THE SOT-WEED FACTOR (806 pp.)—John Barth—Doubleday ($7.50).
"What am I? Virgin, sir! Poet, sir! I am a virgin and a poet; less than mortal and more; not a man, but Mankind! I shall regard my innocence as badge of my strength and proof of my calling: let her who's worthy oft take it from me!"
The speaker is a remarkable man, a "rangy, gangling flitch" who broods away his days in the company of the "fops and fools of the coffeehouses" of 17th century London. What distinguishes him from his fellows is not only his self-imposed celibacy but also a curious kind of virginity of the mind, "a set of the grain as 'twere, that would keep [him] ingenuous even if all the books in all the libraries of Europe were distilled in [his] brain." His name is Ebenezer Cooke, and in this boisterous historical farce he emerges as one of the most diverting heroes to roam the world since Candide was expelled from the Castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh in Westphalia.
Drugs & Dreams. Like Candide, Ebenezer has a tutor—one Henry Burlingame, an unreconstructed rascal who appears throughout the book in a variety of disguises, extricating Ebenezer from the folly of his own innocence and "playing the world like a harpsichord." Disguised as Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore, Burlingame appoints Ebenezer Poet and Laureate of the Province of Maryland, commissions him to compose an epic poem to be called the Marylandiad.
To Ebenezer, the appointment is a chance to "leap astride life"; it actually amounts to an invitation to disaster: a group of insurrectionists mistake Ebenezer for a secret agent of Baltimore's and all but succeed in a plot to murder him. Enroute to America he loses his commission, falls into the hands of pirates and is forced to walk the plank. Miraculously, he makes his way to shore, where he encounters a drug-ravaged hag who turns out to be the girl of his dreams—a former London prostitute named Joan Toast. Shaken by all this, Ebenezer innocently signs away the family property and sees the family manor Maiden, turned into a bordello. By the time he is captured by Indians, Ebenezer finally understands "the crime I stand indicted for, the crime of innocence." He abandons poetry and finishes out his life as a sot-weed factor, or tobacco peddler.
Lost Garden. Bawdy in manner and ironic in detail, The Sot-Weed Factor i that rare literary creation—a genuinely serious comedy. Author Barth, 30, assistant professor of English at Penn State, is clearly fascinated with the multiple facets of reality and just as clearly convinced that the real is unknowable. "No man is what or whom I take him for!" cries Ebenezer wildly, and indeed the Poet Virgin cannot even penetrate the "vasty reaches" of himself. Unlike Candide, he cannot cultivate his garden, because he is too lost in philosophic speculation to understand that the garden is there.