You can’t find it anymore except in your mind’s eye: The Floating Opera, either tied up as The James Adams Floating Theater at Long Wharf on the edge of Cambridge Creek, or lost in your bookcase–in which case it would be The Floating Opera, the debut novel by John Barth, published in 1956 and nominated for the National Book Award.
But to the credit of Dorchester County Public Library in Cambridge, Maryland, they are focusing the light in our mind’s eye on Barth’s career and its connection to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in general and Cambridge in particular by creating the John Barth Historic Marker and (very impressive) a “John Barth Walking Tour” through the heart of Cambridge—the latter using Barth’s own words from a talk he gave at the library on Saturday, June 10, 2010.
The tour itself (mapped out in a handsome color brochure available at the library) has seven stops starting with “107 Aurora Street where the Barthkinder were born and raised, next door to our grand parents’ house on the corner of Maryland Avenue,” and ending at Long Wharf with Barth noting: “As a boy, I saw the James Adams Floating Theatre tie up at Long Wharf on its summer circuit, and I returned here, in my mid-20’s, to finish The Floating Opera. I still drive down there and ‘around the Boulevard’ every time I revisit the old hometown.”
In between are stops at: 2) The Choptank River at the foot of Aurora Street where Barth and his twin sister Jill “…swam and dived among the summer sea nettles.”;3) the East Cambridge Elementary School (which like the Floating Opera is no longer there) where Barth “…once got paddled for writing a naughty poem about our teacher—my introduction to the pleasure and pains of authorship,”; 4) Schine’s Arcade Theatre where Barth and his sister went to the movies on their 25 cent weekly allowance; 5 ) Whitey’s Candyland, his father’s store “…where we all occasionally helped out but mostly hung out; and next to last, 6) the apartment by Long Wharf where “In 1955, at age 25, on vacation from my first teaching job at Penn State, I spend a ‘breakthrough’ summer enjoying the view…and writing most of my first novel, The Floating Opera.”
And into that fiction went the facts of Cambridge: “High Street, where I walked, is like no other street in Cambridge, or on the peninsula. A wide, flat boulevard of a street, gently arched with edge-laid yellow brick, it runs its gracious best from Christ Church and the courthouse down to Long Wharf, the municipal park, two long, stately block away. What makes High Street lovely are the trees and the street itself. The trees are enormous and for the most part: oaks and cottonwood poplars that rustle loftily above you like wind pennants atop might masts.”
In this way, the beauty of Cambridge, Maryland, and the beauty of good writing are joined in our mind’s eye.
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