Letters

by John Barth

  I had thought of working at the shipyard that summer, between high school and college, to put by money for books and board. Instead I replaced without wages one of our laborers. A master mason (Uncle Karl), a journeyman carpenter, one other laborer, and myself: while Father brooded once again in the stoneyard, trying to sculpt with the sandblaster, we raised the shell of Peter’s house.

  “It’s our own place, says Brother Pete,” Hector had early declared. “We’ll use the Baltimore rocks in her. Consolidate our follies.”

  Karl shrugged. I suggested that in the absence of specific mention of those same rocks in the contract, Peter ought to be consulted. He was in Germany with the occupation forces; his return to us and marriage to Magda were anticipated for the fall. Mother agreed. Father’s nose began to itch.

  “He wants it for an advertisement, doesn’t he? Well, damn-foolishness is our stock-in-trade.”

  But he made no further move to use the rocks until Peter, despite my account to him of our problems with the seawall, gave epistolary consent. In the weeks that followed I also restrained the company’s liberality in the matter of sand by mixing as much as possible of the mortar myself, in the proportion of no more than three parts sand to one of Portland. But I had not the heart to protest Karl’s directive, which Father seconded, that we take the sand directly from “our own” beach frontage instead of buying it: the convenience and economy of the beach variety, I had to hope, might partly offset its coarseness and impurity.

  I do not ask myself why I made love to Peter’s fiancée, nor have I much examined Magda’s reasons for inviting me. But when we sat in the Cornlot clover on Sunday mornings or strolled down the listing wall—“dressed up” from Sabbath habit despite our nonbelief—our motives, like the scent of talcum, shaving lotion, and delicate sweat, hung about us in the humid air. As Peter was our bond, we spoke of him often, warmly enlarging on his generosity, his strength of character. I would take Magda’s hand and wish with her for his speedy and safe return. We talked together of many things. I felt that Magda spoke more easily with me than with my brother; I came to believe as well that I appreciated as he could never what was of value in her. I had become an atheist by age fifteen; by sixteen a socialist. I discoursed with energy on the madness of nationalism, the contradictions of capitalism, the brotherhood and dignity of man, the rights of women and Negroes (I’d learned to capitalize the n), the grand challenges of ignorance, poverty, disease. But my zeal was a toy boat on the dark sea of Magda’s fatalism. To her the Choptank itself was a passing feature of the landscape; the very peninsula (which I had informed her was slowly sinking) ephemeral: alone among Dorseters she shrugged her shoulders at the broken wall.

  “Six years or six hundred; it’s soon over.”

  Schopenhauer was supplanted by Spengler, Spengler by Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiasticus by Magda. At the vernal equinox I was postpolitical; by the summer solstice I had given up reading altogether. For all it was my freshman-year professors, some months later at the university, who taught me the second law of thermodynamics, Magda had brought its meaning home to my soul already that summer. It was Independence Day. Earlier that evening, families had gathered along the shore to watch the fireworks shot off from Long Wharf: punk sticks glowed and smoked against mosquitoes; citizens chuckled at the squibs and chasers; they murmured at the rockets that thudded skywards, flowered green and copper, and broadcast reverberating jewels; they held ears and breaths against the ground-shaking mock Bombardment of Fort McHenry at the climax, applauded the final set-pieces of Old Glory and (for some reason) Niagara Falls, and went home. A great moon rose from the Atlantic. Magda and I lingered behind, drank beer from bottles at world temperature, slapped at mosquitoes.

  She observed: “You don’t go out with girls anymore.”

  “No.”

  “I wonder is that my fault.”

  In the moonlight I saw the perspiration that often beaded her upper lip, and through her blouse the stout straps of her undergarments. I told her for the hundredth time how much I esteemed my brother. “But you know, I can’t believe he sees what I see in you. Peter hasn’t got an awful lot of… imagination.”

  “And you’ve got too much.” Magda turned to me beaming and kissed my lips as on that evening in the foyer of the Menschhaus. But I was three long years older: we leaned into the clover and opened our eyes and mouths.

  Presently I declared: “I think more of you than he does.”

  She chuckled. “Peter loves me, Ambrose.”

  “How about you?”

  “Oh, well, me.” An amazing smile. My weight on her meant nothing; she plucked absently at my collar point as at a daisy. “It’s your brother I love. He’s better than you, don’t you think?”

  But as I recoiled she caught my sleeve, and with the same smile led me into Peter’s house. Its stone walls were raised now to the level of first-floor windows; partition studs were up and rafters strung across the framing, but as yet we were not roofed. The moon grew smaller, brighter, harder. At length, striped in shadows and white light, I lay spent and began to taste the wormwood of our deed. But Magda lay easily as I had imagined, naked on the rough subflooring—large legs apart, hands under her head—contemplated the moon through our angled beams, and calmly said: “They say the whole universe is winding down.”

  Daily I labored on the house; at night it was our trysting place, though I was not frequently permitted copulation. Magda was no tease: when the urge was on her she would initiate embraces or respond to mine with an ardor that half alarmed me, and if I did not bring her to orgasm she would earnestly complete the job herself. When she did not feel erotic and I did—rather more than half the time—she would say so and quickly “relieve” me by hand or mouth so that we could talk, or walk, or quietly count meteors. She did not mind the taste of semen, I was astonished to learn, so long as it was chased with Coca-Cola. (Yes, she did recall that afternoon in the toolshed seven years earlier, but only with a shrug: “Kids, I swear.”) But when she guessed, and she was never wrong, that my lust was as it were hypothetical, “caused” by no more than the possibility of its own satisfaction, a wish to be aroused rather than an actual arousal—then nothing doing. She seemed to me to know herself uncannily well; in her company I felt myself to be at worst a concentricity of pretensions, at best a succession of improvisations and self-ignorances. Unerringly—and unfailingly, and never disagreeably—she pointed them out. In moments of pique I was moved to retaliate, and finding nothing with which to tax her in the moral sphere, I would suggest that she lose some weight, or crudely complain that women’s crotches were ill odored.

  Magda laughed. “How many have you sniffed?” Then she chided me for both my discourtesy and my misinformation: I would find, she said, that some women were fortunate enough to smell fresh of crotch even after a night of doucheless love, just as some, like some men, perspired almost inodorously. Others, like herself, were less lucky, however fastidious: Love learned not to mind, if not positively to enjoy. As for her “weight”—by which she assumed I meant her figure, as she was not overweight for her height, build, and age—Peter had compared her to the nudes he’d found in one of the art books Uncle Wilhelm had shipped home from France, and lovingly called her his oda—odie-something-or-other.

  “Odalisque,” I groaned, contrite. “I’m such a jerk, Magda.”

  “Odorless is what you want,” she said mildly. “Those dainty little things in the underarm ads.”

  Mother’s health declined. In late July, radical mastectomy, which the surgeon assured us would arrest, before it reached her lymphatics, the malignancy he’d biopsied in her breast. But he had been Aunt Rosa’s hysterectomist; we were not much comforted. One Sunday morning, after visiting her in the hospital, I lay perspiring in Peter’s living room. Magda discovered a large blue mole on my chest.

  “Look here, Ambrose. That could turn into something serious.”

  Her eyes shone. I stroked her back as she explored the new hair of my chest
for more. She discovered six in all, arranged more or less like the stars in Cassiopeia, and saluted each with an eager small cry. Then, despite our Sunday worsteds and seersuckers, the hour and circumstance, she waxed more ardent than I’d ever known her. Presently I cried: “For heaven’s sake, marry me!”

  She wiped sweat from her lips, smiled, shook her head. “Your brother’s the one for me. He’s got a heart, he has.”

  The phrase put me painfully in mind of Mother. As we left, straightening plackets and shirttails, I glanced up toward the hospital solarium. There stood Father and Karl, impassively regarding us, their heads wreathed in my uncle’s blue cigar smoke.

  That evening at supper Peter telephoned from Germany, where it was already past midnight. He would be discharged in six to ten weeks. Magda could plan the wedding for early October. I was to be best man. We should proceed with footings for the “lookout tower,” if we hadn’t already. He wished we could see the ones he’d seen over there, just like in Aunt Rosa’s egg. The word in German was Turm; a castle was a Schloss; he was a regular linguist these days…

  No one home except Father and me. Hector rubbed his nose and regarded, from the side porch of the Menschhaus, the lights of the cars returning from Ocean City over the New Bridge toward the Bay ferries and the mainland.

  “Your Uncle Karl and I have talked it over,” he said to me. My heart drained. He lit a Lucky Strike, managing the book match with one hand. “One part lime to three sand from now on, is what we think. Pete won’t mind. No Portland except for pointing. It’s all damned nonsense. D’you follow me?”

  N, O, et cetera

  “No, I don’t!” I should have cried, Yours Truly; and “No, I shan’t!” dear Germaine. But oh, I did, I followed them, follow them yet, shall follow them finally and readily into our ultimate plot in the Dorset boneyard, where Uncle Wilhelm’s unmarked stone still marks his grave. M ends this fragment and my first “love affair,” which, with that water message, began my vocation and my trials as an nomme de lettres: still laboring to fill in the blanks, still searching for an exit from that funhouse, a way to get the story told and rejoin my family for the long ride home.

  “Nonsense,” says Arthur Morton King, my drier half: “It’s all damned nonsense.” He abandoned “personal” literature long since, as tacky, smarmy. He could not care less that, come fall, the Narrator went off to college (along with the unnamed other laborer on Mensch’s Castle that summer, his friend and fellow writer-to-be); that Peter came home, married Magda, entered the firm as Karl’s partner, and took over completion of his ill-founded house. I tell and tell, Germaine; yet everything is yet to tell: how Ambrose got from ’47 to ’69; from the sandy basement of the Castle to its “Lighthouse” camera obscura; from his realization that that water message must be replied to, through his maverick noncareer as A. M. King, to his present commitment (first draft now two-sevenths complete and sent to Reggie Prinz in New York) to make a screenplay from his fellow laborer’s labors. Along that way, for romantical interest, four other affairs: two with Magda, one with the would-be star of Prinz’s current project, one with wife Marsha, mother of his backward angel.

  “All damned nonsense,” King declares. “Take a (blank) page from Uncle Wilhelm’s book: already in his day art was past such tack and smarm.”

  But this Ambrose has the family syndrome: will somehow nudge and bully it through, and make love to Milady A., and do that filmscript however often Prinz rejects it. And compose a seamless story about life’s second revolution; and help Peter salvage firm and family. And—here A. M. King and I are one—“rescue” Fiction from its St. Helena by transforming it altogether, into something full and luminous as the inside of Rosa’s egg.

  S: The Author to Todd Andrews. Soliciting the latter’s cooperation as a character in a new work of fiction.

  Department of English, Annex B

  State University of New York at Buffalo

  Buffalo, New York 14214

  March 30, 1969

  Mr. Todd Andrews

  Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

  Court Lane

  Cambridge, Maryland 21613

  Dear Mr. Andrews:

  Some fifteen years ago, when I was 24 and 25 (Eisenhower! Hurricane Hazel!), I wrote my first published novel, a little tidewater comedy called The Floating Opera. It involved, among other things, a showboat remembered from Aubrey Bodine’s photographs and an imaginary 54-year-old Maryland lawyer named Todd Andrews, who once in 1937, when he was 37, cheerfully attempted to blow himself up together with the Floating Opera and a goodly number of his fellow Eastern Shorers. You may have heard of the story.

  At that time, as a budding irrealist, I took seriously the traditional publisher’s disclaimer—“Any resemblance between characters in this novel and actual persons living or dead,” etc.—and would have been appalled at the suggestion that any of my fictive folk were even loosely “drawn from life”: a phrase that still suggests to me some barbarous form of capital punishment. I wanted no models in the real world to hobble my imagination. If, as the Kabbalists supposed, God was an Author and the world his book, I criticized Him for mundane realism. Had it been intimated to me that there actually dwelt, in the “Dorset Hotel,” a middle-aged bachelor lawyer with subacute bacterial endocarditis, who rented his room by the day and spent his evenings at an endless inquiry into his father’s suicide…

  No matter. Life is a shameless playwright (so are some playwrights) who lays on coincidence with a trowel. I am about the same age now as “Todd Andrews” was when he concluded that he’d go on living because there’s no more reason to commit suicide than not to: I approach reality these days with more respect, if only because I find it less realistic and more mysterious than I’d supposed. I blush to confess that my current fictive project, still tentative, looks to be that hoariest of early realist creatures, an epistolary novel—set, moreover and by God, in “Cambridge, Maryland,” among other more or less actual places, and involving (Muse forgive me) those most equivocal of ghosts: Characters from the Author’s Earlier Fictions.

  There, I’ve said it, and quickly now before I lose my nerve, will you consent, sir, to my using your name and circumstances and what-all in this new novel, clearing the text of course with you before its publication et cetera and for that matter (since other “actual persons living or dead” may wander through this literary mail room) to my retaining you, at your customary fee, for counsel in the libel way?

  Cordially,

  P.S.: Do you happen to know a Lady Germaine Amherst (Germaine Lady Amherst? Germaine Pitt Lady Amherst? Lady Germaine Pitt-Amherst?)? What about a nut in Lily Dale, N.Y., named Jerome Bonaparte Bray, who believes himself to be the rightful king of France, myself to be an arrant plagiarist, and yourself to be his attorney?

  H: The Author to Todd Andrews. Accepting the latter’s demurrer.

  Department of English, Annex B

  State University of New York at Buffalo

  Buffalo, New York 14214

  Sunday, April 6, 1969

  Todd Andrews

  Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

  Court Lane

  Cambridge, Maryland 21613

  Dear Mr. Andrews:

  How a letter written and presumably mailed by you in Cambridge on Good Friday could reach my office here in Buffalo on Holy Saturday is a mystery, considering the usual decorous pace of the U.S. mail. But on this pleasant Easter Sunday afternoon, having got through the Times betimes, I strolled up to the campus to check out some epistolary fiction from the library, found it closed for the holiday, stopped by my office, and voila: its postmark faint to the point of illegibility; its twin 6¢ FDR’s apparently uncanceled; the mystery of its delivery intact.

  And its plenteous contents avidly received, sir, twice read already, and respectfully perpended. Be assured that I share your reservations; nevertheless, I forge away.

  Be assured further that I will honor your request not to make use of your name and situation
, or the confidences you share with me in your letter, without your consent. When I have a view of things at all, it is just your sort of tragic view—of history, of civilizations and institutions, of personal destinies—and I hope I live it out with similar scruple. Even given your eventual consent (which I still solicit), I would of course alter facts as radically as necessary for my purposes, as I did fifteen years ago when I invented a 54-year-old lawyer named Todd Andrews, and cut the Macks from whole cloth to keep him company. The boundary between fact and fiction, or life and art, if it is as arguable as a fine legal distinction, is as valuable: hard cases make good law.

  So we are, I think, in the accord your letter would bring us to, except for one small matter of record. You wonder why I made no mention of our conversation in the Cambridge Yacht Club on New Year’s Eve, 1954. It is because I don’t recall being there, though I acknowledge that something like your Inquiry and Letter must have turned my original minstrel-show project into the Floating Opera novel. In the same spirit, I here acknowledge in advance your contribution, intended or inadvertent, to the current project: it had not occurred to me to reorchestrate previous stories of mine in this LETTERS novel, only to have certain of their characters stroll through its epistles. But your ironic mention of sequels tempts me to that fallible genre, and suggests to me that it can be managed without the tiresome prerequisite of one’s knowing the earlier books. I will surely hazard it: not perversely, to see whether it can be got away with, but because it suits my Thematic Purposes, as we say.