Letters

by John Barth

  And even

  An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.

  And, yes

  riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

  And finally the opening words of “Arthur Morton King’s” own fiction-in-progress: a retelling of the story of Perseus, of Medusa, of

  O!

  D: Lady Amherst to the Author. Trouble at Marshyhope. Her early relations with several celebrated novelists. Her affair with André Castine, and its issue. Her marriage to Lord Jeffrey Amherst. Her widowing and reduction to academic life.

  24 L Street

  Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

  Saturday morning, 26 April 1969

  My dear B.,

  Directly upon my supplying you, in my last, with that gloss upon my address, I receive your letter of 20 April with its postscriptal request for just that information! One is given pause. But the same applies to my “confession” generally, I’m sure: more than you bargained for, and before you’d really got down to bargaining.

  No matter—though these crossings in the post are decidedly eerie and a touch confusing. I have still past history to relate; and my present connexion with Ambrose M. (relationship were too portentous a word) remains curious enough to prompt me, if not to account for it, at least to record it, if only to remove me a tongue-tisking distance from my own behaviour. Saturday mornings (when I am alone or he is asleep) are convenient for me to write to you, over the breakfast coffee and “English”(!) muffins; and perhaps it will be as well—and fit—if, like fictions, these confessional installments go unreplied to: scribbled in silence, into silence sent, silently received.

  My morning newspaper duly notes—what I’ve been in the thick of all week!—that college campuses your country over are at best in disarray, at worst in armed rebellion. Even the innocents here at Marshyhope (“pinknecks,” Ambrose calls them), inspired by their incendiary counterparts at Berkeley, Buffalo, Cornell, and Harvard, managed yesterday a brief takeover and “trashing” of John Schott’s office, and a “sit-in” in Shirley Stickles’s and mine. Schott and Shirley (and Harry Carter, shaking with fear for all his earlier dismissal of student activists as “Spock’s Big Babies”) were for fetching the army in straight off, no doubt to impress the conservative kingmakers in “Annapolis, maybe even Washington.” I too was chiefly irritated; would have been furious had they mussed my office. For while I deplore (for its futility more than for its imperialism) your government’s misguided war in Vietnam, and can by some effort of imagination follow the emotional logic that leads therefrom to, say, student occupation of administrative offices at Columbia University, I can by no manner of means take our students seriously, who so far from having read their Marcuse, Mao, and Marx, do not even read the morning news, and rail against the university without knowing (any more than Schott or Carter or Shirley S.) what a real university is.

  Which, Ambrose tells me, and lately told them, is the proper object of demonstration. What they ought to protest, in his view, is the false labelling that calls such an enterprise as ours a college, not to say a university, in the first place, rather than an extended public high school. But what would these children do in a genuine university?

  He and your “Todd Andrews,” almost alone, have been able to talk with the demonstrators, in whose stirring up Harrison Mack’s son, a bona fide radical, has had a hand. Mr Andrews is the most enlightened of the Tidewater Foundation trustees and their executive director as well, to whom even Schott must in some measure defer. While he and Drew Mack speak to each other across an ideological fence, there is some bond between them which the younger man clearly resents but cannot break. And Ambrose—an old friend of Drew Mack’s, clearly not a part of the regular academic establishment, and mistaken by the students for a radical because he despises Richard Nixon (I myself would describe my lover as a conservative nihilist)—found himself cast in the role of faculty spokesman for the students! The utter confusion he found appealing; no use Drew Mack’s (correctly) arguing to the protestors that Ambrose was no more the representative of “their values” than was Todd Andrews of the administration’s: they worked out a conciliation between them which gave both sides the illusion of being represented and ended the occupation. By extending the spring recess to a fortnight and moving up the final-examination period, they hope to forestall a regrouping of forces this semester. Next fall, one hopes, the mood on campus, if not the situation in Southeast Asia, will have changed.

  Thus my lover unexpectedly finds himself in the sudden good graces of John Schott, to whom Mr Andrews has represented him as a forefender of adverse publicity for MSU in the news media. I am almost encouraged now to advance his name after all before our reconstituted nomination committee for the Litt.D.—rather, to entertain its advancement by someone else. To Ambrose himself, an apolitical animal, the whole business is, if not quite a joke, at most a sport or a variety of “happening”—“It’s what we have instead of Big Ten football,” he declares—and a potent aphrodisiac: in his cynical view, they play at revolution to excite themselves, then back to their liberated dormitories to make love. He is of course “projecting”: I write this weary to the bone, sore in every orifice from our amorosities of the night past, everywhere leaking like a seminiferous St Sebastian. From where in the world, I wonder, does so much come come?

  Thus our gluttony persists, to my astonishment, into its fourth week! I should not have believed either my endurance or my appetite: I’ve easily done more coupling in the month of April than in the four years past; must have swallowed half as much as I’ve envaginated; I do not even count what’s gone in the ears, up the arse, on the bedclothes and nightclothes and dayclothes and rugs and furniture, to the four winds. And yet I hunger and thirst for more: my left hand creeps sleeping-himward as the right writes on; now I’ve an instrument in each, poor swollen darling that I must have again. He groans, he stirs, he rises; my faithful English Parker pen (bought in “Mr Pumblechook’s premises,” now a stationer’s, in Rochester, in honour of great Boz) must yield to his poky poking pencil pencel pincel penicellus penicillus peeee

  Your pardon. Come and gone (an hour later) to fetch his daughter for an afternoon’s outing—and make what excuses he can, I daresay, to his Abruzzesa, Mrs Peter Mensch. Can he be servicing her too? it occurs to me to wonder. Physically impossible! And yet, titillated by the thought as at last I douche my wearies, I find myself dallying astride the W.C. with the syringe…

  But I daresay this is not the sort of thing you had in mind to hear.

  Nor I to write: not even two hours ago, when I set out to tell you for example that I was born Germaine Necker-Gordon in Paris to a pair of fashionably expatriate ambitious minor novelists who traced their separate descents from an unrecorded dalliance of young Lord Byron’s with the aging Madame de Staël in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, the penultimate year of her life. That I was educated in the second-rate salons and literary cafés of Paris and Rome by the most indulgent, amoral, loving, pathetic, dear, and worthless parents a child could have, who transferred their ambitions to me straight upon the completion of my first novel (at age nine!): once promising talents both, each of whose own first books had been mild critical successes; whose seconds and thirds had received diminishing notice; whose fourths and fifths and sixths had not found a publisher, so that like space rockets whose next stage fails to fire, they languished decade after decade in gently decaying orbit. That with their tender connivance I was deflowered, not ungently, at age fourteen, in Rome, in the woods of the Villa Ada (now a campground for tourists!), with a (capped) fountain pen, by Mr H. G. Wells, then 71, whom I feared and admired, and who admired in turn my person but not my fiction, which he found “smarmy.” He was not so much a dirty old man as a vulnerable, was Wells, and I a mischievous girl; neither
his literary criticism nor his fountain pen much hurt me, but my parents, outraged at his critical judgement, refused to read anything he published after The Anatomy of Frustration (1936).

  They next set their sights on old Maeterlinck, who however was too preoccupied with expiring (Avant le Grand silence had appeared; La Grande porte was in press; L’Autre monde in manuscript) to be tempted. On holiday in Capri in 1938 they endeavoured shamelessly to introduce me to (read “introduce into me”) Mr Sinclair Lewis, despite his singular uncomeliness and our low opinion of his work after 1930; to this end we ingratiated ourselves with the Americans on the island, and so I first met Jane and Harrison Mack—naive, charming, rich—and Sir Jeffrey William Pitt, Lord Amherst: then 40, recently divorced, making like ourselves a last tour of Italy before Armageddon, and busily flirting with Mrs Mack, who seemed not interested. (Thirty years and several Armageddons later, I realise that Jane would have just then ended her long off-and-on affair with Todd Andrews and was carrying the son named after him—who however too resembles Harrison for any doubts as to his legitimacy.)

  But I was interested, despite my parents’ objections that, lord or no lord, Amherst had never published a line in his life: on the train from Naples north, he became my first real lover. The break with my parents, however, came in Zurich the following year, when I rejected Jeffrey’s proposal of marriage: to be his wife rather than his mistress, and therefore a woman with the means and leisure both to write and to “ally herself” with established writers, made eminently good sense to M. and P.; they did not share my “rebellious adolescent enthusiasm” for the author of Ulysses and Work in Progress, to sit at whose feet (but I never got near them, I confess to you now) I went to Paris when Jeffrey and my parents fled the war: they back to Zurich, he to England.

  Do I bore you, Mr B.? That cold winter I was nineteen, attractive, virtually francless. I felt handsomely scarred by experience, bursting with talent: I’d had words (three) with young Sam Beckett concerning his aloofness toward James Joyce’s mad, infatuated daughter. I was already contemning Hemingway as a shallow popular novelist; I was skeptical of Eliot’s neo-orthodoxy, distressed by Pound’s anti-Semitism and attachment to Frobenius and Il Duce. And I was befriended by the Misses Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, before whose meagre but welcome fire I met their pet of the moment: a quiet, splendidly handsome 22-year-old French-Canadian avant-gardist named… André Castine.

  There, I have set down the name. Thank God Ambrose is not here to mock it: I couldn’t abide that just now, or him—though it was André (I suddenly understand, with a dark frisson, what would have been at once apparent to another: I shall profit, then, perhaps, from this “scriptotherapy”) who made me vulnerable, three decades later, to his pallid echo, Mr Mensch. My André!

  We did not need Alice Toklas’s hashish brownies to intoxicate us. Two hardened cynics, we were in love from the first quarter-hour of conversation. Our bringings-up had much in common: André’s parents were obscure figures in the Canadian foreign service, freewheeling and nomadic Bohemians. They never married; André was raised ad libitum all over North America and Europe; he was at ease in half a dozen languages and any social situation; he seemed to have read everything, to be knowledgeable about everything from cricket matches to international finance and organic chemistry. He had been writing poems and stories since he was five, had abandoned both two years younger than Rimbaud, was already bored with the cinema as an alternative to literature, and was provoking Miss Stein (and Miss Necker-Gordon) with the idea of putting these “traditional” genres behind him entirely, in favour of what he called (and this was 1939/40!) “action historiography”: the making of history as if it were an avant-garde species of narrative.

  Passionately we differed, passionately concurred, and passionately came together. I had loved dear Jeffrey, my firm and gentle sexual father, an ideal first lover; André and I ravished, consumed each other. We crackled like two charged wires in our freezing flats: love seems too mild a word for such mad voltage! By the spring of 1940 I was pregnant. We moved south to avoid the Nazis; the “script of history” fetched André up and down the country from Vichy to Paris on mysterious errands; I could never tell how much of his high-spirited, always ironic talk was serious. Something went wrong, “a rejection slip from Clio” André called it: in the middle of a night we fled our little villa, where I was battening on Brie and Beaujolais and baby and happily letting life write me instead of vice versa. By lorry and plane and little boat and big we went to Quebec, then to Ontario—antipodal, cool, serene, impossibly far from the world and its cataclysms—to have our baby.

  I met André’s parents, Mlle Andrée Castine and M. Henri Burlingame, who but for their mysterious appearances and disappearances recalled my own: devoted and doting, intense and ineffectual. André adored them—and disagreed point for point with their interpretations of history, in particular the history of their own family’s dark activities. But whereas he always spoke jestingly and acted seriously, his parents always spoke unironically and could be taken no more seriously than my own. As best I could gather, they had devoted themselves to the organisation of Communist party cells during the Depression: she in the wheatlands of central Canada, he (I tremble to begin to invoke the web of “coincidence” in which I am still caught, and at whose centre, ever nearer, lies… je ne sais quoi) in the wetlands of tidewater Maryland and Virginia! “As likely as setting fire to Chesapeake Bay,” André would laugh—but his father, with a dark roll of the eyes, would put his forefinger on Washington, D.C., on the hydrographic chart, his thumb on the Dorchester marshes, just that far away. One active cell in that vicinity, he avowed, would be like one free-floating cancer cell in the enemy’s cerebral cortex; it was no defect in the strategy itself that had led to its admittedly total failure, but such accidents of history as Franklin Roosevelt’s election and New Deal, and the busy gearing up of the U.S. defence industry against the threat of war, which were distracting the working class with an adventitious prosperity and killing in the womb (“Forgive me, Germaine!” I hear him breaking off to cry here, aghast at his tactless trope, whilst we rock with mirth) the Second Revolution, whose foundations he’d so painfully begun to lay.

  “Poor ground for foundation laying,” André would tease, and declare with a laugh and a kiss that they weren’t fooling him: he knew them both very well to be in the pay of the U.S. F.B.I., to infiltrate and sabotage the very activities they claimed to be organising. And what was this heresy of historical accidents? An affront to the entire line of Burlingames, Castines, and—and so forth!

  Into this vertiginous dialogue—on Guy Fawkes Day, 1940, in the snug farmhouse at Castines Hundred where André himself, and any number of Castines before him, had been born—I brought our son. Neither André nor his father was there; something enormous was in the works—“My Zauberberg,” André called it, “my Finnegans Wake.” Postcards came from Washington, Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila. Andrée (a grandmother at 40, and I now virtually childless nearing 50!) was full of candour, love, and a kind of bright opacity: freely as I enquired into the mystery of their lives, and readily as she responded, nothing seemed ever quite to clarify… A postpartum depression seized me, the effect I believe mainly of this ubiquitous uncertainty. I… could not cope, could not deal with things. The baby—I couldn’t name him, even, much less nurse; names had lost their sense. Where was I? What was this Canada, of which I’d seen little beyond Castines Hundred? Where was André? Where were Mama, Papa, dear Jeffrey (how I longed for him now, and wept to learn that he’d been re-wed in London)? André’s letters urged me back to writing, but I couldn’t write, couldn’t even read. Our alphabet looked alien as Arabic; the strings of letters were a code I’d lost the key to; I found more sense in the empty spaces, in the margins, between the lines.

  Assez. In that house everything went without saying: good Andrée took the child as if it were her own, no explanations needed (my sense was that nothing was any longer explainable: one hemisphere
was aflame, the other smouldering). Passage was arranged for me back to Switzerland, to a tiny villa leased by my parents, close by Coppet. André, it turned out, had kept them apprised of things—had even dropped in one day, as if from the sky, to introduce himself and show them photographs of our baby! They thought him a fine young man, praised his epistolary style, deplored his avant-gardism, urged him back to the virtuous paths of Galsworthy and Conrad, whom he promised to reread…

  That summer Papa died, bequeathing me his copies of every letter he’d written since he’d decided at age twelve to become an author: eight legal-size file drawers full! To Mama he left his “unfinished” (read unpublished; read unread) manuscripts, as voluminous as her own, which latter she dutifully put by in order to devote herself—till her own death fifteen years later—to his literary executorship. There was nothing else to execute. The mass lies mouldering yet, for all I know, faithfully catalogued and “readied for the press,” hers beside his, in the cellar of that villa, not far from which they lie too.

  I call myself childless: I cannot say certainly either that I have seen my son and his father since, or that I have not. God knows I have tried. And tried. Not enough, perhaps: another and better would perhaps have ransacked the globe; never would have left Castines Hundred in the first place. No good my pleading the world gone mad, André’s “action historiography” become Theatre of the Absurd, the funhouse quality of that family, wherein no one and nothing was what it seemed… Now and again over the years, usually about Guy Fawkes Day, cryptic messages arrived in the post, aflower with exotic stamps: Our son is well; he has a name “not unlike his grandfather’s”; his education is in good hands. As for me, I have not been forgotten: my decision was understandable, my condition to be sympathised with; I am still loved, even as it were watched over.