by John Barth
Ambrose is, I trust I made clear, not boorish in all this, but Quietly Firm, like an Edwardian husband. If our Fourth Stage corresponds to his 4th affair—i.e., his wooing and wedding of Marsha Blank—then I infer of that alliance that she was the more ardent partner, he the more dominant. I reflect on the course of their connexion (not to mention its issue) and am not cheered.
Well!
G.
P.S.: A long letter, this. I remember, wryly, how in the years when I aspired to fiction I would sit for hours blocked before the inkless page. And my editorial, my critical and historical writing, has never come easily, nor shall I ever be a ready dictator of sentences to Shirley Stickles. Even my personal correspondence is usually brief. But this genre of epistolary confession evidently Strikes some deep chord in me: come Saturday’s Dear J., my pen races, the words surge forth like Ambrose’s etc., I feel I could write on, write on to the end of time!
E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Not pregnant. The “prenatal” letters of A.B. Cook IV.
24 L Street
31 May 69
John,
End of May, Ember day; full moon come ’round again. My calendar dubs it the Invasion Moon, no doubt because a quarter-century ago it lit the beaches of Normandy. I was 24 then: had been Jeffrey’s mistress in Italy and England; had conceived André’s child in Paris and borne it in Canada; had had done with Hesse and aborted his get in Lugano; was chastely waiting out the war near Coppet, researching the life of Germaine de Staël. It seems ages past, that moon: my uterus is an historical relic! But ember as in Ember days means recurrent, not burnt to coals: what’s waned will wax, waxed wane…
Well, I’m menstruating. No Johnstown Flood, but an unambiguous flow. Astonishing, that old relic’s new regularity; you could correct your calendar by it. What to think? Ambrose is almost angry at this repulse of his wee invaders. I would remind him that who menstruates a fortiori ovulates; my plumbing’s in order, let him look to his! But on this head he is not humorous. Indeed, he has turned a carper: my outfits lately are too old-fashioned; my manners date me; my way of speaking rings of middle-aged irony. I reply: Well might they so be, do, ring; 650 moons is no “teenybopper.” Would he trick her old carcase out in bikinis and miniskirts? Have her “do grass,” “drop acid”? Pickle her fading youthfulness in gin like his old (and new) friend Bea Golden? He does not reply: I fear I have invoked that name to my hurt, as one does a rival’s. Yet I think I’d know if she had truly reentered his picture as they fiddle together with Prinz’s, for my “lover” virtually lives with me now…
Dear Reader: I am a mite frightened. My calendar (the one on my desk which names the full moons, not the one in my knickers that marks them) notes that in France on this date in 1793 the Reign of Terror began—though the Revolutionary Tribunal had been established in the August of ’92, and my eponym had nearly lost her head in the September. If Ambrose should become my Robespierre, who will be my Napoleon?
Add odd ironies: my master’s master’s essay was entitled Problems of Dialogue, Exposition, and Narrative Viewpoint in the Epistolary Novel. You knew?
On the Monday and the Thursday since my last, he and I made love: both times in bed, in the dark. Tomorrow’s, I’ll wager, will be forgone as pointless. In April it would not have been. Tomorrow’s! We are come to that!
Well: with so much unwonted free time on my hands, I have at least finished your Sot-Weed Factor novel. Mes compliments. Since my friend and I these evenings read even in bed, I look to dispatch with more dispatch your other “longie,” #4, the goat-boy book. Of SWF I will say no more, both because my monthly flow cramps my verbal, and because while I am done with your words I am not with your plot. Rather, with your plotter, that (literally) intriguing Henry Burlingame III. By scholarly reflex, even before Monday’s momentous special delivery was delivered to 24 L, I had “checked out” enough of your historical sources in the regional-history section of the Marshyhope library (its only passable collection) to verify that while the name Henry Burlingame appears on Captain John Smith’s roster of his crew for the exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608, there is no further mention of him in Smith’s Generall Historie, and none at all in the Archives of Maryland, through which bustle the rest of your dramatis personae. I therefore assume—with more hope than conviction—that “Henry Burlingame III,” his protean character and multifarious exploits, are your invention; that the resemblance between this fictitious 17th-Century intrigant and the Burlingame/Castine/Cook line of 20th-century Ontario, Annapolis, and Everywhere Else is either pure coincidence or the impure imitation of art by life. I entreat you, sir: break your silence to tell me that this is so!
This letter will not be long. I’ve scarcely begun to assimilate, and am still entirely distracted by, that aforementioned special delivery: a packet of four very long letters, plus a covering note. The mails, the mails! The packet is postmarked Fort Erie, Ontario, 21 May 1969 (a Wednesday); the cover note is dated Wednesday, 14 May, same year; the letters proper are dated 5 March, 2 April, 9 April, and 14 May—but all Thursdays—and all in 1812! 157 years from Castines Hundred (so all are headed, in “Upper Canada”) to Dorset Heights: a very special delivery indeed!
4½ bolts from the blue. They are, of course, the letters André promised when the time should be ripe for us to make a “midcourse correction,” as the Apollo-10 chaps say, in our son’s career, by control at least as remote as theirs (and far less reliable). The letters are—read “purport to be,” though to my not inexpert eye they seem authentic—in the hand of one Andrew Cook IV, André’s great-great-grandfather, who at the time of their alleged composition was 36 years old and taking refuge at Castines Hundred from the furore over his latest ploy in the Game of Governments. They are addressed to his unborn child, then gestating in the womb of his young wife. The texts are too long and too mattersome to summarise: their substance is the history of the Burlingame/Castine/Cook(e)s, from Henry Burlingame I of Virginia (John Smith’s bête noire, as in your version) down to the “present”: i.e., Andrew Cook IV on the eve of the 1812 War. This Andrew declares, in effect, that the whole line have been losers because they mistook their fathers for winners on the wrong side; he announces his intention to break this pattern by devoting the second half of his life to the counteraction of its first, thus becoming, if not a winner, at least not another loser in the family tradition, and preparing the road for his son or daughter to be “the first real winner in the history of the house.”
Here my pen falters, though I am no stranger to the complexities of history and of human motives. What Andrew Cook IV says is that he had grown up believing his father (Burlingame IV) to have been a successful abettor of the American Revolution, and had therefore devoted himself to the cause of Britain against the United States. But at age 36 he has come to believe that his father was in fact an unsuccessful agent of the Loyalists, only pretending to be a revolutionary—and that he himself therefore has been a loser too, dissipating his energies in opposition to his father’s supposed cause and therefore abetting, unsuccessfully, his real cause. “Knowing” his father now to have been a sincere Loyalist in disguise, he vows to rededicate himself to their common cause: the destruction of the young republic. “My father failed to abort the birth he pretended to favour,” says A.C. IV. “We must therefore resort to sterner measures. For America, like Zeus, is a child that will grow up to destroy his parents.”
In that loaded metaphor, precisely, is the rub: supposing the letters to be genuine, one may still suspect them to have been disingenuous. Had Andrew IV really changed his mind about his father’s ultimate allegiances, or was he merely pretending to have done, for ulterior reasons? Was his avowed subversiveness a cover for subverting the real subversives? And might his exhortation to his unborn child have been a provocation in disguise? So at least, it seems, some have believed, notably the author of the cover note…
John: that note is in “my André’s” hand, and in his French! It is addressed to me. It is writt
en from Castines Hundred. It is headed “Chérie, chérie, chérie!” It alludes tenderly, familiarly, to our past, to my trials. It explains that “our plan” to insure “our son’s” dedication to “our cause” (by my publishing these letters, and others yet to come, in the Maryland and Ontario historical magazines) had to be thus delayed until “our friend the false laureate” had been “neutralised”—an event that has presumably occurred, and whereof (it is darkly implied) his declining the M.S.U. Litt.D. is the signal. We may now proceed: Given “our son’s” background and professional skepticism, it will not do to present to him directly these documents, the truth of his own parentage, and the misdirection hitherto of his talents for “Action Historiography”: I am therefore to publish the letters as my discoveries, with whatever commentary I may wish to add; the author of the cover note will then clip and send them to Henri (professing astonishment, conviction, etc.) together with “certain supplementary comment,” including the story of Henri’s own birth and early childhood, the whole to be signed “Your loving, long-lost father, André Castine.” The “false laureate” once revealed to be not Henri’s true father, we will assess the young man’s reactions and, “at the propitious moment, may it come soon,” reveal to him that the responsible, respected, impersonal historian who brought the letters to light is in fact his long-lost mother! End of cover note. Its close is two words, in two languages: Yours toujours. It is signed… Andrew!
I shall go mad. I shall go mad. Why should not Ambrose (who shall not see the cover note) turn out to be André? Why should not you? Why should not my dear daft parents, decades dead, drop by for tea and declare that I am not their daughter, Germaine Necker-Gordon? Then God descend and declare the world a baroque fiction, now finally done and rejected by the heavenly publishers!
Madness! And in these letters (which you may presently read in print, for I shall do what that hand bids me, with every misgiving in the world) I perceive a pattern of my own, A.C. IV’s and V’s and VI’s be damned: It is the women of the line who’ve been the losers: Anne Bowyer Cooke and Anna Cooke, Roxanne Édouard, Henrietta and Nancy Russecks, Andrée Castines I and II and III—faithful, patient, brave, long-suffering women driven finally, the most of them, to distraction.
And of this sorry line the latest—unless she finds the spiritual wherewithal to do an about-face of her own with what remains of the second half of her life—is “your”
Germaine!
S: Todd Andrews to his father. His life’s recycling. Jane Mack’s visit and confession. 10 R.
Skipjack Osborn Jones
Slip #2, Municipal Harbor
Cambridge, Maryland 21613
11 P.M. Friday, May 16, 1969
Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613
O dear Father,
Seven decades of living (seven years more than you permitted yourself), together with my Tragic View of Order, incline me on the one hand to see patterns everywhere, on the other to be skeptical of their significance. Do you know what I mean? Did you feel that way too? (Did you ever know what I meant? Did you feel any way?)
So for example I did not fail to remark, on March 7 last, when I wrote my belated annual deathday letter to you, that it was occasioned by the revival of events that prompted my old Letter in the first place; but having so remarked, I shrugged my shoulders. Even seven weeks ago, when the dead past sprouted to life in my office like those seeds from fossil dung germinated by the paleontologists, I resisted the temptation to Perceive a Pattern in All This. I mean a meaningful pattern: for of course I noticed, not for the first time, that Drew Mack and his mother were squaring off over Harrison’s estate quite as Harrison and his mother had once done over Mack Senior’s. But I drew no more inferences from that than I shall from the gratuitous recurrence of sevens above; I merely wondered: If (as Marx says in his essay The 18th Brumaire) tragic history repeats itself as farce, what does farce do for an encore?
Then came, on April Fool’s Day, a letter from the author of The Floating Opera novel, inquiring what I’d been up to since 1954 and whether I’d object to being cast in his current fiction. I obliged him with a partial résumé—in course of which I began to see yet further Connections—then not only declined, at least for the present, to model for him, but observed that his project struck me as the sort conceived by an imagination overinclined to retracing its steps before moving on. I even wondered whether he might not be merely registering his passage of life’s celebrated midpoint, as I once did.
I’ve not heard from him since. But I withdraw that pejorative merely, and I am at once chastened and spooked by that clause as I once did. O yes: and at age 69 I’m also in love, Dad. Whether with a woman or a letter of the alphabet, I’m not yet certain.
Something tells me, you see—lots of things—that my life has been being recycled since 1954, perhaps since 1937, without my more than idly remarking the fact till now. The reenactment may indeed be fast approaching its “climax”; and as I made something of a muddle of it the first time around, I’d best begin to do more than idly remark certain recurrences as portentous or piquant.
Item: the foregathering, in Cambridge and environs, of Reg Prinz’s film company, to shoot what was at first proposed to be a film version of some later work by the author of The Floating Opera, but presently intends to reprise at least “certain themes and images” from that first novel—and which features “Bea Golden.” Will she play Jane Mack?
Item: in the morning’s mail, notice of two scheduled visits to Cambridge this summer of “our” showboat replica, The Original Floating Theatre II, about which Prinz had inquired of me only last Friday, in his fashion, whether it would be putting in here during the July Tercentennial celebration. He was interested in using it as a ready-made set for “the Showboat sequences”—should he have said sequel?—in his film.
For as it turns out (so I reported to him up on deck some hours ago), the O.F.T. II will play at Long Wharf not only during the week of July 18-25, but on the third weekend in June as well: 32nd anniversary of that midsummer night when I tried (and failed) to blow its prototype, myself, and tout le monde to kingdom come. Heavy-footed coincidence! God the novelist was hard enough to take as an awkward Realist; how shall we swallow him as a ham-handed Formalist?
Well, that production-within-a-reproduction must sink or swim without me; I shan’t be going. But since Harrison’s funeral on your 39th deathday; since my own 69th birthday and my letter to you; since my new association with Jane Mack, even with Jeannine—to get right down to it, since this evening’s cocktail party aboardship and subsequent sunset sail with one of my guests, since whose disembarkation I’ve sat here at the chart table drawing up parallel lists and exclaiming O, O, O—I’ve been feeling like the principal in a too familiar drama, a freely modified revival featuring Many of the Original Cast.
In the left-hand column (from early work-notes for my own memoir, drafted between 1937 and 1954, of Captain James Adams’s original Original Floating Theatre), the cardinal events of my life’s first half, as they seemed to me then and still seem today, 13 in number. On their right, more or less correspondent events in the years since. To wit:
1. Mar. 2, 1900: I am born.
1. June 21 or 22, 1937: I am “reborn” (you know what I mean) after my unsuccessful effort to blow up the O.F.T.
2. Mar. 2, 1917: I definitively lose my virginity to Betty Jane Gunter, R.I.P., upstairs in my bedroom in your house, puppy dog-style on my bed, before the large mirror on my dresser, and learn to the bone the emotion of mirth.
2. Dec. 31, 1954/Jan. 1, 1955: I definitively lose my middle-aged celibacy (also, one idly remarks, after 17 years, and also on a Friday) to Sharon-from-Manhattan, after a New Year’s Eve party at Cambridge Yacht Club, thence to Tidewater Inn, Easton, where I relearn, if not mirth, certainly amusement. And refreshment!
3. Sept. 22, 1918: I bayonet a German infantry sergeant in the Argonne Forest,
after learning to the bone the emotion of fear.
3. July 23, 1967: I forestall Drew Mack & friends from blowing up the New Bridge, and in the process learn to the ventricles the strange emotion of courage.
4. June 13, 1919: I am told of a cardiac condition that may do me in at any moment, or may never. I begin, not long after, the attempt to explain this state of affairs to you in a letter, of which this is the latest installment.
4. End of June, 1937: I am told by my friend the late Marvin Rose, M.D., R.I.P., that in my place he would not worry one fart about a myocardium poised for so many years on the brink of infarction without once infarcting. Never mind the discrepant chronology, Dad; my heart tells me that here is where this item belongs. I perpend Marvin’s opinion, in which I have no great interest since my “rebirth,” and resume both my Inquiry and my letter to you, of which etc.
5. 1920-24: My Rakehood, or 1st sexual flowering, during which I also study law and learn of my low-grade prostate infection. Followed by a period (1925-29) of diminished sexual activity, my meeting with Harrison Mack, and my entry into your law firm.
5. 1955—?: My 2nd and presumably final sexual flowering, altogether more modest: prompted by #2 above; aided by a prostatectomy too long put off, which relieved a condition both painful and conducive to impotence; principally abetted by dear Polly Lake. An efflorescence with, apparently, a considerable half-life: there is evidence that that garden is even yet not closed for the night. O yes, and I remeet the Macks, reinvolve myself in their Enterprises, and largely put by the profession of law for directorship of their Tidewater Foundation.
6. Groundhog’s Day, 1930: Your inexplicable suicide, which teaches me to the bone the emotion of frustration, and remains to this hour by no means explained to my satisfaction. I move into the Dorset Hotel; I pay my room rent a day at a time (see #4 left, above); and I open my endless Inquiry into your death. O you bastard.
