Free Final Fridays by John Barth Page B

cited before. I remember a conversation with William Styron back in 1965, in the course of which he mentioned to me that he was at work on a “straight” novel about Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and I asked him how he planned to avoid nit-picking from experts on period detail. His working strategy, Styron told me, was systematically
to avoid such detail as far as possible and to concentrate instead on the characters’ psychology; my working strategy in Sot-Weed was to invoke the Muse of Comedy rather than her grim-faced sister.
    All the same, it seemed important to me to acquire a fair degree of amateur expertise in three main areas—the history of the two colonies, the homely details of everyday life there (such as clothing, food and drink, and what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim”), and the detailed flavor of the colonists’ written and spoken language, which also affords some access to their thoughts and feelings. If I perpetrated anachronisms of detail or language or psychology—and no doubt the novel has its share of those—I wanted them insofar as I could manage to be intentional anachronisms, not inadvertent ones. Even in satirical farce or fantasy, one ought not ignorantly to put carburetors on fuel-injected engines, for example, or have Charles Calvert call William Claiborne “Black Bill” if that nickname hadn’t yet come into use.
    Back then I was living up in State College, Pennsylvania, on a meager assistant professor’s salary and had neither the funds nor the leisure (nor for that matter the temperament) to make research expeditions to St. Mary’s and Jamestown, Annapolis and Williamsburg. Other than such documents as Captain John Smith’s Generall Historie , William Byrd’s Secret Diary of the Dividing Line , and above all Ebenezer Cooke’s Sot-Weed Factor poem, my primary resource in this enterprise—and it turned out to be a splendid one—was the multivolume Archives of Maryland , which I discovered in the stacks of Penn State’s Pattee Library and immersed myself in for the next several years while drafting the novel. This formidable shelf of heavy folio volumes comprises mainly transcripts of the proceedings of the Governor’s Council and the General Assembly of the province from
the time of its chartering up to the Revolution, but it also includes all sorts of depositions and complaints to the Provincial Court—an invaluable source for the names of everyday items, the kinds of hassles that folks were involved in, and the language they used to voice their grievances or defend their behavior. I wish I could give you pregnant examples, but at 40 years’ distance I have forgotten what frowes and inkles are, and suckets and pookes , and how many ells make a firkin , although those magical terms still sing in my memory. I do recall being impressed with differences between the English English of the late-17th/early-18th century and the English of the American colonials at that time. The language of Captain John Smith, both in his own writings and in the documents that I ghost-wrote for him (such as his Secret Historie of the Voiage up the Baie of Chesapeake ), has an Elizabethan flavor because Captain John was a bona fide Elizabethan; the language of Eben Cooke’s Sot-Weed Factor a hundred years later, and of Maryland Provincial Court depositions taken at the time of its writing, remains more Elizabethan than Georgian, no doubt for the same reason that one still hears occasional Elizabethanisms in the speech of Tangier and Smith Island waterfolk: isolation from the evolving mother tongue. A few critics of my novel picked linguistic-historical nits: The verb swive , for example, meaning “copulate,” which my characters employ with some frequency, is really more Chaucerian than early-18th-century, one such critic complained (“Thus swyvèd was that