Letters

by John Barth

  What I did not question until later, to André’s own professed surprise, was his authenticity. Appearances and mannerisms are easily mimed: did I need no proof, after all those years, that he was he? Well, I didn’t; didn’t care (at the time) even to address so vertiginous a question. If, somewhile later, I began to wonder, it was because for the first time since our parting he had come to me in the role of himself: had he posed as another, I’d never have doubted at all.

  We stayed at the Wolpert until Monday, scarcely leaving André’s room except for meals. He was obliged, as I stood about dazed, to undress me himself. When he first entered me—after so many years, so many odd others—I became hysterical. From Kitchener he took me back to Castines Hundred, where I enjoyed something of a nervous collapse. It was as if for twenty-five years I had been holding my breath, or an unnatural pose, and could now “let go,” but had forgot how. It was as if—but I can’t describe what it was as if. Except to say that for André it was as if our quarter-century separation had been a month’s business trip: a regrettable bother, but not uninteresting, and happily done with. Good to be back, and, let’s see, what had we been discussing?

  Sedatives helped, prescribed by the Castines’ doctor. Arrangements were made at the university to reschedule my lectures after my recovery. André too, I learned (now Baron Castine since his grandfather’s death), had been briefly married—a mere dozen years or so, as it were to mark time “till my own marriage had run its course”—and had sired “one or two more children,” delightful youngsters, I’d love them, off in boarding schools just then, pity. Had I truly borne no more since ours? Dommage. Now that chap, our Henri, yes: chip off the old block, he: more his grandfather’s son, or his “uncle’s,” than his father’s: at twenty-six a more promising director of the script of History than either of them at his age, busy redoing what he André had spent half a lifetime undoing. Crying shame he wasn’t at Castines Hundred then and there: it was high time we approached the question of revealing to him his actual parentage…

  Tranquillisers. And where might the lad be? Ah, he André had hoped against hope that I might have had some word from him: the boy was at the age when certain of his predecessors had revised their opinion of their parents, and was skilful enough to discover them for himself. Last André had heard, Henri was underground in Quebec somewhere, playing Grandpère’s nasty tricks on the Separatists, who took him for their own. So at least he’d given out. Before that he’d been working either with or against the man he understood to be his father, down in Washington. But his track had been lost, just when André much desired to find it. Of this, more when I was stronger, and of his own activities as well: a little bibliography of “historical corners turned” that he was impatient to lay before me, “like the love poems they also are.”

  He had of course followed with close interest my own career: he commended my articles on Mme de Staël (whom however he advised me now to put behind) and my patience with my late husband Jeffrey’s later adulteries. He informed me, in case I should be interested, that Jeffrey had been infertile if not quite impotent after the 1940’s, but had honoured paternity claims against him rather than acknowledge his infirmity. My essay on Héloïse’s letters to Peter Abelard, he said, had been heartbreakingly sympathetic, yet dignified and strong as poor Héloïse herself. Had I read any good books lately?

  By the beginning of the new year I was, if not exactly recovered (I never shall be), at least “together” enough to return to the university and to “Juliette,” with André’s approval—which I hadn’t sought—and with three other souvenirs, two of which I had sought.

  The first was that promised account of his activities since 1941. On that head I am sworn to secrecy; you would not believe me anyroad. But if even a tenth of what he told me is true, André has indeed “made history,” as one might make a poem—and to no other end! Little wonder I have difficulty accepting any document at all, however innocuous, as “naive”: I look for hidden messages in freshman compositions and interoffice memoranda; I can no longer be at ease with the documentary source materials of my own research, which for all I know may be further “love poems” from André. A refreshing way to view Whittaker Chambers’s “pumpkin papers,” or Lee Harvey Oswald’s diary! And both enterprises, I need not add, had kept him away, “for her own protection,” from me as well as from the woman he’d married “as a necessary cover” at that aforementioned turning point in his life. (He’d also been fond of her, he acknowledged, even after “her defection and subsequent demise.” I didn’t ask.)

  The second souvenir was the news that our son had been raised to believe himself an orphan, the son of André’s “deceased half brother and sister-in-law!” What’s more, it now turns out (read “was then by him declared”) that he did indeed have a half brother, quite alive, “down in the States”—or half had a brother, or something. “All very complicated,” he admitted: the understatement of the semester. And his “necessary ruse” (for the boy’s own security, don’t you know) bid fair to backfire; for the evidence was that our son had located either this half brother or his semblable, accepted him as his father, and was doing the man’s political work, the very obverse of André’s own.

  And, pray, what was that work? For André (since 1953) it was “the completion of his and his family’s bibliography”: the bringing to pass within his lifetime, in North America at least, that Second Revolution which, in his father’s lifetime, had been thwarted “by Roosevelt and World War II.” Did he mean an out-and-out political revolution, like the French, the Russian, the original American? Well, yes and no (André’s reply to everything!): that’s what his father, Henry Burlingame VI, almost unequivocally had meant, and had failed like so many others to bring about. What he André had in mind was something more… shall we say, revolutionary? Never mind. Immediately, his task was to make an ally of our son, by the most complicated means imaginable, which I shall return to. Suffice it here to say that “our” first problem in that line was the question whether, left to himself, the boy would spend his maturity working for or against his “parents.” If for, then we should reveal ourselves to him without delay; if against, he should be left in his present error.

  Mightn’t it depend, I managed to wonder, on who those parents were? André smiled, kissed my hand: Absolutely not.

  The third souvenir I took without knowing it, either during my recovery or in the weeks thereafter, when André would drive over to Toronto or I revisit Castines Hundred, with or without “Juliette.” I was well into my forties, John: a widow beginning a new life in the academy, much shaken by my history and slowly rebuilding after my “collapse.” I had learnt that I still loved André enormously, but no longer unreservedly. I believed what he reported to me, but suspended judgement on his interpretations and connexions of events, his reading of motives and indeed of history. I was in fact no longer very interested in those grand conspiracies and counterconspiracies, successful or not. I understood that I was his when and as he wished; I would do anything he asked of me—and I found myself relieved that he didn’t after all ask that I marry him, and/or live with him at Castines Hundred, and/or devote myself to his ambiguous work. It was therefore disturbing, in subtle as well as in the obvious ways, to discover myself, in the spring of 1967, once again impregnated!

  Given my age and recent distress—and the prompting of “Juliette,” who had already left her menses behind—I was inclined to believe myself entering the menopause. By the time my condition became undeniable the pregnancy was well established, and I had not seen André for at least two months. I was not disposed to tell him about it, much less seek his advice or help: I spent some time verging upon relapse; then got hold of myself and set about to arrange the abortion. “Juliette” scolded me: it was the father’s child, too; he had the right to be consulted, and to be permitted to assist if our judgements concurred. Only if they did not should I do on my own as I saw fit. For her part, she thought it would be charming for “us” to bear
and raise the child; she’d always wanted to be a father.

  André appeared straight off, of course, somehow apprised of the situation (I had ceased to be curious whether “Juliette,” or half the world, was in his confidence). Had he wished me to carry, bear, and raise the child, I should certainly have done so. As he graciously deferred to my wishes in the matter, I asked him without hesitation to find me an abortionist willing and able to deal with so advanced a pregnancy.

  Not surprisingly, he knew of one. Just across the Niagara from your city, in the little town of Fort Erie, Ontario, is an unusual sanatorium financed in part, so André told me, by the philanthropy of my friend Harrison Mack, with whom André just happened to be acquainted. Things could be arranged with the supervising physician there, a competent gentleman. I would be distressed, by the way, to hear that Monsieur Mack’s spells of delusion had become more frequent and, one might say, more thorough since Jeffrey and I last visited him in ’62: one wondered if it were not some long-standing attraction to me that led him to fancy himself British?

  I reminded André (we were driving down the Queen Elizabeth Way) that I was only half British; he reminded me that George III had been scarcely that. Did I know the Macks’ daughter, the film starlet “Bea Golden”? I did not. Just as well, inasmuch as she was recuperating under an assumed name, at this same sanatorium, from abortion-cum-delirium-tremens-cum-divorce-cum-nervous-breakdown. André himself, he volunteered, did not know the Mack family socially; but their son Drew was a coordinator of the Second Revolutionary Movement on American college campuses (indeed, the sanatorium, unknown to its administrators, was a training base for such coordinators); André’s “brother” was a familiar of the Macks; and André himself owned stock in Mack Enterprises.

  Really?

  Quite. Ever since the days of Turgot and the physiocrats—upon my article on whose connexion with Mme de Staël, his compliments—his family’s income had been from sound investments in the manufacturers of dreadful things: Du Pont, Krupp, Farben, Dow. The drama of the Revolution would be less Aristotelian, he declared, its history less Hegelian, never mind Marxist, if the capitalists did not finance their own overthrow. “We” had bought into Mack Enterprises when they got into defoliants and antiriot chemicals. Did I know that Harrison Mack, Senior, the pickle magnate, had in his dotage preserved his own excrement in Mason jars? And that his son “George III” had begun causing his to be freeze-dried? Freud had things arsy-turvy: there was the pure archival impulse, not vice versa! Did I know, by the way, the Latin motto of Mack Enterprises?

  I did not, and was not to learn it for some while, for just here the present importunes to soil past and future alike. I was no stranger to clinical abortion; the “sanatorium” was peculiar (so had been the one in Lugano) but not alarming; the doctor—an elderly American Negro of whom I was reminded by the nameless physician in your End of the Road novel—was stern but not discourteous. I do not hold human life to be sacred, my own included—only valuable, and not always that. To have borne and raised that child would have been an unthinkable bother, an injustice to the child itself under the circumstances, an unreasonable demand on André’s part—which of course he did not make. I resist the temptation to say, in sentimental retrospect, that with all my heart I wished he had made exactly that unreasonable demand. But half my heart, one unreasoning auricle at least…

  Instead, as I recuperated next day from the curettage, he made another. I was still groggy with anaesthesia; an important question had occurred to me just before our conversation on the Q.E.W. had been interrupted by our arrival at Fort Erie; I wanted urgently to recall it now, and I could not—would not, alas, until too late—even when that finest of male voices asked his pauvre chérié whether she remembered an historian named Morgan, formerly of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, currently president of a little college down that way endowed by Harrison Mack?

  She did: he had invited her to a visiting lectureship there, which invitation she had declined.

  “He has invited her de nouveau,” André proudly informed me. “And this time she must accept.”

  Must she now. And why should she exchange the civilisation of Toronto’s Yorkville Village and Bay-Bloor district for what had impressed her as the, let us say, isolated amenities of Tidewater Farms and vicinity? Eh bien, for the excellent reason that while we had lost one child, we had, if not regained, at least relocated another. Henri was alive and well! And doing the Devil’s work with his “father” in Washington, D.C., so effectually that if he were not checked there would very possibly be no Second Revolution at all in our lifetimes; whereas, were he working as effectively for “us,” things might just possibly come to pass by “our” target date, 1976. Perhaps I remembered André’s own dear father’s spanning with thumb and forefinger the easy distance from D.C. across the Chesapeake to the marshes of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, whence he had hoped to infiltrate and undermine the bastions of capitalist imperialism (or their infiltrators and underminers, depending on whether one credited the declared intention or the consequences of his actions)?

  Tearfully—though just then D.C. suggested to me neither District of Columbia nor direct current, but dilation and curettage—I did remember those nights of love and happy polemic at Castines Hundred in 1940, while Europe burned.

  Then I was to understand that a certain secret base in these same marshes, not very far from Marshyhope State University College, was the eastern U.S. headquarters for the Movement: Maryland and Virginia were peppered with their secret bases; that’s why ours was safest there. From the vantage point of a visiting professorship at Marshyhope, I could observe and reacquaint myself with Henri, at first anonymously as it were, and then, if all went well…

  His plan will keep till next Saturday’s letter: it was as baroque as the plot of your Sot-Weed novel promises to be (at the time I said “circuitous as Proust,” and André kissed my forehead and replied, “Voilà ma Recherche, précisément”), which for all I know may be itself a love letter from him. God knows it bristles with his “signals”! Did you write it? I grow dizzy; grew dizzy then, no longer just from Sodium Pentothal.

  But when the time came I went, with a sigh and no false hopes, as I would have gone to the University of Hell for my novelist of history, had his plot and precious voice demanded. Adieu, chère “Juliette”: you I traded—when André bid me au revoir for the last time to date, a few days and much further instruction later—for unfortunate Mr. Morgan, mad King Harrison, contemptible John Schott… and Ambrose Mensch.

  Who has filled me full, if not fulfilled me, as I’ve filled these pages Like she-crab or queen bee after mating season, I luxuriate, squishy and replete, in this sexless interval. May it last a few days more!

  What have I forgotten? That I remembered, too late, who it was I’d met on the day Joe Morgan mentioned Turgot and the physiocrats in the library of the Maryland Historical Society in 1961: our nominee-by-default for next month’s doctorate, for whom Schott even now will be at composing a treacly citation. I last remet him three months ago, at poor Harrison’s funeral, with… “his” … “son.”

  Vertigo! Who is whose creature? Who whose toy? Help me, John, if you have help to give a still-dismayed

  Germaine

  P.S. Whilst City College, Colgate, Harvard, Illinois—yea, even Oneonta, even Queens—are torn asunder (per program?), all is uneasy calm at Marshyhope. More interest here in Derby Day than in Doomsday!

  I: Lady Amherst to the Author. More trouble at Marshyhope. Her relations with the late Harrison Mack, Jr., or “George III.”

  Office of the Provost

  Faculty of Letters

  Marshyhope State University

  Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

  10 May 1969

  Mon cher (encore silencieux) B.,

  I write this—sixth? eighth?—letter to you once again from my office, once again more or less besieged by the “pink-necks.” Shirley Stickles wonders why I do not dictate it to her;
I wonder, not having heard from you on the then urgent queries in my last, why I continue to write, write, write, into a silence it were fond to imagine pregnant. And I know the answer, but not what to make of it.

  A difficult season, this, for Shirley Stickles. She cannot understand (I cannot always either) why the students who seize and “trash” Columbia, extort ransom for stolen paintings from the University of Illinois, force the resignation of the presidents of Brown and CCNY, commit armed robberies at Cornell, and more or less threaten MSUC, are not even expelled and sent posthaste to Vietnam, far less put to the torture as she recommends. And the sudden transvaluation of Ambrose Mensch, whom she despises, in the eyes of John Schott, whom she adores, baffles and troubles her like yesterday’s unsainting by Pope Paul of Christopher, Barbara, Dorothy, et alii.

  What has happened is that my lover (so he remains, more tender and solicitous than ever, though our respite from sex is of a week’s duration now) has for the second time come to the rescue, more or less and altogether cynically, of Marshyhope, and so further endeared himself thereby to our acting president as to lead that unworthy to wonder aloud to me this morning, in S.S.‘s presence, whether, “if it should happen that Mr Cook is unable to accept our invitation,” we mightn’t extend it after all to Ambrose! Schott trembles now, you see, for the success of his Commencement Day exercises, so vulnerable to disruption, when the state comptroller will be present to accept our maiden doctorate of law. Much as his instincts (and ex-secretary) warn him not to trust Ambrose, with Cook’s consent he would “sacrifice” the Litt.D.—which, like the doctorate of science, has small political utility—to insure the peace of the ceremonies and, incidentally, to bring Reg Prinz’s cameras back on campus.