Letters

by John Barth

  Within the fortnight it took me to find decent lodgings in Cambridge, the alarming depths of Harrison’s obsession with me—rather, his new obsession with George III’s old obsession with Lady Pembroke—became clear, as did its complexity. In his most lucid moments (from our point of view), for example, he would tenderly explain that “Harrison Mack’s” attraction to “Germaine Pitt” had no doubt been occasioned by His Majesty’s mad passion for Elizabeth Spencer, but that he had been secretly fond of me ever since Capri, and I was not to imagine that he did not love the hallucinated “Lady Amherst” in her own right. I urged Jane to permit me to break off all contact with him; she assured me that his madness was too complete, as was her preoccupation with Mack Enterprises, for his ravings (sic) to bother her at all; if they made me uncomfortable, I should do as I saw fit. Accordingly, I busied myself at the college, making ready for the fall semester and confirming, with sinking heart, how far from Toronto—not to mention London and Paris!—I had come.

  Marshyhope’s library was a bad joke; its faculty would not have been hired by a good private high school; its students would be drawn from the regional public ones… I reminded myself that I had not come there to further my professional career, and that the Library of Congress was a mere two hours away by bus; and I consoled myself with the one bright feature of the intellectual landscape, Joe Morgan, a man I quite admired and could easily have more than admired had he shown the slightest personal interest in me. The fellow of that name in your End of the Road was a rationalist Pygmalion, a half-caricature, sympathetic only by contrast with the narrator; if he was the prototype of my new employer, time and bereavement had much improved him. President Morgan was intelligent, learned, and intense, but not obsessive. He took his administrative duties seriously and discharged them efficiently, but he was in no way officious or self-important. Roughly my coeval, handsomer now than when I’d met him five years since, he was as alone and isolated on Redmans Neck as I. One might have imagined…

  But hospitable as he certainly was, cordial, sympathetic, free of “hang-ups,” as the children say, and neither unmasculine nor cold of manner, his emotional life remains a closed book to me: either he was without physical desires, or he gratified them with such utter discretion that even his enemies could find no ground for innuendo in that line. I wonder, as I write, where Morgan is now; whether his disappearance from Amherst College has anything to do with the failure of some exquisite self-control he had not even suspected himself of having tightly exercised for a dozen years, since his young wife’s death from an experience I am too familiar with!

  Well. He was wearily amused at Harrison’s delusion that he Morgan had betrayed Tidewater Tech into the state university system; he explained to me (what I set forth in the postscript of my first vain letter to you) his worthy ambitions for the place and his confidence that, unless Schott and company carried the day, Marshyhope could become, not just another third-rate community college, but a quite special and admirable research centre. But (unlike the priggish fellow in your novel) Morgan had what amounted to a tragic, if not an altogether pessimistic, view of his aspirations: he would not be surprised, he told me, if Harrison’s association of Marshyhope with the mutinous American colonies had been inspired and encouraged by A. B. Cook, in John Schott’s behalf. Nor was he very sanguine of prevailing against them in the matter of the Tower of Truth. But he was not certain of defeat, either, and on that basis (I have not even mentioned his quite Jeffersonian respect for the net good judgement of ordinary people) he proceeded.

  Half jokingly he suggested that I exploit in the college’s behalf my new role as Lady Pembroke. So the “Duke of York,” without especially intending to, had done: Morgan showed me the just completed and as yet unstaffed media centre, remarking with a smile that state legislators were ever readier to subsidize an impressive physical plant than an impressive faculty. Had I met Reg Prinz?

  In early November I finally did. To spare myself (and, as I imagined, Jane) Harrison’s displays, I’d used my opening-of-semester business to excuse myself from visiting Tidewater Farms except rarely, despite Jane’s urgings. His fixation on “Lady Pembroke” was undiminished, she reported: he had annulled by royal decree all marriages contracted before 1 August 1811, and vowed to become a Lutheran in order to marry me; he swore repeatedly on the Bible to be faithful to his dear Eliza, who had been faithful to him for fifty-five years; he proposed to establish a female equivalent of the Order of the Garter, whereof I was to be the first elect; he nightly imagined me in his bed, and daily threatened to come for me in the royal yacht, crying “Rex populo non separandus!” when his male nurses (whose attendance was now required) restrained him. She found it hard to imagine that my actual waiting on him would make matters worse, and rather imagined it might temper his fantasies, which were truly becoming difficult for her to live with: so much so that, since she could not bring herself to have him “committed” (and since he had better residential care at Tidewater Farms than any institutional facility could provide), she had taken to spending more and more of her own nights at an apartment in Dorset Heights, and was contemplating an extended business-vacation trip to Britain.

  It was true that in my presence Harrison behaved agreeably, spoke temperately and rationally more often than not, and made no amorous overtures. Even so… And I did have other things on my mind, including André’s business (of which nothing so far had come) and the approach of a certain fateful anniversary. For this last reason especially, I was disinclined to accept Jane’s invitation to dinner on the first Sunday in November, until she added not only that it was to be by way of being a bon voyage party for herself, who was indeed off to London for a while, but also that the annual Guy Fawkes Day fireworks would be let off at Redmans Neck after dinner, courtesy of the Tidewater Foundation, and that a number of their particular friends would be there, including Messrs Andrews from Cambridge and Prinz from New York, whom she believed I had not met, and Mr Cook from Annapolis, whom she understood I had?

  I went, trembling. Harrison was all charm and gallantry, and so apparently the master of his mania that one could easily have taken the George-and-Eliza business as a standing pleasantry for the occasion. Your Mr Andrews too proved a civilised surprise: a handsome, elderly bachelor, he held forth amusingly on the C.I.A.‘s three-million-dollar involvement in the National Student Association, recently disclosed, and chided Drew Mack (in absentia) for not making our local chapter of the S.D.S. menacing enough to attract some of that money to Marshyhope. In other circumstances I’d have taken less distracted pleasure in meeting him: it pleased me, for example, that he freely broke Jane’s prohibition, “for Harrison’s sake,” of our mentioning their son “the Prince of Wales,” and that Harrison seemed unperturbed thereby; for I was disinclined myself to walk on eggs with his eccentricities as did Jane (and Doctor #2). But of course it was Andrew Burlingame Cook whom I had come there tremulously to inspect, whose reintroduction to me, on that date of all dates, it was impossible to ascribe to coincidence… John: the man cannot be André Castine. How could he be André? André is heavyset, swarthy, brown-eyed, bald, trimly moustached and short-bearded; he wears eyeglasses, can’t see without them, and partial dentures, of which he is self-conscious—and his accent is French-Canadian in all of his several languages. The “Poet Laureate” is of similar build, but his hair is thick, curly, salt-and-pepper-coloured, his eyes are hazel, he wears neither beard nor moustache nor spectacles, his teeth are his own and boldly gleaming, and while his voice admittedly has something of André’s sexual baritone, his accent is as echt “Mairlund” as Todd Andrews’s. He is not André!

  Nor is he, by his own assertion, André’s half brother, though it could be held that they resemble each other as siblings might. Indeed, when I pressed him on that head (immediately upon remeeting him; he had not forgotten our previous encounter), he denied ever having heard the name Castine except in the history books and the “Student’s Second Tale” in Longfellow’s Tales o
f a Wayside Inn. He had a grown son, he acknowledged, by his late wife—who like himself had worked with the U.S. Office of War Information in London during World War II, and who (like Jeffrey’s first wife!) had been killed in an air raid there in ’42. The boy’s name was Henry Burlingame VII, sure enough—Henry Burlingame Cook, legally, but it had been the unofficial custom of the family for generations to alternate the surnames of their two chief progenitors… He was a dandy fellow, Henry, but completely wrongheaded in the political sphere, thanks in some measure to the influence of such Commie acquaintances as Drew Mack and Joseph Morgan. Presently he was in Quebec somewhere, inciting the Canucks against queen and country, God forgive him and save all three. For he was a good lad at heart, was son Henry, and believe it or not he Cook himself had undergone a brief attack of Whiggery in his twenties—from which he had recovered with such antibodies as to have been spared the least twinge of recurrence, he was happy to report. He greatly feared (this after dinner now, as we sipped cognac and watched skyrockets from the terrace in the mild autumn night, through which sailed also incredible hosts of wild geese, chorusing south from where I wished I were) I was the butt of some silly practical joke, and expressed chivalrous indignation that “a lady of my quality” should be so used.

  He was, well, charming: not at all the blustering boor of the Maryland Historical Society—except (and here too he is at least in spirit my André’s kin) in the company of “adversaries” such as Morgan, who joined us after dinner, or when the conversation turned to politics. Then he became the loud Poetaster Laureate of the Right: encouraged Harrison’s conviction that the Russian embassy had not leased waterfront acreage in Dorchester County merely for the summer recreation of their staff, as they claimed, but to spy on Mack Enterprises and “other operations in the area.” (Nonsense, Jane crisply replied, they were a Mack enterprise: she had leased them the land herself.) He declared to His Majesty that Schott’s proposed Tower of Truth would make Marshyhope “independent enough to secede from the state system”—a loaded illogic that Harrison good-naturedly reproved him for. And I could not judge, much as I needed to, how seriously he took his professed Toryism—but I believed Joe Morgan’s grim reply (since borne out) when I asked him that question: “Only half seriously, Germaine. But he would destroy us half seriously, too.”

  So. The only unattached lady among so many charming, unattached gentlemen, and too unfortunately distracted to enjoy their gallantries. Or properly to acquaint myself with the youngest member of our company, the most detached certainly, if not unattached, who hovered in the margins of the evening as of this letter. “And I believe you’ve not met Mr Prinz,” Jane said at the end of our cocktail introductions, as I attempted dazedly to measure A. B. Cook against André’s depiction. In the following year, last year, when I found myself de facto mistress of Tidewater Farms, playing “Esther” to Harrison’s “Ahasuerus” (his conceit, after one of George III’s) whilst “Queen Vashti” refreshed herself at the real Bath and Cheltenham, I had occasion to re-view Reg Prinz—else I’d be unable to describe him now, so distraught was I and evanescent he that November evening. The “son [Harrison] should have had” is at the end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht’s and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose’s phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation, or a long-term convict just released with the warden’s good wishes and a new suit of street clothes. He neither smokes nor drinks nor, so far as I could hear, speaks. It is said that he comes from a wealthy Long Island Jewish family and was educated at Groton and Yale. It is said that he “trips” regularly on lysergic acid diethylamide and other pharmaceuticals, but deplores the ascription to them of mystic insight or creative vision in their users. It is said that he is a brilliant actor and director; that he has absorbed and put behind him all the ideology of contemporary filmmaking, along with radical politics (he thinks Drew Mack naive, we’re told, but is “interested” in Harrison and A. B. Cook as “emblems,” and “admires” Henry Burlingame VII) and literature, which he is reputed to have called “a mildly interesting historical phenomenon of no present importance.” One hears that he is scornful of esoteric, high-art cinema as unfaithful to the medium’s popular roots, which however bore him. Political revolutions, he is said to have said, are passé, “like marriage, divorce, families, professions, novels, cash, existential Angst.”

  Do not ask me where, when, or to whom the young man has delivered himself of these opinions, most of which I have at at least second hand from Ambrose. I have indeed, on occasion since, heard him speak, in a voice almost inaudible and invariably in ellipses, shrugs, nods, fragments, hums, non sequiturs, dashes, and suspension points. Ambrose declares that his immediate presence (I must add “except at formal Guy Fawkes Day dinner parties”) is uncommonly compelling; that in it most “issues” and “positions” seem idly theoretical, or simply don’t come up however much one had meant to raise them; that the most outrageous situations are acquiesced in and seem justified by “the wordless force of his personality.” I deny none of the above—though I suspect my lover of some projection!—and I do indeed find Prinz a quietly disquieting, inarticulately insistent fellow: a sort of saxifrage in the cracks of the contemporary, or (to borrow one of Ambrose’s tidewater tropes) a starfish on the oyster bed of art. But one wonders—this one, anyroad—whether that vague antiverbality proceeds from (I had almost said bespeaks) a mindless will or a mere vacuum; whether the man be not, after all, all surface: a clouded transparency, a… film.

  If the last, I’d have graded him B at best that November evening, which we are now done with. Today—I don’t know. I left Tidewater Farms no wiser than I’d arrived, but sorely troubled. To Joe Morgan and Todd Andrews, of course, I could say nothing of my deepest concerns; but in the car back to Cambridge from Redmans Neck (Morgan kindly returned us to our addresses) I learned that while my two pleasant bachelor companions agreed that A. B. Cook was an enigma and a charlatan, more subtle and sophisticated than the role he played with Schott and Company, they did not (then) agree on what if anything underlay the oafish masquerade. Andrews was inclined to think him a wealthy, eccentric, heartfelt reactionary whose support (both financial and poetical) of certain Dixiecrat politicians was legitimate if lamentable; whose friendships with Harrison and other civilised right-wingers were genuine, his relations with vulgar red-necks like Schott merely expedient. And his duplicity, in Todd Andrews’s opinion, was probably limited to loudly supporting in the crudest fashion a famously conservative gubernatorial candidate so that a lesser-known but even more conservative could run against him on what pretended to be a liberal platform, and the Tories win in either case. The rest, he declared—Cook’s rumoured paramilitary “club” on or near Bloodsworth Island, his rumoured connexion with the Baltimore chapter of the American Nazi party (all news to me)—was mere liberal-baiting panache.

  Morgan disagreed. Through his activities with the historical society he’d had frequent dealings with Cook, who’d been the first to propose him to Harrison Mack for the presidency of Tidewater Tech, as he’d been the first subsequently to propose his resignation from Marshyhope in favour of Schott. Quite apart from any grudge against the man for whatever harm he might do the college (it is a mark of Morgan’s tact that he didn’t mention Cook’s slanderous resurrection, so to speak, of his late wife’s death), Morgan believed him genuinely menacing and perhaps psychopathological. What’s more, he believed there might be some truth in a body of rumour that was news to Mr Andrews as well as to me: that Cook was literally sinister, a threat not from the right but from the left! On this view, his public connexion with right-wing extremists was for the purpose of sabotaging their activities with ostensibly favourable publicity and establishing a creditable “cover” for his real connexions w
ith—not the Far Left, exactly, but a grab bag of terrorists: the F.L.N., the I.R.A., the P.L.O., the Quebec separatists, the farther-out black and Indian nationalists—all of whom, of course, had operatives in Washington.

  “Once, ten years ago,” Morgan told us matter-of-factly, “when I first got to know him, Cook offered to arrange a murder for me. Said it was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t take him up on it, but I didn’t have the impression he was boasting, either.”

  We didn’t press; perhaps Andrews, like me, wondered uncomfortably whether the victim was to have been the late Mrs Morgan or someone involved in her death. Given the whispering campaign against him, Morgan’s remark seemed ill-considered—but I took it as a mark of his trust, and was in any case more interested in Cook’s possible connexions with André, perhaps via the Free-Quebec people. And Morgan was so healthy-looking, so cheerfully normal, even boyish of face, it was impossible to imagine him involved in anything clandestine, much less violent. Todd Andrews dismissed the whole “Second Revolution business”—which he assumed was what the rumoured leftism added up to—as another of Cook’s cranky red herrings, and wished only that he wouldn’t feed Harrison’s folly with it. Morgan agreed that it might well be mere crankery, but considered it dangerous crankery withal. And so the evening ended, Andrews remarking as he bade me good night that in his opinion my own unexpected role in his friend’s delusion was more therapeutic, at least palliative, than not. He hoped I would indulge poor Harrison as far as my discretion permitted.