a Jesuit; Dick Merriweather, after wooing Death in a hundred unpublished odes and sonnets, had made such a conquest of that Dark Lady that at length, his horse rearing unexpectedly and throwing him to the cobbles, she had turned into an eternal embrace what he had meant as a mere flirtation), but to their entreaties for a sequel to the poem — a Fur-and-Hide Factor or a Sot-Weed Factor's Revenge — he turned a deaf ear.

Truth to tell, he had little to say any more in verse. From time to time a couplet would occur to him as he worked about his estate, but the tumultuous days and tranquil years behind him had either blunted his poetic gift or sharpened his critical faculities: The Sot-Weed Factor itself he came to see as an artless work, full of clumsy spleen, obscure allusions, and ponderous or merely foppish levities; and none of his later conceptions struck him as worthy of the pen. In 1717, deciding that whatever obligation he owed to his father was amply satisfied, he sold his moiety of Cooke's Point to one Edward Cooke — that same poor cuckold whose identity Ebenezer had once assumed to escape Captain Mitchell — and Anna hers to Major Henry Trippe of the Dorset militia; though "their" son Andrew III was by this time a man of twenty-one and had already sustained whatever wounds the scandal of his birth was likely to inflict, they moved first to Kent and later to Prince George's County. For income, Ebenezer — now in his early fifties — performed various clerical odd-jobs as deputy to Henry and Bennett Lowe, Receivers General of the Province, with whom he became associated (the Author regrets to say) by reason of his conviction that their brother Nicholas was actually Henry Burlingame. Anna, be it said, did not permit herself to share this delusion, though she indulged it in her brother; but Ebenezer grew more fixed in it every day. If, indeed, it was a delusion: Nicholas Lowe did not in the least resemble Burlingame's past impersonation of him or any other of the former tutor's disguises, but he was of the proper age and height, possessed a curious wit and broad education, and even displayed what can only be called "cosmophilist" tendencies now and again. Furthermore, to all of Ebenezer's hints and veiled inquiries he replied with a mischievous smile or even a shrug. . But no! Like Anna, we shall resist the temptation to folie à deux: age has made our hero fond, like many another, and there's an end on it!

Two things occurred in 1728 to conclude our history. Old Charles Calvert was then a baker's dozen years under the sod and thus unable to savor, as did our poet in his sixty-second year, this final irony concerning The Sot-Weed Factor: that its net effect was precisely what Baltimore had hoped to gain from a Marylandiad, and precisely the reverse of its author's intention. Maryland, in part because of the well-known poem, acquired in the early eighteenth century a reputation for graciousness and refinement comparable to Virginia's, and a number of excellent families were induced to settle there. In recognition of this fact, the fifth Lord Baltimore (that famous young rake and dilettante referred to earlier) was moved to write a letter to the aging poet, from which the following excerpt will suffice: