Maryland

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



(Getty Images)

By Christopher Tilghman
April 14, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

Christopher Tilghman is a writer who lives part-time on the Eastern Shore. His new novel is “On the Tobacco Coast.”

When John Barth, son of Cambridge, Md., and the Eastern Shore, died April 2 at age 93, the American literary scene lost a dazzling stylist, a provocative theorist, a beloved teacher and a most generous yet humble mentor to any writer who had the good luck to cross his path. Something less noticed was also gone: The Chesapeake Bay had 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.

{snip}