Letters

by John Barth

  They were the instrumentality of Ambrose’s triumph yesterday. The week has been unseasonably warm here, more like midsummer than like the gentle Mays of my (and your Ebenezer Cooke’s) Cambridge. The students, impatient to get out of their clothes and onto the ocean beaches, lolled and frolicked in the quad with Frisbees, guitars, transistor radios, and sun reflectors, ever more restless and boisterous as the week went on. Drew Mack’s disciples in the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (“Marshyhope Maoists” is Ambrose’s term) scolded them daily through bullhorns for not emulating their brothers and sisters to the north and west. The usual list of nonnegotiable demands was promulgated, the ritual denunciations made of the administration (all fairly just, in this case, but not different from those being lodged against the ablest college officials in the land), the de rigueur student-faculty strike proclaimed. But in such sunshine, with the sparkling Choptank so close at hand and the season’s first Ocean City weekend coming on, who wanted to be cooped up in an occupied building? Besides, it was reported that a bona fide film company was arriving in Cambridge, complete with actors, directors, and cameras, and might visit the campus en route to “location” farther down-county. If the weather held, we all agreed, we would probably be spared.

  Alas, yesterday dawned cool, windy, overcast; at noon it began to drizzle, though the forecast for the Saturday remained fair. It is our ill fortune, under the circumstances, that while the majority of our students, being from the immediate area, go home on weekends, the activists cannot conveniently do so, being most of them from “Baltimore or even farther north.” In short, enough support was mustered from the bored and frustrated to threaten a second takeover of Tidewater Hall, this one determined to “succeed” where the first, a fortnight since, had failed. And again we administrators, our number augmented by Ambrose and Mr Todd Andrews, debated whether calling in the state police would intimidate or aggravate our besiegers. Most of us were confident that Drew Mack and his comrades would welcome the provocation as a chance to rally moderates to their cause, especially if the troopers could be incited to swing truncheons or make arrests. Schott and Harry Carter wondered nevertheless whether a firm, quick, “surgical strike”—the academic expulsion and physical removal from the campus of all the known organisers of the rising—was not our last hope of avoiding embarrassment in June.

  The rain stopped, but the sky remained cloudy, the air chill. Ambrose then proposed that Reg Prinz and company be invited at once, as a diversion, to do certain on-campus footage more or less called for by his screenplay, which was flexible enough to include, at least tentatively, impromptu performances by the student activists themselves. The move might buy us time for the weather to clear; the medium being cinema instead of television news reportage, there would be no particular provocation in the presence of the cameras. And the rumour could be circulated that the filming would continue over the weekend at Ocean City (there is boardwalk “footage,” I understand, in your book Lost in the Funhouse, which I’ve yet to read; Prinz is apparently working it into the film).

  Schott and Carter, while they had no strong objections to this stratagem, had no great confidence in it either, not having met Prinz except by the way at Harrison Mack’s funeral last February. But I had got, if scarcely to know him, at least somewhat to appreciate Prinz’s peculiar, unaggressive forcefulness and inarticulate suasion, during my stay at Tidewater Farms, where he was a special sort of visitor. And so while trusting the man would be like trusting a wordless interloper from outer space, I could second Ambrose’s proposal, from my own experience, as more likely than it might seem. Mr Andrews, who also knew the chap slightly, concurred. We were given shrug-shouldered leave to try it.

  Have you encountered Mr Reginald Prinz in the flesh by this time, I wonder? And are you apprised of his odd notions about making a movie from your work? As it is that curious personality, and by extension those curious notions, which made Ambrose’s plan successful (and make our presence here today mainly precautionary), I shall digress for a space on that head, and at the same time complete for you the Story of My Life Thus Far.

  Of a woman widowed by cancer, whose worse fate it subsequently was to be twice remarried to apparently healthy men and twice rewidowed by wasting diseases, Freud somewhere facetiously remarks that she had “a destiny compulsion.” The term haunts me. I seem to myself afflicted with at least three separate compulsions: to fall in love with (and more often than not conceive by) elderly novelists; to fall in love with and conceive (and be dismissed) by André Castine; and, like Freud’s patient, to wait upon the terminal agonies of lovers who do not fit those categories. That Jeffrey, whose unspeakable cancer I’ve spoken of, was a legitimate lord, and Harrison Mack, to whom I now come, a self-fancied monarch of the realm, makes me tremble at André’s half-legitimate baronetcy, not to mention Ambrose Mensch’s nom de plume! I left Toronto for Marshyhope in August ’67 at André’s bidding, and to some extent to do his inscrutable work: when I should come face-to-face with the Enemy (his “half brother” A. B. Cook) and our son—an encounter I was not to arrange myself—André would deliver to me certain letters he had discovered, written by one of his ancestors, which had radically altered the course of his own life. I was to publish them as my own discoveries in the Ontario or Maryland historical magazines, where Henri would come across them, etc., etc. The strategy would be madness if it were anyone else’s; may be madness even so. In any case, though I saw my son, unequivocally, three months nine days ago today (and have not been myself since), I have seen no letters. For all I truly know to the contrary, André may be dead or crazy—may have been since 1941! Since my visit to Fort Erie, as I explained in my last, I have resisted the need to try to comprehend that man and our relation—though he or his palpable semblance could still summon me in midsentence, and I would put by pen, paper, professorship, Ambrose, and all and (not without a sigh) hie wearily himward.

  I wrote ahead to the Macks and received from Jane a crisp but courteous invitation to be their guest until I found lodgings. She also confirmed André’s report of her husband’s decline since ’62, and hoped my conversation might amuse him. But except in his ever less frequent intervals of true lucidity, she warned (when he knew he was Harrison Mack, who in his madness fancied himself George III), and his ever more frequent intervals of second-degree delusion, as it were (when he fancied himself George III mad, fancying himself Harrison Mack sane), I must be prepared to hold onto my own sanity, so entirely did he translate Tidewater Farms into Windsor Castle, or Buckingham Palace, or Kew, or Bath. Only her deliberate and entire immersion in business affairs, for which she had found she had talent, preserved Jane’s reason. She declared herself sorry to hear of my own bereavement—but I could hear envy in her phrasing, and I sympathised. She kindly sent a car to fetch me from Friendship Airport in Baltimore to her office at the Mack Enterprises plant in Cambridge, where I admired—a shade uneasily, I confess—her extraordinary physical preservation, whilst she completed her forewarning of what I must expect out on Redmans Neck.

  There Harrison was gently but absolutely confined, in a kind of ongoing masquerade. One of his psychiatrists, it seems, had attempted to render his delusion untenable by quizzing him in detail on Georgian history, of which he was innocent. A second, opposed in principle to the first, had thought to undo his colleague’s mischief by providing Harrison with the standard biographies and textbooks on the period, including studies of George’s own psychopathology. The patient blithely played the second against the first by sophisticating his derangement on the one hand whilst on the other attributing any gaps in his historical information, or discrepancies between the Georgian and Harrisonian facts, to his madness, to the fallibility of historiography, or to the misguided though doubtless well-intended masquerading of his courtiers!

  “He calls himself a Don Quixote inside out,” Jane declared—and I observed to myself (a) that it bespoke a wistful detachment on Harrison’s part to see himself so, and (b)
that it would have to be he, or some literate doctor, who so saw, since Jane herself carried no freight of literary reference. What I could not appreciate at second hand was the aptness of Harrison’s self-description: not only did he (so he was persuaded) mistake, in his “enchantment,” giants for windmills and soldiers for sheep, instead of vice versa—that is, he madly imagined that in “his” (George III’s) madness, Windsor Castle looked like Tidewater Farms, and the royal coach-and-four like a Lincoln Continental—but he informed me, in our first extended conversation, that “George Third the First” had actually made notes on Don Quixote at Windsor during his first mature seizure, in 1788, when also he had remarked to William Pitt (my husband’s ancestor, by the way) that having been disgracefully defeated in his first American war, he must needs be “a second Don Quixote” to involve himself in another.

  Thus he could cast Jane, unflatteringly, in the role of homely Queen Charlotte, whilst “in his madness” perceiving and relating to her as Jane Mack, a handsome creature from another life in another time and place. Their son the vicious ingrate Prince of Wales, to spite and shame his father, carried on as a radical commoner named Drew Mack, wed to a “toothsome blackamoor wench”; their daughter Princess Amelia had not only died, but scandalously gone on stage under false names afterward to conceal the fact, etc. Only two people in the court were exempt from this double identity: His Majesty’s old friend Todd Andrews, whom he compared explicitly to Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, and his new friend—“the son [he] should have had,” his “Duke of York,” the “proper Prince Regent, when it comes to that”—who “never humoured [his] madness, because he shared it”; an “18th-Century courtier trapped in 20th-century America”…

  Reg Prinz. Todd Andrews declares the name is, if not its bearer’s “real” one, at least an alias well antecedent to Harrison’s: a coincidence doubtless turned to account, but not an ad hoc imposture. Its young bearer had an established early reputation as an avant-garde cinéaste before his application to the Tidewater Foundation for subsidy; as he was not given to conversation, and spoke cryptically when at all, the most he could be taxed with was his not vigorously denying a role he most certainly did not “play.” For some reason Harrison had been taken with him on sight, and Jane acknowledged that while Prinz readily accepted all proffered support for his cinematic activities, he could not be accused of exploiting Harrison’s esteem. His visits to Redmans Neck were in part as a planning consultant to Marshyhope’s Media Centre, the directorship of which he had declined; and in part out of an apparent interest in Harrison himself.

  I met His Majesty that same evening, Mr Prinz not till several months later. The original George III in his distress was often physically out of control; required constant attendance by Dr Willis and company; often needed restraining by strait-waistcoat (Willis calls it in his journal “the &c”; George himself referred to the restraining chair as his “coronation chair”); and suffered concomitant bodily infirmities. Harrison, until the twin strokes that blinded and killed him, was in rosy health and amiable temper, a little heavy but by no means obese, withal rather handsomer at seventy than he’d been in his forties, when I first met him at Capri—though not, like Jane, preternaturally youthful. And he was as entirely in control of himself as his complex dementia allowed: certainly in no way dangerous to himself or others, and inclined more to manic fancies than to manic projects. Therefore he needed very little supervision; his company was agreeable, and his conversation, if often saddening, was civilised and frequently clever. Not to disgrace, by his ubiquitous “delusions” (e.g., that Cambridge, England, was Cambridge, Maryland, or that his ministers were trustees of the Tidewater Foundation), the monarchy he held in such esteem, he ventured off the “palace grounds” only reluctantly and never unaccompanied. The “affairs of the realm” he gladly turned over to the queen and ministers aforementioned, though he still opposed the idea of installing Drew as prince regent. And since, “in his madness,” those crucial affairs were translated into such hallucinations as Marshyhope State University College, His Royal Highness into a minor American industrialist named Harrison Mack, Jr., he conscientiously attended to what was represented as the news and business of those hallucinations, and could talk as knowledgeably about Lyndon Johnson’s administration as about John Adams’s and Napoleon’s.

  From all this one might imagine that, pragmatically speaking, he was not mad at all. But though his conduct of affairs “in this world,” as he put it, was in the main responsible and judicious, his identification with mad King George was more than an elaborate, self-cancelling whimsy. Harrison suffered from the duplicity of reality, as it were; events and circumstances that he could not “decipher” into Georgian terms, and thus deal with on their own, alarmed him, lest he mishandle them. And if his nightmares (and infrequent daytime seizures) were learnt from the history books—like George, he fancied he had seen Hanover through Herschel’s telescope; imagined London flooded, and would rush in the royal yacht to rescue “certain precious manuscripts and letters”; signed death warrants for “all six of [his] sons,” etc., etc.—the terror and anguish they caused him were heartfelt.

  My own knowledge of the period was cursory at that time, but I remembered that Fanny Burney had held some post in the royal household (she was in fact 2nd Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte) and that, about the time of the king’s first major attack and the publication of her epistolary novel Evelina, she’d commenced a diary of her observations and reflections on the grave event. It was my thought to represent myself, if Harrison should press for such representation, as Mrs Burney: I knew her writings only slightly, but Harrison (and G. III) in all likelihood knew them not at all—Cervantes and Fielding were their only novelists—and the role seemed congenial enough. I suggested and explained it to Jane; she approved, but hoped no fiction would be necessary, as she’d alerted Harrison to my coming, and he’d remembered me affectionately.

  We arrived at that great gracious house on its point of hemlocks and rhododendrons, as if one had driven into a Maxfield Parrish print, and were directed by the costumed maid and nurse (Dr #2’s idea) to His Majesty in the music room. Harrison, comfortable in navy blazer and white ducks, rose beaming from the harpsichord—he’d become, predictably, a great lover of Handel, and was playing Delilah’s mad-song from Samson—bowed slightly to Jane, whom he addressed as “Madame,” turned then to me, and, as I wondered fleetingly whether to curtsey, raised my hand to his lips and fell to his knees before me! Tears of joy started down his plump tanned cheeks; he cried passionately: “Sanctissima mea uxor Elizabetha!”

  Jane was as startled as I, whose career as 18th-Century novelist (like my career as 20th-) died a-borning. When we got the man off his knees and back into English—which he spoke now as rapidly as his prototype—we learned to our dismay that while his madness made him confuse me with Germaine Pitt, a dear this-worldly friend of his whose husband had been an even dearer friend of Jane’s, he was unspeakably happy to be reunited with his precious… Lady Pembroke! Had we known then what I took the first opportunity to learn from the royal library and apprised Jane of forthwith, we’d have been even more dismayed: Lady Elizabeth Spencer, Countess of Pembroke, had been Queen Charlotte’s Lady of the Bedchamber; her husband the count was George III’s lord of the same and son of his Vice-Chamberlain of the Household. Originally a Marlborough, she and the king had been childhood sweethearts, and she had remained close to the royal family ever after, though she was never among the king’s few mistresses (like Harrison, George was disinclined to adultery) and was a faithful attendant of the queen. But during the attack of 1788—by when she was past fifty, and a grandmother—even more so in his subsequent seizures, George persuaded himself that he had always loved her, and her only…

  Harrison got hold of himself soon enough to be unembarrassing, even charming, through aperitifs and dinner, when he pleasantly set forth to “Jane” and “Germaine” what Charlotte and Eliza already knew: the
biographical facts above, minus his obsession. He condoled more genuinely than Jane the death of my Jeffrey; he recounted in amusing circumstantial detail anecdotes of Capri in the late 1930’s and of Cheltenham in the 1780’s, and complained good-humoredly of the side effects equally of Tincture Thebaicum (prescribed by Dr Sir George Baker against the wishes of Dr Willis) and of Parnate (prescribed by Shrink #1 against the wishes of Shrink #2). He respectfully disagreed with Dr Alan Guttmacher of Pikesville, Maryland—an acquaintance of the family and author of America’s Last King—that “it is the total absence of pathological abnormal ideas that distinguishes the healthy from the morbid mind”: a question-begging definition, in Harrison’s view, though he was surely not claiming his own mind to be healthy. And he could not but wonder whether Guttmacher’s own psychoanalytical thesis—“George III feared that, like the Colonies, his thirteen children would revolt and break away from him one by one”—would not have been adjudged pathological by the royal physicians: not because he Harrison had only two children (and was certain of the paternity of but one of those, he added meaningly), but because his thirteen American colonies had broken away all together, not one by one, and because by his own best insight his troubling identification had not been loss of colonies with loss of children, but loss of colonies with loss of college: i.e., the “loss” of Tidewater Tech to the state university system a year since, from which his most conspicuous mania dated. He went on to praise “Jane’s” business sense, beauty, and patience (she hadn’t batted a cool blue eye at that reference to uncertain paternity; but it seemed to me she was not so much patient as invulnerable even to comprehension of such allusions); then he rewelcomed me to Windsor with another toast in fluent and rapid Latin, which he reported later to have been to the health “conjugis meae dilectissimae Elizabethae: praeteritas futuras fecundarant.”