Letters

by John Barth

  I thought to tell him I did not care to rule the waves just then, but ride them with him. Skin, skin! His hand restirred the juice of April in me, when I’d have freely bid us abandon both of these vessels-going-nowhere and stand full sail bedward. But his damned question, What ought we now?—that he had put it put me off, stayed my hand from more than meeting his.

  And so we sat through the rites and trappings of a typical C-minus U.S. restaurant—stupid puzzles on the place mats, mindless jokes on the napkins, sugar in paper packets depicting ill-coloured birds of America, little sealed containers of “non-dairy creamer,” dime-store candles in painted glass, plastic roses, butter in paper pats, tired salad from a tiresome self-service salad bar, crackers in cellophane, store-bought rolls, the inevitable menu of tinned soups and vegetables, thawed appetizers and entrees, everything (except the boring, inevitable beefsteak) breaded and deep-fried, baked to death, steam-tabled to a mush, or otherwise overcooked as well as overpriced and overdescribed, no fresh fruit to be found or fresh vegetables or fresh anything (How did we English get our reputation as the world’s worst cooks?)—saving one item which saved the meal: a pencilled-in Friday-night special of broiled fresh rockfish from the Bay, which Ambrose identified as striped bass in its local denomination. He ordered it solo unhesitatingly for the two of us, insisting our plates not be defiled with stale French fries, bulk packaged cole slaw, white potatoes baked in Reynolds Wrap, and the rest; just fresh fish, fresh lemon wedges, and tomatoes filched fresh from the salad bar, please. And mirabile (but this is not yet our Second Miracle), we had only to send back the first burnt offering on its cold platter to achieve on second try a quite lightly broiled filet of that admirable beast the Chesapeake rockfish, which we washed down with draft beer in default of pale ale, not to mention white wine—and spoke of the film in progress.

  The 1812 War, the sack of Washington and bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour, the pirate Jean Lafitte’s assistance of Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans and his subsequent involvement in one of the several harebrained schemes to spirit Napoleon from St Helena to America—none of these “splendid ideas” of A. B. Cook’s, I understand from Ambrose, is to be found in your fiction. Yet the single set Reg Prinz is causing to be constructed for his film is “Barataria”: a suggestion (Ambrose’s inference, from Prinz’s hums and tisks) rather than a replication of Lafitte’s pirate village in the Mississippi delta, itself named for Sancho Panza’s make-believe island in Don Quixote. Prinz’s point, Ambrose imagines, is not only that the fictional original inspired or called forth its factual counterpart (itself become legendary), but that even in Quixote Sancho’s island is a fiction precipitated out of fable and realised as deception, a kind of stage set elaborated by the Manchegan lords and ladies to make sport of Sancho Panza. In other words (ours, not Prinz’s, for what we take to be Prinz’s principle, not ours), the relation between fact and fiction, life and art, is not imitation of either by the other, but a sort of reciprocity, an ongoing collaboration or reverberation. Did this imply that you would now include the Baratarians in some future fiction, as the apostles say Jesus performed certain miracles in order that the prophecies might be fulfilled which held that the Messiah would do thus-and-so? We were uncertain. You have in any case considerable latitude, as Prinz’s “Barataria” is to be a general-purpose set (indeed, no more than a lane of clapboard shanty-fronts on or near Bloodsworth Island, if he can secure permission from the U.S. Navy, who use the place for gunnery practice) for scenes of domestic early-19th-century destruction: the burning of Washington, Buffalo, York, Newark, St Davids—even Barataria—some or all whereof may be included in the film!

  Emblems, emblems all, said Ambrose (no dessert cheese on the menu, no brandy for our coffee, no espresso; Charon’s ferry will have better fare); for what Prinz truly wants to record the destruction of is not any historical city, but the venerable metropolis of letters. If he has hit upon the 1812 War to evoke his foggy “Second Revolution,” it may be for no better reason than that it affords him the reenactment of “our” burning of “your” Library of Congress and National Archives, or Admiral Cockburn’s revenge upon the National Intelligencer (delivered regularly to his flotilla in the Chesapeake) for its unflattering accounts of him: having ordered his men to pi the paper’s type, Cockburn first had them pluck out and destroy all the uppercase C’s, to hamper the impugnment of his name in future. A destruction-of-the-capital within a destruction-of-the-capital, Ambrose puts it, and recounted to me further—what it would take too many words fully to rerecount here—Prinz’s “victory” over him earlier in the week (the first intimation I’d had that their connexion was become an open contest): the filming of an “unwritable scene.”

  Briefly: my lover dates his erratic and problematical career in letters from his receipt, at age ten, of a cryptic message in a bottle washed up on the Choptank River shore near his present odd establishment. You know the story: Ambrose even told me—in a 100-page enclosure in the second of his two letters thus far to “me”—that you wrote the story, anyhow rewrote and published it with his consent: how on 12 May 1940, as an overstrung, underconfident, unhappy preadolescent yearning for reassurance from the Wider World that a life lay ahead for him less crabbed (let’s say) than that of backwater Dorset, he’d come across that bottle, fished forth eagerly its communique, and been dismayed to the bottom of his soul to find only a salutation at the head (“To Whom It May Concern”) and at the foot a close (“Yours Truly”). No body; no signature! Monday last happening to be the 29th anniversary of this non-message’s delivery, and the company having filmed on the Sunday certain sequences at Ocean City in which Ambrose took the role of an author rehearsing the boyhood of one of his principal characters, it was decided to include a scene suggestive of that water message. But instead of the seven words of the original (per “Arthur Morton King’s” fictionalization of the event, which also included the surprising, by a group of schoolboys, of a pair of lovers more or less in the act in the gang’s makshift clubhouse, with attendant lower-form dialogue), Prinz suggested there be either an entirely blank sheet or a considerable manuscript in the bottle, which latter would however wash to illegibility even as the camera—and before the anxious protagonist—scanned it.

  Left sleepless anyroad by the Sunday’s shooting (in which—the thought gives me vertigo—Bea Golden appears to have acted a role something like the young Magda Giulianova!), Ambrose had spent most of the night in his boardwalk hotel drafting a scenario: on Prinz’s instructions, the fellow on the beach was to be the Author—i.e., a ten-year-old “Ambrose” nearing forty and recollecting his boyhood; the couple in flagrante delicto were to be a youthful sweetheart of this Author’s (l’Abruzzesa, played by Bea Golden? I didn’t ask) and her current lover, a filmmaker no less, played of course by R.P. Never mind why they’d gone under the boardwalk for this coupling—the mise en scène was changed to Ocean City, “to tie in with the Funhouse sequence”—when all those hotels stood ready to hand. Then mirabile (but not ours, not ours) dictu—better, mirabile obtuear, marvellous to behold, for there were no words in this enactment save the dissolving ones of Ambrose’s text: on the strand next forenoon, the company assembled, Prinz’s first act is to make the written scenario itself the water message! As the cameras roll, he stuffs into a bottle half full of ocean Ambrose’s rendering of the scene to be played and tosses it into the surf, as if to punish the Author for having intruded on his amours (his fly is open; Bea Golden wears only a beach towel; the Marshyhopers still in attendance are agog)! Ambrose is aghast, then furious to the point of literally clenching fists… then thrilled, his very adjective, as he believes he begins to see the point: Prinz, having mouthed something soundless at him, strides into the cold surf, retrieves the bottle, fetches out the marinated, washed-out script, presents it with a smile of triumph to the Author, then stands by expectantly, his arm around Ms Golden, as if awaiting direction.

  The point, my lover now concluded, was
precisely the inversion, in this double reenactment, of the original, historical state of affairs (the Author, grown, relives his boyhood experience; the wordless film reiterates the written story). The World having given “Ambrose” a tantalising carte blanche when he most craved specific direction, “Arthur Morton King” had vainly striven for nearly three decades to fill that blank. Now, before his and the camera’s eyes, his scenario of this predicament’s reenaction—itself the latest of those strivings, and nothing but direction—is washed away. Things have come full circle; the slate is clean; he is free!

  And, for the moment (as the movie moves on), he is also immobilised, speechless, unable to direct either the Director or himself. Then he laughs; he finds his first words (“I see…!”) and is interrupted by Prinz’s “Cut.” To which is presently appended a directive to the sound man, to make Ambrose’s laugh echo that of “the Laughing Lady in the Funhouse sequence.” Prinz then turns his back and strides hotelwards with the shivering heroine, leaving the bested Author as stranded as our ferryboat restaurant, which we now prepare to leave.

  “It was simply brilliant,” Ambrose declared. “And the most brilliant thing about it, its final point, was… exactly what I can’t put into words,”—and what you will therefore excuse my having lost in this retelling!—“that the whole scene was not only nonverbal, but unwritable. Proof against literary rendering! A demonstration; a visual tour de force. What shall we do now, Germaine? You and I?”

  My turn for speechlessness? For Words fail me, or Dumbstruck by his sudden change of subject, I could not at once nor can I now… that sort of thing?

  Not a bit of it! Somewhere amid rockfish and recountment I had got a quiet message from my own Yours Truly, the genuine Germaine. While I found Ambrose’s story interesting enough, I had not been by it diverted, not for a moment, from the question posed on Todd Andrews’s foredeck. As if its reposing now were no non sequitur but the obvious close of his “unwritable sequence,” like a ready player at her cue I replied at once: We ought to tip the waitress moderately; we ought unhurriedly to recross the bridges to 24 L; there we ought leisurely to disrobe and temperately come together. If our fortnight’s abstinence was neither the effect nor the cause of a waning of his affection for me, as it certainly was not of mine for him, and if his inclination (which he’d said was clear to him) corresponded to mine, we ought at once to resume our sexual connexion, but less frenetically than before. That’s what I thought we ought; what thought he?

  And now I bring this chronicle at last to bed with Miracle #2, so long in utero: He thought the same, exactly! 10% for the waitress, whose fault the place was not; a decorous disembarkation (but his hand on my arm, his beaming smile, his instant wordless rising from table, belied his composure); 50 mph across the moonless, still Choptank (where Andrews’s skipjack sat becalmed now in the channel, sails raised and slack, drifting on the tide in the last twilight) as we spoke—warmly, quietly, but neither urgently nor lightly—of how we’d missed one another’s persons, and had rather savoured that missing, and would be pleased now to have done with that savour. In April we’d have gone to it in the car; we tuned in the ten o’clock news instead and smiled together at the announcement that Venus-5, the Russian space probe, had successfully soft-landed on its target and begun, presumably, to probe. By half-past—serenely, surely—so had Ambrose.

  He declared (calmly) he loved me. I replied, less calmly, I had liked him in March and craved him in April, and believed I now loved him too. He declared his wish to spend most nights with me; I replied that that was my wish also. We agreed however that some discretion should be exercised (more than we had done in April) to avoid unpleasantness in a small, conservative community; his daughter, too, posed something of a problem. In any case, there were more or less definite plans to shift the film company to the Niagara Frontier for ten days or so in June, which happened to fall between MSUC’s final exam period and commencement ceremonies: he hoped I would go with him; that we could as it were elope, “honeymoon” at the Falls…

  “Stage Four” of our affair, then, I gather, will be the sweet extension—long may it extend!—of Miracle Two: this… this spouselike intercourse (he insisted I wear a nightgown: I am to help him shop for spare pajamas, a bathrobe, carpet slippers, to keep at 24 L!), which I find seizes me with a strange, helpless ardour. Poached eggs and tea! The morning newspaper! How far this delightful husbanding? Will it come to pipe and dog and bumbershoot? Am I to play at wiving even to the point of—

  But now words fail me, anyhow falter, as they did not at Miracles One and Two. Last night, postcoitally, I’d reminded Ambrose of his promise to elucidate that Deeper Pattern he’d perceived in our relation. He pled fatigue, pledged a full account at breakfast, and proffered for the meanwhile only that our April binge had reminded him of the one other such sexual marathon in his life, twenty years previously, at age nineteen. It had been his second romance, if the term could be applied to an altogether physical connexion. Inasmuch as his first love had been hopeless (a prolonged boyhood admiration for his older brother’s girl, our friend Magda Giulianova), the uncomplicated sexual release of this second affair had been of great benefit to him. His partner, however—he would tell me tomorrow; I would be amused—a nymphomaniac of sixteen, had moved on after an exhausting summer to fresher fields, and in the ensuing season of involuntary chastity he had consoled himself (but not sexually) once again with Magda, by then Mrs Peter Mensch, whom he found himself this time loving but not desiring. Thus his first three “affairs”: recollected in this manner, they’d put him in mind of both that curious alphabetical list from the New England Primer and, mutatis mutandis, the progress of our own affair, which for better or worse bid to recapitulate his carnal biography. He had not however (he admitted with a drowsy chuckle) got the correspondences quite worked out: we were at Stage Four in the recapitulation, but Letter Seven of the Primer’s list…

  A restless night for me: the novelty of a bedpartner; certain private memories of my own associated with Ambrose’s mention of the Niagara Frontier; half-impatient speculation on these rôles I was being cast in willy-nilly. If l’Abruzzesa (as it appeared) had been both #1 and #3, and I myself was #6, it wanted no great inductive prowess (from the chaps who brought you Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie) to guess that Magda had also been #5, no doubt this time sexually: the ménage à trois from which Ambrose had come to me with his talk of beggared Dido and an Aeneas who would not weigh anchor and run for Rome. Ergo, #4 will have to have been… his ex-wife: that obscure Marsha, of whom Ambrose never spoke; of his marriage to whom I knew little more than that at one point it had made him suicidally unhappy and that it had been terminated not very long since.

  Also, perhaps unfortunately, that it had not been fruitless. The “dear damaged daughter,” as Ambrose called her, of whom the mother had evidently washed her hands, and l’Abruzzesa taken charge…

  Now, I had not forgot that mad string of postscripts to his first letter: the G that followed For-ni-ca-ti-on was not Germaine…

  Nor was the Third Miracle a proposition of marriage. Ambrose slept soundly, as I did not, and woke refreshed and roused. I was headachy, anxious (forty-five needs its sleep, and I now confess to you, for good reason, a small vain lie in last month’s letters: I am not forty-five, but… a touch older); made the fact known when he essayed his “A.M. quickie,” or second probe of the Venusberg. Unperturbed, he reminded me that on May Day I’d found orgasm a pleasant palliative for menstrual cramps: ought we not to give it a go for simple headache? His bedside manner was so good-humored, I agreed to try his prescription if I might take two aspirins first. He popped up to fetch them for me. Aussi mon pessaire, I called after him: from its case in the medicine cabinet, just above the aspirin; I had neglected to deploy it last night.

  He came back with two aspirins, a paper cup of water, an almost undiminished erection, a grave smile… and no diaphragm.

  Let’s take a chance, says he. No thank you, says I: it’s sm
ack in the middle of my month. As it was last night, he reminds me. My own recklessness, says I: it’s being late-fortyish I was taking a chance on. Germaine, says he, and takes my hand (I’ve downed my aspirins), and his voice goes thick…

  3. And here is our Third Miracle, too flabbergasting for exclamation marks: A. wants us to forgo all contraception. He wants his seed in me. He wants me pregnant, impregnated, preggers. He wants to get a child on me, to get me with child. He wants us to make a baby: my old egg, his sluggish swimmers. Conceive: he wants me to conceive by him, conceive a new person, our chromosomes together, his genes and mine, the living decipherment of our mingled codes. That’s what he thought we ought.

  I write this sunning by the newly dug pool of Jane Mack’s apartment complex, where I’ve basked and written all afternoon whilst my lover confers with his brother on some new crisis in the family firm. The Dorset Heights pool is empty; Germaine Pitt’s depths are full to overflowing, despite the best efforts of her vaginal sphincter. His stuff is in there, pooled with mine: I sit on it as I did first in our ad hoc committee chamber; for all I know, the flailing Ambrosian beasties have done their work already upon the ultimate Amherst ovum.

  Surely I am quite crackers! I feel my life profoundly changing, and half hope it is my change of life. Even were we wed, two such poor track records as his and mine should not be bred. What imbecile child will be our “Petit Nous’”? And yet I love him, this odd Ambrose, for pressing me to this unthinkable thing—which I must pray will not come to pass!