John Barth Novelist

One of my great thrills in 1991 with a personal hero-novelist John Barth (May 27, 1930 - April 2, 2024). His novels toyed with what a novel could be. His work was called postmodernist, described as novels that imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of the author. They include: The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) about the life of Ebenezer Cooke, a poet in colonial Maryland, and a series of fantastic and often comic adventures, including a farcical revisionist account of the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas; Giles Goat-Boy (1966), is a lengthy satirical fantasy based on the conceit of a university as the world of the Cold War, divided into a secretive East Campus and a more open West Campus; The short story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and the novella collection Chimera (1972). They are writing about writing and include a seven-deep nested quotation. Chimera shared the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. In his epistolary novel LETTERS (1979), Barth corresponds with characters from his other books. This interview from 1991 focuses on his book The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai. Any mistakes are his fault. Check with audio file for accuracy.

Ross Reynolds 0:00

John Barth is one of America's foremost and funniest novelists. His books include the floating opera Geils, goat Boy, this knotweed factor letters and the newly published the last voyage of somebody the sailor. He's a winner of the National Book Award, a writer whose way of telling the story is no less fascinating than the stories that he tells thanks very much for being on Seattle afternoon. Today used to be Mr. Bartels, you've had a long standing fascination with the Scherazade myth, which we were speaking about earlier this week with Isabel Allende, who shares your fascination with that. You've written that her stories, her tales are not your favorite, but she's your favorite storyteller?

John Barth 0:34

Why am I so and indeed our fascination puts it very kindly. I think it's become more of an obsession, an obsession that sometimes I think I ought to be trying to cure. The image of superheroes are telling stories to the king is one of those great images that everybody knows whether they've ever read the 1001 nights or not like the image of Don Quixote going across Spain, many more people know the image than know the book itself. When I first encountered the 1001 nights as a student filing books, in the books in the stacks of a library and reading what I was filing, she struck me and beginning to form my own ambitions as a storyteller, she hair is odd, whose life is always on the line struck me as being the most appropriate and pungent image for all of us storytellers. You know, we're only it's not enough to total 675 good stories, you're only as good as the next story. And your life is on the line in the metaphorical sense you know that your career dies if you don't keep doing it. You know, the King Lear becomes your audience, who is also your absolute critic, you got to make him happy you're not later on it came to see because I also have been teaching all my life in universities as well as writing that that publish or perish aspect, as they say, on campuses, you know, you get you get published or you die as a professional academic, that she is the first image over the publish or perish thing. More seriously, she's one of the great images of the whole story of Scheherazade is sort of wonderful feminist allegory even in the 1001 nights in the Arabic It translates out as she's called things like the savior of her sex you know, she's she understands that the Kings misogyny, sleeping with a woman every night and killing her the next morning, so she can't be unfaithful is a sickness in the state. You know, it's not just his problem, a sickness in the state. She tells

Ross Reynolds 2:13

these stories and eventually is released. But she Harris doesn't have a happy ending in her life that

John Barth 2:18

she shares out has a happy ending. And yes, she does. Yes. So it may not be a Storyteller's version of a happy ending. She on the 1,001st night, she pleads for her life on the bay. It turns out in the side of the story in the cracks of the story, that over this 1001 Night, she's had three children. And in every translation, it's one walking, one crawling, and one nursing. So she's had them spaced out over 1000. That's one of the reasons by the way, why there's 1001 Nights rather than some other number. But the king as she asked for her life on them, so that the children shouldn't be far as the king grants or her life on the basis of her literary production, and her moral character. And he says, in effect, I forgave you long ago. But I wanted to hear the rest of your story, if I would shares go to put the telephone through his head at that for more seriously than I think than Eve or more more profoundly than even the feminist reading, which is certainly valid and certainly sharp. And the image of shared eyes as an image for all as writers, there's no reason why non writers should be particularly interested in that aspect of it is the most essential one of all, and that is that in a sense, we really are all share Azhar is not we writers, but we people in that as long as we're interested in telling our stories and hearing our stories, how was your day, you're not going to believe what happened to me on the way over to the studio, etc. Let me tell you, we're alive. And I believe it to be quite so that when we cease to be interested in in our stories and the stories of others, we're dead in some way we've ceased to be human. So that equation of narrating of storytelling with being alive, I think, is the profoundest appeal of the shares of story. John

Ross Reynolds 3:51

Barth is my guest on Seattle afternoon. What's the kernel that gets you started on a book, you've written once that you started this at weed factor with a goal of writing a book so thick that the title could be written horizontally across the spine? Is there an image or is there a way of telling the story? Or is there a character that very much

John Barth 4:11

is one of the one of the interesting things about being a novelist who managed to survive death and other kinds of things and the usual catastrophes of the 20th century. So that one writes over several decades as a kind of low grade curiosity about what your muse is going to come up with next stories do have germs that we're not always aware of what all of them are, to be sure. It's a pity we don't have TV here because the current rule this one was a cover of a National Geographic magazine from 1985, showing an Afghan refugee, a beautiful young woman with a red julabo on and a frightened, horrified look in her eyes. And I had been thinking about writing a story with one foot in here and now I wanted to write about a man in the 20th century who grew up much as I did in what's been called the American century who somehow loses his way he doesn't quite know who he is, hence the title The last voyage of somebody the sailor Like many new journalists like George Plimpton type, he decides that he will he will resign off. For as material for his next book he will resale the classical voyages of Sinbad, the Islamic Odysseus. And he gets lost he gets lost overboard and somehow by a device that you must read the book find out, he finds himself in medieval Baghdad in the land of Sinbad the Sailor. Okay, there's the two things. It's like having two logs on a fireplace, and it takes three to make a fire. And when I saw that image of the beautiful, harried young, Muslim woman, Afghan refugee, I said to myself, there's Sinbad as a daughter, and as soon as I had Sinbad daughter, I had a plot and the story evolved from

Ross Reynolds 5:39

that. Could we have a taste of the last voyage if somebody the sailor, the

John Barth 5:43

shortest possible Chase, because Sinbad is a programmatic windbag? And he like myself as a storyteller who goes on away before he stopped? Let me make it clear that the last voyage is somebody say of somebody to sealer, is not all about Sinbad. It's a novel that does keep one foot in the present and one foot in the past most of the past have 1000 over the of medieval Islam and the narrative past the 1001. But at the beginning of Sinbad, his introduction to the story, he speaks to his dinner guests, including this refugee, named somebody and says, Six voyages, brothers each as hard and harrowing, as the one before have paid for what I share with you. Six several times, I have thought myself sunk and drowned, or Castaway beyond hope of rescue. And yet, our lobby praised though on every voyage, I've lost my whole investment and despair of my life. I have come back each time to Baghdad, more wealthy than the time before. Nowadays, this is old Sinbad with six of his seven voyages behind him. Nowadays he says the very smell of salt water turns my stomach, the sound of surf of Siemens Chanteys and slashing sales makes my mouth go dry. From past immersions I've become so hydrophobic that I yearn for the desert. I've drained my courtyard fountains. I wash only with perfumed oils. I can't bear even to water my wine. Yet though I'm scarcely dry from my sixth submersion on the caliphs orders. I must now set out a seventh time old man that I am set out once again and sink and soak Allah preserve me and preserve me he will I don't doubt he will marinate me in that brine that he has seen fit to pickle the earth with as surely as steam rises, and cork floats. Old Sinbad will come back up the Tigris older and richer yet, though not a bit happier or more wise.

Ross Reynolds 7:43

John Barth reading from the last voyage of somebody the sailor his most recent novel, which although it was finished, well before August 2, is partially set in Baghdad. Are there any eerie resonances? Because

John Barth 7:55

history has put a spooky kind of topicality on the novel that I didn't intend at all that half of it the Baghdad literally the Sinbad, half of it, of the much of the action takes place in the Persian Gulf, which in Sinbad time is called the harmless Persian Gulf Sinbad never runs in any trouble till he gets out of the Persian Gulf, and in the ancient cities of Bosnia and Baghdad, and it's ironic now painful almost to remember that right through the 1001 nights, the standard epithet for Baghdad was the city of peace for so it was under the rule of Harun Al Rashid. Sinbad, obviously, why do I ever get so restless that I have to go back to see again and leave behind me the delights of the city of peace, etc? Yes, that's grim to think about now, given what's happened, it's a spurious topicality. When the book was written, Saddam Hussein was officially our ally. And we were supplying him with his stuff that he's about to dump on us now as but do you ever

Ross Reynolds 8:49

learn some things about yourself from looking back at your fiction?

John Barth 8:53

Only in an odd sort of way. One thing one thing every writer learns, of course, is that he has been a particularly to write novels of some length as I tend to and have some complexity though, comedy. This is, after all, a novel about the heavy subjects of time and death. But it is a comic novel. It's not meant to be a long face novel. One of the things one learns that every four years, you can really knit up the old Argyle sock of the plot, you know, and, and get those threads together, hopefully, without dropping a stitch. That's something you learn about yourself. You learn if you have been writing over your 20s, and your 30s, and your 40s and your 50s. And now in my case, in the 60s, you learned to be very patient with yourself. You don't have that romantic auto destruct impulse that has unfortunately characterized so many of our American novelists. For example, in the first half of the 20th century, you learned to be patient with your muse. Hemingway made the great mistake as as we're told of writing his daily word count on the wall next to the toilet conducing conducive to constipation writer's block at the same time, much wiser I think to measure by the year and by the month let's say and by the year if I have a day when no sentences calm I feel Bigger you have the computers working back there somewhere you know the memory banks are going to come tomorrow and they always do. One

Ross Reynolds 10:06

hallmark of your writing is an almost a watchmakers precision in the way that the plot and the narrative comes together incredible detail that's been called genius. The book letters comes to mind an entire book composed of letters actually between characters from some of your previous books to one another, and

John Barth 10:22

following an alphabetical pattern at the same time.

Ross Reynolds 10:25

Do you ever get together a clock work like that, that you have to toss out because it's not working? Not

John Barth 10:31

all clocks work. That's right. There are clocks that don't work. This is the argyle socks theory. And they're do the metaphor I use before. And while it's certainly a kind of, there's something of the artifice about it. It's a kind of artists that I like it's kind of artifice that you find in interesting music, jazz or classical music, in interesting sports. I mean, what can be more complicated than the game plan of American football, you know, play by play. But in other areas, and sometimes in fiction, if it's delightful enough on the surface, complexity can be a pleasure in itself. For me, it's also a kind of organizational principle to keep things from becoming just chaotic. It's not one that would necessarily work for every writer writers are want very different from one another. For one thing, and the same writer from project to project may operate in a different way. I like to have a game plan, though, like the Pentagon's it doesn't always turn out to work. And so one must be prepared to improvise and make course corrections as you go along.

Ross Reynolds 11:26

Well, it's also literature that's very aware of itself as literature there's often a wink and a nod that you're playing with a literary device here in your

John Barth 11:34

books like so though I wouldn't be happy unless beyond all that storytelling about storytelling, which always sounds dreadful when you put it that way. I wouldn't be having this beyond that the stories were also genuinely passionate, impassioned, let's say genuinely funny or at least entertaining, diverting, let's have you as well as being storytelling about storytelling which mind you is not just a kind of modernist idea she Hara Zod is a story about storytelling, you know, all the early operas we have or OPERS about singing, you know, movies are about movies all the time, you know. So that kind of self referentiality as we call it, the medium, the medium using itself as part of its subject. All stories are in a way about storytelling. We say, Gee, he really knows how to tell a joke, right? This one doesn't know how to tell a joke. He really can tell a story. This one can't tell a story. We're always aware whether we're aware of that awareness or not, I believe, of that aspect of all great stories being also about themselves, whatever else they're about. For me, it's important that they also be about other stuff.

Ross Reynolds 12:33

There's the Muse ever leave you? Are you a prolific writer, the words pour out of you,

John Barth 12:38

prolific in the sense that while the number of books that are published over my career, the span of my career doesn't approximate save the number of books that a writer like my friend John Updike will have published in the same amount of time. But his are usually a good deal shorter. And so if you added up the number of pages I found out to my to my best agrument the other day, that with the publication of the last voyage of somebody's car, I have passed my 5000s published page of fiction made me feel like shares odd times five. The Muse doesn't desert me in the sense that I seem to keep turning out books. I know some novelists who always know what the next thing is going to be and in fact, some novelists who work on more than one project at a time but it happens to be my metabolism that I never know what the next thing is going to be for me this kind of low grade suspense and finding out what the next car is going to be that the Muse deals me but she has thus far knock on wood as I say it always come around and and began to sing the next thing by the time for me it's very important partly as a kind of insulation against reviewers and critics that one be well at work on the next book by the time the previous one is published. So I would have been distressed indeed would not be talking to you here this afternoon. If it were not the case that the last voyage which will officially be published next week, but which is on sale everywhere already. actually hit the stands before I was at work on the next I am but cannot talk about it. All right.

Ross Reynolds 14:01

I want to talk about it. Have you soured on sailing? I know that's a big passion of yours. It actually is we've through many of your books.

John Barth 14:08

Oh, no, I'll never get tired of sailing Chesapeake Bay, which I love very dearly. It's like sailing through your own history for me to sail those waters. I'm not as daring as a navigator as some of the people in my books. That's what fiction is for. I think I give them bigger sail boats and larger ambitions than I have in a quarter. On the other hand, I confess that I have become weary of it as a theme in my fiction, and just as my wife says, Don't do Shirzad again. I really have haven't done same with sailboats. But then, you know, I think of my past as a jazz musician. And, and think who's to tell the sax player that that's just enough choruses of Melancholy Baby, you know, that 16 is just enough. You know, it's only the musician that knows when the audience may leave even, you know, but he knows when he's done with

Ross Reynolds 14:51

the theme, this decline in literacy in this nation concern you?

John Barth 14:55

Of course it does. And it's not only in this nation. I mean, let's not mock the United States. I think it's more exacerbate it, and so is more obvious. I mean, we are in the we are a republic now of Nintendo and the VCR. But those those amusements are not confined to the United States and that that phenomenon of a literacy which people speak of college graduates who are quite literate, but they just do when, when pastime, time comes around, they get their delight and recreation from other sources, then, poetry and fiction, let's say quite understandable. These are other glitzy delights and much more passive than the act of business of reading. That does concern me indeed, I wonder whether in the year 2050 You know anybody anymore will be he may be that the fate of, of even the Stephen King's in the Danielle Steel's will be like the fate of our of poets now and our contemporaries, they maybe come in short on art for very special tastes. I hope not because it's such a great source of wisdom, delight and joy.