Opinion

With John Barth’s death, the Chesapeake has lost its poet

Although best known as a postmodernist — I once asked Jack what the word “postmodern” meant and he answered without irony that he had no idea — it’s worth recalling that his earliest works, “The Floating Opera” and “The Sot-Weed Factor,” are novels of the Eastern Shore. “The Floating Opera” is a mordant and slightly hysterical tale of a Cambridge lawyer planning to commit suicide by blowing up — with himself onboard — a showboat moored in the Choptank River; in “The Sot-Weed Factor,” we get Jack’s wild take on the 17th century colony through the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke, the sot-weed factor — which is to say, the tobacco broker — of the title.

Jack’s subsequent work took off from there into the funhouse of narrative invention, but in his novels he returned to the bay again and again, usually on a sailboat, a sort of grounding, if that’s the right word, for his imagination. In “The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor,” for example, tales of Scheherazade and Sinbad the Sailor share space with a couple on a sailboat cruising the Chesapeake.

Jack gave me a copy of “Somebody” with an inscription wryly giving me permission to skim the Sinbad stuff and focus on the cruise, which is what I did. Nobody, to my mind, captured better the waterlogged landscape, the special sights and smells, the indolent sensibilities of boating on the bay.

Jack’s passing begs a question: Why has the Chesapeake region historically produced so little literature? There were two cradles of the English-American culture, two colonies on two bays, the Massachusetts Bay and our own Tobacco Coast. Why has the Northeast produced so much literature and we have produced so little? Where is our Hawthorne, our Melville, our Henry James, Edith Wharton and Sarah Orne Jewett?

The most enduring book by far to come out of the Eastern Shore is Frederick Douglass’s “Narrative,” but what else was there? Of 19th century Maryland “classics,” has anyone in the past 100 years actually read John Pendleton Kennedy’s “Swallow Barn”?

In more recent times, Gilbert Byron’s tedious “The Lord’s Oysters” and James Michener’s earnest “Chesapeake” keep rising to the top of the list only because the list is so short. The problem is, these two warhorses are about the Chesapeake, but not about very much else. What we might be asking for is a literature that comes from or out of the bay with all its intimate secrets attached but looks toward larger American truths.

So what’s the answer? Two observations and then a guess.

First, the material is there. There is the landscape, a river valley drowned only 10,000 years ago, which left behind an almost seamless meeting of land and water. A rivalry of cultures, the farmers working the land to produce tobacco, then peaches, then tomatoes and now chickens, and generations of watermen bringing in oysters and crabs and seines full of shad and herring. A meeting of races, the White middle class building on centuries of privilege, and the Black communities, with their history of enslavement but also, on the Eastern Shore, with a robust population of free Blacks living comfortable lives.

And there is the history. New England, as the story has had it for generations of schoolchildren, was a refuge founded on principle, on religious and perhaps intellectual freedom, built upon a sort of stolid self-reliance. The Chesapeake, as more modern scholarship has confirmed, was a colonial, mercantile venture from the start, a hegemony built on enslaved labor, primarily indentured Whites in the beginning and, by the end of the 17th century, African slaves.

There is a kernel of insight in that contrast: Which of those two cultures is more likely to produce art? Except that neither the pretty tales of New England nor the revisions to our understandings of the Chesapeake are entirely accurate. Where, for example, was diversity of religious belief actually tolerated? What American ports did slave traders sail out of on the triangular trade with Africa and Europe? What region got rich off cotton?

The fact is that the New England of Plymouth Rock and Concord and Lexington is largely a myth, but perhaps, when it comes to a regional literary tradition, a myth is a good thing. It creates its own context and provides a storehouse of behavioral reference. A shared understanding of the challenges life faces. A sense of good and evil and what it might take to discern one from the other. With all that as a starting point, “The Scarlet Letter” could write itself.

As far as I can tell, there is no unifying myth of the Chesapeake Bay; as the planters were in the 17th century, our regional identity is strung out along the rivers, in the coves and creeks. So I wonder if this lack of literary tradition has something to do with being anything and everything, in the middle, on the border, on both sides of the Civil War. Perhaps in the end, this is a matter of geography. We are on an estuary neither fresh nor salt, at the midpoint of the Atlantic Coast, a no man’s land one passes through.

One doesn’t tend to write novels about being in the middle, in a stasis, being held suspended between two points. Not much drama there. One does write about ambiguity, about being torn and uncertain, but plot tends to reward a decision at the end. What if — spoiler alert — there is no decision? What if, as we always have done, Maryland just muddles through?

I wish it had occurred to me, during our occasional lunches over the years, to ask Jack Barth these questions about the Chesapeake literary tradition, about myth, about muddling through. He did approach the subject in certain short essays, and he noted the meagerness of what he called “goose art.” But honestly, in the end, I feel Jack was content with the situation. The bay was his; he owned it; he was ambivalent about sharing it, as ambivalent about sharing its literary material as sharing a good place to drop anchor. If on an evening a sailboat happened to ghost by his mooring on some nice little cove, I’m sure he was happy enough when it continued on its way without stopping.