Intimations of Mortality: “Toga Party,” a short story by John Barth

October 22, 2007 at 5:38 pm (books, Short stories)

“Toga Party” is the second story in the latest edition of The Best American Short Stories. Begun in 1915, and published by Houghton Mifflin since 1978, this annual collection has a series editor – Heidi Pitlor at present – and a different guest editor each year. The editor for year 2007 is Stephen King.

“Toga Party” at first seems to be yet another tale of silliness in the suburbs, but there’s an undercurrent of anxiety from the outset. Prompted by what? The fear and dejection felt by Dick Felton at the prospect of illness and old age. Felton and his wife Sue, now both retired, live on Maryland’s Eastern Shore (a place my husband and I love). He’s 75; she’s in her late 60’s. A strong bond of companionable love has been forged in the course of their forty-plus years of marriage. Lately, they have been working on their wills, a task that almost inevitably evokes feelings of sadness and foreboding. This has been especially true for Dick .

As the story opens, the Feltons have just received an invitation to a toga party from the Hardisons, a couple who have just built a lavish house in their gated community, Heron Bay Estates. Perhaps this rather outlandish celebration will be the tonic they need to help them ward off melancholy. They make preparations to attend; Sue even researches costumes on the internet.

The party is at the outset a great success. As they arrive, guests are supposed to supply Latin aphorisms as passwords in order to gain entry: phrases such as “ad infinitum” and “ars longa vita brevis est” ring out merrily and float over the partygoers. At one point, someone compares the festivities to Trimalchio’s Feast. This is a scene from a fragmentary work that probably dates from some time during the reign of the Emperor Nero (54 – 68 A.D.): “Satyricon” by Petronius. I was forcibly struck by this reference, as I had only recently learned about Trimalchio’s Feast a few days ago while listening to The Teaching Company’s Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition. It is a description of a dinner party thrown by a newly freed slave Trimalchio, an occasion that descends rapidly into vulgarity and debauchery.

The Hardisons’ party does not degenerate into a Trimalchio-style orgy, although guests are encouraged at one point to participate in some rather tasteless, juvenile games. As the evening wears on, Dick Felton’s anxiety reasserts itself and seems to spread throughout the company (or, was it just my feeling that this was happening?). I was reminded of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.”I began to get the sense that something dreadful lay in wait. I was right. The phrase “timor mortis conturbat me,” while never given explicit voice in this story, kept ringing in my head. It can be roughly translated as “fear of death confounds me” and is frequently encountered in medieval literature, specifically in the prayer called The Office of the Dead. I first encountered “timor mortis” some years ago in a short story by Joyce Carol Oates. (Wouldn’t you know it…)

I don’t want to be misleading as to the cause of Dick Felton’s unease. He is not so much afraid of death as he is of old age and its concomitant decrepitude. And more than his own death, he dreads losing Sue and fears likewise for her should he die first. He cannot help imagining the “raw and overwhelming” grief implicit in the loss of one’s life partner. So, as a reflection of the prevailing zeitgeist, “timor mortis conturbat me” seems more than a little apt…

Like Paul Theroux, whose Elephanta Suite I reviewed recently, John Barth is a writer more people should know about. In 1960, he published a raucous, sprawling historical novel called The Sot-Weed Factor, a real masterpiece of the genre that, in tone and spirit, hearkens back to the novels of Henry Fielding. Barth was born in 1930 in Cambridge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and taught from 1973 to 1995 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Admittedly, this story had a special resonance for me because of the setting, the ages of the protagonists (more or less the same as mine), and the allusions to the classics. Still, I think it is terrific, worthwhile reading for anyone interest in the art of the short story. Every once in a while, I come across one of these gems that, despite its brevity, seems to encompass a world of feeling in the way our great novels do. “The Music School” by John Updike is one such; “Toga Party” by John Barth is another.