Letters

by John Barth

  And then the bees, “thousand on thousand, a roaring gold sphere… moved by their secret reasons, closed ranks and settled upon her chest. Ten thousand, twenty thousand strong they clustered. Her bare bosoms, my squalling face—all were buried in the golden swarm.” Grandfather boldly lifts them off with ungloved hands and bears them to his waiting hive. Erdmann strikes with the bee-bob; Konrad grapples with him; they fall into the hammock, which parts at the headstring and dumps us all into the clover. Rosa disrupts baptismal services at a nearby church with her cries for aid; raging Grandfather hurls the bee swarm down upon us all; Andrea is stung once on the nipple (and thereafter abandons breast-feeding and relinquishes my care to Rosa); Willy Erdmann is led off crying imprecations of my illegitimacy; Konrad and the Methodist minister endeavor to restore the peace of the neighborhood. Aunt Rosa, subsequently, likens my birthmark to a flying bee; Konrad reviews legendary instances of babies swarmed by bees: Plato, Sophocles, and Xenophon are invoked—and finally St. Ambrose, erstwhile bishop of Milan, after whom I am in time denominated. The episode ends with the adult “Ambrose’s” ambivalent reflections on the phenomenon of proper names: “I and my sign… neither one nor quite two.” Et cetera.

  Despite some lurking allegory, which I regret, “Ambrose His Mark” gains in artistic tidiness from its reconception of the family described in my chapter G. And the narrative viewpoint, a nipple’s-eye view as it were, is piquant, though perhaps less appropriate to the theme of ontological ambiguity than the “first-person anonymous” viewpoint of A. M. King’s version. No matter. “Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose, Ambrose!” the narrator intones at the end, watching to see what the name calls: “Regard that beast, ungraspable, most queer, pricked up in my soul’s crannies!”

  I like that.

  H

  Here was the “Water-Message” episode from my eleventh year, whereof it disconcerts me still to speak, yet which occasions all this speech, these swarming letters. In his retelling our Author retains my third-person viewpoint, omniscient with Ambrose, but drops that authorial “I” of sections A through F. The year is 1940; Grandfather is five years dead, his prostatic cancer having metastasized in 1935. There is no mention of Uncle Karl, who however returned to direct the firm that same year, apparently made his peace with Hector, and hired a bachelor flat down near the yacht basin. Nor of Konrad and Rosa, who also now rent an apartment of their own, across the corner from the Menschhaus, residence then only of Hector and Andrea, Peter and me. Gentle Konrad is still teaching fifth grade in East Dorset Elementary School, tuning pianos, and bicycling the streets of Dorset on behalf of the Grolier Society’s Book of Knowledge, whose contents he knows by heart. He and Rosa are childless. Ardent fisher off the “New Bridge” as well as cyclist, Konrad has skin cancer and a year to live. None of this is in the published version, nor of Hector’s arm, withered now like the late kaiser’s (his limp is mentioned), nor of his gradual self-reestablishment, after Karl’s return to the firm, in the county public school system: he is principal now of East Dorset Elementary, the smallest in the city and the poorest except for its Negro counterpart. Ambrose (on with the story) is a timid fourth grader, uneasy in his skin, fearful of his fellows, saturated with the Book of Knowledge, broodily curious about the Book of Life, abjectly dreaming of heroic transfiguration. All done in images of mythic flight: seaward-leaning buoys, invocations of Odysseus, foreshadowings of dark illumination, etc.

  Thus the “ground situation.” The “vehicle” of the plot is Ambrose’s desire to plumb the mysteries of the Occult Order of the Sphinx, a gang of preadolescent boys loosely led by Peter, which “meets” after school in a jerry-built hut along the river shore in a stand of trees called the Jungle. “It was in fact a grove of honey locusts, in area no larger than a schoolyard, bounded on two of its inland sides by Erdmann’s Cornlot and on the third by the East Dorset dump. But it was made mysterious by rank creepers and honeysuckle that covered the ground and shrouded every tree, and by a labyrinth of intersecting footpaths. Junglelike too, there was about it a voluptuous fetidity; gray rats and starlings decomposed where BB’d; curly-furred retrievers spoored the paths; there were to be seen on occasion, stuck on twig ends or flung amid the creepers, ugly little somethings in whose presence Ambrose snickered with the rest…” You get the idea. Exiled by the older boys—who after surprising a pair of lovers in their clubhouse, gleefully enter it for what one guesses to be ritual masturbation—Ambrose wanders the beach with smelly, feisty little Perse Golz, a third grader whom he tries to impress by pretending to receive and transmit coded messages from the Occult Order.

  Very painful to remember, these classic humiliations of the delicately nerved among the healthy roughnecks of the world, whom, like Babel his Cossacks or Kafka his carnivores, I still half love and half despise. A message, a message—the heart of such a child longs for some message from the larger world, the lost true home whereof it vaguely dreams, whereto it yearns from its felt exile. “You are not the child of your alleged parents,” is what he craves to hear, however much he may care for them. “Your mother is a royal virgin, your father a god in mortal guise. Your kingdom lies to west of here, to westward, where the tide runs from East Dorset, past cape and cove, black can, red nun,” et cetera.

  And mirabile, mirabile, mirabile dictu: one arrives! Lying in the seaweed where the tide has left it: a bottle with a note inside! “Past the river and the Bay, from continents beyond… borne by currents as yet uncharted, nosed by fishes as yet unnamed… the word had wandered willy-nilly to his threshold.” By all the gods, Germaine: I still believe that here is where Ambrose M. drops out of life’s game and begins his career as Professional Amateur, one who loves but does not know: with the busting, by brickbat, of that bottle; with receipt of that damning, damned blank message, which confirms both his dearest hope—that there are Signs—and his deepest fear—that they are not for him. Cruel Yours Truly falsely mine! Take that, and this, and the next, and never reach the end, you who cut me off from my beginning!

  I

  I’m lost in thefunhouse, Germaine. The I of this episode isn’t I; I don’t know who it is.

  In fact I was once briefly lost in a funhouse, at age twelve or thirteen, and included the anecdote in section I of this Amateur manuscript. But it happened in Asbury Park, New Jersey, not Ocean City, Maryland; I was with Mother and Aunt Rosa (lately widowed, whom the excursion was intended to divert); neither Father nor Uncle Karl was with us; I got separated from Peter in a dark corridor, wandered for a few minutes in aimless mild alarm, met another young wanderer with whom I made my way to the exit, where Peter waited—and found my companion to be a black boy. In those days (circa 1943) such a dénouement was occasion for good-humored racist teasing, of which there was full measure en route home. The point of Arthur Morton King’s anecdote was the sentimental-liberal one of Ambrose’s double awakening: to the fact of bigotry among those he loves, which he vows never to fall into; and to his budding fictive imagination, which recognizes that such experiences as that in the funhouse are symbolically charged, the stuff of stories. In short, an intimation of future authorship as conventionally imagined: the verbal transmutation of experience into art.

  I don’t know how to feel about our friend’s rerendering, by far the most extravagant liberty that he’s taken with what I gave him. It goes without saying that I’ve no objection to even the most radical rearrangement of my experience for his literary purposes; my gift of these episodes was a donnée with no strings attached. All the same…

  Oh well: I simply can’t be objective about either my lostness in the funhouse or his story, which, while very different from the facts, is perhaps truer and surely more painful. In that version, the ride to “Ocean City,” seen omnisciently through young A’s sensibility, is all covert dramatic irony and dark insinuation. On the front seat of the car are Hector (driving) and Uncle Karl, between them Andrea; on the back seat Peter (about fifteen) sits behind Hector, Ambrose behind Uncle Karl, and behind Andrea,
“Magda G––, age fourteen, a pretty girl… who lived not far from them on B–-—Street in the town of D––, Maryland.”

  The insinuations come to this: that Andrea may have had or be having an affair with Karl; that Peter, at least, may be in fact Karl’s son instead of Hector’s; and that not only Hector but young Ambrose may at least half-sense this possible state of affairs!

  Which brings us to the back seat, where, in addition to dealing with these shocking possibilities, A. is vainly mustering his nerve to touch Magda, Peter’s girlfriend, with whom our amateur has imagined himself in love since one late afternoon in September 1940, when, it is implied, she surprised him with a blow job in the Menschhaus toolshed. See B’s text for rhetoric and details. Magda’s attitude toward him is cordially patronizing; she is holding hands with Peter; Ambrose doubts that she even remembers the incident in the toolshed (for him a watershed).

  The action proceeds between these suppressed bourgeois-domestic hang-ups, scandals, and volatilities in the foreground and, in the background, implications of the larger bourgeois violence of World War II: crude oil on the beach from torpedoed tankers, “browned-out” streetlights, shooting galleries full of swastikas and rising suns. Ambrose glimpses human copulation for the first time, under the boardwalk; he catches sight of the aureole of Magda’s nipple, trembles at the power and ubiquity of the sex drive, entertains preadolescent doubts of his masculinity, suffers pangs of jealousy and desire, approaches a nausea compounded of these plus the tensions in the family, his ambivalent feelings for his father and himself, and a candied apple that sits ill on his stomach. The three youngsters at last enter the funhouse; Ambrose takes a wrong turn and fancies himself wandering those corridors forever, telling himself stories in the dark, perhaps including the story “Lost in the Funhouse.”

  Well. That loose-toga’d lady with the five-stringed lyre on the bench in the picture on the El Producto cigar box full of stone chisels on the shelf in the toolshed under the wisteria between the woodhouse and the privy behind the Menschhaus—whom Ambrose regarded with awed impersonality while Magda mouthed him in 1940—may have taken up her instrument and sung to my scribbling friend; she has not yet to me. That candied apple still sticks in my throat; Magda and Peter are still each other’s; and I—

  But I can’t speak further of this story, this episode, these events. An end to I!

  J

  Just at this point, Germaine, my Amateur rebegins in the first person, Ambrose speaking, as if in losing himself in that funhouse he’d found his voice, at least, at last. No use my apologizing for the voice he found, which “Arthur Morton King” soon after abandoned: it was the way he spoke back then.

  I myself, before I found it was myself was lost, thought Peter a foundling.

  We discussed the possibility at length in our bedroom, and I will admit that my protestations—that I loved him regardless of his origins—were as experimental as sincere, and that there was more fascination than affection in the zeal with which I conjectured (he had not the imagination for it) the identity and station of his real parents. Were they gypsies of the sort who kept a house trailer on the edge of town, out past the tomato cannery, and read Mother’s palm for half a dollar? Were they residents of our very block—Erdmanns, Ziegenfusses—who now watched their shame grow up before their eyes? Our street ran down to Dorset Hospital, where most of the county’s babies drew first breath; no speculation was too wild to entertain. But my favorite was that Colonel Morton himself, who owned the cannery and several seafood-packing houses and had been mysteriously shot in the leg a few years past, had fathered Peter upon a European baroness during one of his sojourns abroad. The outraged baron had attempted to murder his rival and would have killed the child as well had not the colonel, foreseeing danger, paid Hector and Andrea to raise his natural son as their own. As for the baroness, she had by no means forgotten the issue of her star-crossed passion: she waited only for her old husband to die, whereupon she would join her true lover in America (I had never seen the president of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes) and claim Peter for her own.

  “Aw, Amb, that’s nuts.” But I’d hear my brother rise on one elbow in the dark. “You don’t believe no such a thing. Do you.”

  I would consider the play of shadows on the ceiling, where the streetlamp shone through catalpa leaves. As a matter of fact I did not see on my brother’s nature the stamp of colonels and baronesses, but the possibility stirred my heart. One day the baroness would drive up in a Daimler-Benz car, with a chauffeur and a veil, and take Peter back to be master of the castle. But first she’d buy out Mensch Masonry and take us around the world. Perhaps she would appoint Hector manager of Peter’s estate until my brother’s seniority, and we’d all live there: I, Magda, Peter, Mother, Father, Aunt Rosa.

  On nights when raw nor’easters howled down the Eastern Shore and swept luckless sailors into the Chesapeake, the valley of the Rhine (where I located the baroness) appeared to me peaceful, green, warm, luminous: the emerald landscape of Aunt Rosa’s egg. The gray-green castle turrets were velveted with lichen; dusty terraces of vines stepped down to the sparkling river; a Lorelei, begauzed and pensive, leaned back against her rock and regarded some thing or person, invisible from where we stood, among the sidelit grapes of the farther shore.

  So eloquent would I wax before this spectacle, I could sometimes exact from Peter promises of rooms for myself in one of the towers, and a private vineyard hard by the postern gate, before he remembered to protest that Mother was all the baroness he craved, our poor house the only castle. I could not of course propose outright that in that case he make over his inheritance to me; but I would go to sleep confident that Peter recognized my qualifications for the baronetcy and would abdicate in my favor when the time came.

  The egg from which this vision hatched—bought by Uncle Konrad for Aunt Rosa at the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1910—lay in permanent exhibition between two of Uncle Wilhelm’s cupids on the mantelpiece of our Good Parlor, which in the old fashion was opened only for holidays, funerals, and company. Peter no less than myself deemed it worthwhile as a boy to behave himself long enough on such occasions to be rewarded with a glass of Grandfather’s wine and a view into that egg, but for years I assumed that its magical interior, like Wilhelm’s student statuary, was no more than a curiosity to him. Not until he was seventeen, and I fifteen, did I learn otherwise.

  Uncle Konrad, upon his death in 1941, left in trust for each of his nephews two thousand dollars, into which we were to come upon our graduation from Dorset High. Mine was earmarked already by the family for my further education. Peter, I believe, was expected to invest his in the uncertain fortunes of Mensch Masonry Contractors, where like Uncle Karl he’d worked as an apprentice every spare moment of his youth. Father and Karl spoke warmly, as Peter’s graduation day approached, of his good fortune in being able to “do something” for the business at last—as though his having done a journeyman mason’s work at a boy’s wage for the two years past were not itself a baronial contribution.

  “Bread cast upon the waters,” Hector would say to the family in general, sniffing and arching his brows. “Famous percentage yield. Throw in a slice, fish out a loaf.”

  “Well, he doesn’t have to put it in the company,” Mother declared. She wore her housecoat the day long, as if she understood the word to mean a coat for keeping house in. The years had begun to frizz her hair, spoil her teeth, lower her jowls, undo her breasts, pot her belly: the sight of her holding court from her couch, cigarette between her lips and coffee cup in hand, did not move one in the same way as formerly. “It’s his money.”

  “Who said it wasn’t? Let him put plumbing in the house for you.”

  That was not what she meant, Mother replied. But it was. Hector’s sole concession to modernity, since buying out Karl’s and Rosa’s shares of the Menschhaus in 1936, was a cold-water tap let into the kitchen sink. It was still pitchers and basins on marble washstands in all the bedrooms, and as we had
no heat either beyond the kitchen and parlor stoves, there’d be ice on those pitchers on winter mornings. We were, moreover, the only family in East Dorset who still used the privy built into the row of whitewashed sheds behind our summer kitchen. The prospect there was not unlovely: a walk of mossy bricks led under the grape and wisteria arbors which screened the sheds. But it was so shocking cold in winter, so beloved of wasps and bees in summer, that I remained more or less constipated until college.

  Yet however legitimate her yen for domestic convenience, I felt Andrea had no more right than Hector to influence Peter’s choice, and vigorously so argued. The very prudence of their resolve as to my inheritance (which resolve Peter had affirmed so stoutly that I couldn’t disagree) increased my jealousy for the independence of his, and led me by some logic to feel it should be spent imprudently. Not “thrown away,” mind, in the evanescent joys of riotous living, nor yet exchanged for objects of useless beauty: the notion of the spree was alien to our Protestant consciences, and I cannot imagine Hector or even the unknown Wilhelm, for example, paying money for a piece of art. My fancy equated carefree expenditure with the purchase of hard goods, the equipment of pleasure: if Peter hesitated to commit himself, I assumed his problem to be the choice between, say, a red Ford roadster, a racing sailboat, a five-inch reflecting telescope.