Letters

by John Barth

  Polly Lake goes at it like a trouper, Dad: lots of humping and bumping and chuckles and whoops. Jane Mack does it like an angel: lithely, gracefully, daintily, above all sweetly. Suddenly she clutched my shoulders and whispered a long O. For an instant I feared something was wrong. Heart attack? Coronary? Then I understood, and wondered why Bach didn’t pause, the bridge traffic, all the constellations, to hear that O.

  Sweet surprise. Afterwards she lay for a minute with her eyes closed (registering with a small smile my own orgasm); then she slipped dextrously out from under and into the head compartment to clean up. The air was chill now; there were patches of mist on the river. I wiped off with a paper towel, dressed, broke out a couple of Windbreakers from a hanging locker, spread bath towels on the cockpit cushions against the dew, started the engine, and went forward to lower and furl the sails. When I came back Jane was sitting with her legs curled under—dressed, jacketed, hair in place—smoking a cigarette and sipping a brandy. Another was set out for me. When I bent to kiss her, she gave me her cheek.

  I asked what we should drink to. She smiled brightly and shrugged, the old Jane. I was disappointed; the question had been serious. To the letter O then, I proposed. She didn’t know what I meant. Look at that traffic, she said: In a few years they’ll have to build another bridge and a bypass; Route 50 really bottlenecks at Cambridge. Her first words since the “Todds Point” wisecrack, not counting that O. She thought it just as well that Mack Enterprises had stayed out of the high-rise condominium boom in North Ocean City; they were way overextended; some people were going to lose their shirts.

  Back at the slip her chauffeur was waiting; Jane had him toss her the forward dock lines and made fast, then gave me a hand with the aft and spring lines. Then she said, Dad, and I quote: “That was just delightful, Todd. We must do it again. Soon. Nighty-night now.”

  No irony, no double entendre. Yet she had shown, out there in the channel, that she was capable of both, and of sentimental recollection too. Indeed, as we’d shucked our duds out by Red Nun 20, I’d set about amending my whole conception of Jane’s historical amnesia; now I was obliged to revise the amendment. More than that pants suit had been doffed and redonned; even when the only white left on her was what had been under her bikini in Tobago, I realized now she’d never acknowledged unambiguously our old affair; Todds Point was where she’d lived as well as where she’d 8-L’d me. A fresh frisson: had this been, for Jane, no sweet replay at all? Was she still and forever in that left-hand column, doing everything for the first time?

  Well, Dad: here I sit aboard the Osborn Jones like Keats’s knight at arms by the sedgeless lake: alone, palely loitering, enthralled. And baffled to the balls, sir! Could #8 & #10 R, my reseduction, whether or not Jane was conscious of the echoes, be simply another Mack Enterprise? A bribe? A retainer? It doesn’t seem impossible; with Jane, not even quite cynical. I think of the chap in Musil’s Man without Qualities who only seems a hypocrite because of his spontaneous, genuine feeling for those who happen to be in a position to further his interests. I think of Aristotle’s sensible observation in the Ethics, that the emotion of love among the young is typically based upon pleasure, among the elderly upon utility. Then I think of that O, and cease to care.

  O my heart. Whatever Jane felt out there at the dewpoint, among the blue herons, black cans, red giants, and white dwarfs, your ancient son felt, more than passion, an ardent sweetness: a grateful astonishment that life can take, even so late, so sweet and surprising a turn. Or, if after all no turn was taken, I feel at least a grateful indulgence of that Sentimental Formalist, our Author, for so sweetly, neatly—albeit improbably—tying up the loose ends of His plot.

  The earth has spun nearly around again since; the world with it. Many a one has been begotten, born, laid, or laid to rest since I began this letter. Apollo-10 is counting down; #11’s to land us on the moon before summer’s done. It’s been years, Dad, since I gave a fart why you hanged yourself in the basement on Saturday 2/2/30. You frightened me then about myself, whom I’ve ceased to fear, and turned into a monologue the dialogue we’d never begun. Only the young trouble their heads about such things.

  10. Mar. 28-May 16, 1969: Another Mack v. Mack shapes up, and Jane reresumes our affair, at least to the extent of reseducing me.

  Where will my #11 land me, this second time around? That’s all I’m really curious about, now I’ve seen the pattern. Yesterday I took an interest in (and the Tragic View of) the careers of Charles de Gaulle and Abe Fortas, the campus riots, my government’s war against the Vietnamese, even the enlargement of our knowledge of the universe, not to mention the disposition of Harrison Mack’s estate and the threatened blackmailing of Jane Mack. But I seem to have lost something overboard last night: today nothing much interests me except that O, which fills my head, this cabin, all space. I can hear nothing else; don’t want to hear anything else. I’ve written these pages, imagined that pattern, just to hear it again.

  O that O.

  If I try to sleep now (it’s getting on to cocktail time again), will my dreams rerun that episode? Never mind history, this letter, the rest of the alphabet. Bugger off, Dad. Author of us all: encore! Back to #10 R, Red Nun 20, Jane’s O!

  I: Jacob Horner to the Author. Declining to rewalk to the end of the road.

  5/15/69

  TO:

  Professor John Barth, Department of English, SUNY/ Buffalo, Buffalo, New York 14214, U.S.A.

  FROM:

  Jacob Horner, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

  Sir:

  In a sense, I Am Indeed the Jacob Horner of your End of the Road novel, for which you apologize in your letter to me of May 11, Mother’s Day, Rogation Sunday, birthday of Irving Berlin and Salvador Dali. Never mind in what sense.

  Your story of having discovered that manuscript in Pennsylvania in December 1955 I Find less convincing than the novel itself. As for your work in progress, your inquiries, your proposal: I am Not Interested.

  You would hazard the remobilization of “Jacob Horner”; how shall Jacob Horner Go About the resurrection of “Rennie Morgan,” whose widower intends to kill me if I don’t Bring Her Back To Life by Labor Day?

  If only roads did end. But the end of one is the commencement of another, or its mere continuation. Today, 15th of May, Ascension Day, 51st anniversary of the opening of airmail service between New York City and Washington, D.C., birthday of Anna Maria Alberghetti, Richard Avedon, Michael William Balfe, Joseph Cotten, James Mason, Ilya Mechnikov, I Am Back at the Beginning of mine, where I Was in 1951—what a year, what a decade, what a century—only Older; not so much Paralyzed as Spent.

  Who wants to replay that play, rewalk that road?

  L: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. His own history to the present writing: the French Revolution, Joel Barlow in Algiers, “Consuelo del Consulado,” Burr’s conspiracy, Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy. The Pattern.

  At Castines Hundred

  Niagara, Upper Canada

  Thursday, 14 May 1812

  Dawdling daughter, slugabed son!

  Last time I letter’d you, lazy child, five weeks since, ’twas mid-Aries; now ’tis the very tail of Taurus, the beast that was meant to bring you last week to breath. The good Baron your uncle has her nurse & midwife standing by; your mother frets to be discharged of nine months’ freight; I am a-fidget to be off for Washington & Bloodsworth Island, where I have business. Yet you sleep on thro the signs: another week & you’ll be Gemini! Are you storing strength for some great work? Are you tranced like the Seven Sleepers? Or does it merely suit you to linger there, in that sweetest cave of all?

  Your father, too, has been gestating, with Andrée’s help, here in the womb of the Castines, whence issue forth all Cookes & Burlingames, and I feel myself upon the tardy verge of 2nd birth. Like you, I have flail’d blindly in my sleep, pummel’d a parent I had better pitied, if not loved. As late as these latest weeks, from a kind of dreamish habitude, I have scuttled up & down the shores o
f Ontario, Huron, Erie; John Astor’s voyageurs & trappers are now organized into a line of quick communication for General Brock in the coming war; the routes are ready for smuggling materiel from New England merchants to our government in York & Montreal. My doing, tho the doer feels, ever more strongly, that the man he is about to become must undo the man he’s been: that I myself, not my father, am the parent I must refute.

  My last three letters have traced the history of your forebears down to Andrée & myself, and have shown (what your mother first discover’d to me) how each has honor’d his grandsire as a fail’d visionary, whilst dishonoring his sire as a successful hypocrite. Each Cooke the spiritual heir of the Cooke before; every Burlingame a Burlingame! Not even your mother quite escaped this dismal pattern, tho by discerning it thus early in her maturity, she finds herself with less history than I to be rewrit. But I, I am steept & marinated in the family error, to the confession whereof we now are come. In this letter—surely my last to an addressee unborn!—I must rehearse my own career, complete the tale of what Andrée has taught me, & set forth our changed resolves with respect to the coming war, together with our hopes for you.

  Bear in mind, little Burlingame—what I have ever to remind myself—that Aaron Burr in Paris may not be Henry Burlingame IV! If (as Mother at her best believed, despite those late cruel letters) Father died in 1783, or ’84, or ’85—if, for example, he was the man hang’d by Washington as Major John André—then of what a catalogue of crimes against us he stands acquit! Every one of his earlier friends who thot they recognized him thereafter—Benedict Arnold, Joel Barlow, Joseph Brant, Aaron Burr, Baron Castine—acknowledged that he was much changed, and their descriptions of him differ’d greatly. Who knows better than I that letters can be forged, knowledge pretended, manners aped? And so when I received that note from him on Bastille Day 1790, written in the Bell Tavern in Massachusetts and handed me in Paris by an attendant of Mme de Staël; when I read it, wept, curst, tore it to shreds, burnt the shreds, & pisst upon the ashes—even then, at 14, I allow’d that it was not of necessity my father I pisst upon, but perhaps a heartless & unaccountable impostor, perhaps a series of such impostors.

  In either case, I thereby spurn’d the declaration in that letter: that my father’s great aim & life’s activity had been 1st to prevent, and later to subvert, the American Revolution. It was Arnold had 1st put the contrary bee in my bonnet, in London in 1787, which now commenced a buzzing: that my father from the start had been a sly & wondrously effective agent of George Washington! Father’s advice to Burr & Arnold, when they were joining the Continentals at Cambridge, had invariably been sound advice. He had permitted Arnold to raise the St. Leger siege against Fort Stanwix. Arnold himself, moreover, was persuaded that Father had gull’d him into betraying West Point to Major André in order to betray the betrayal, all at Washington’s directive, to the end of uniting the “states” behind him & discrediting the Loyalists. Whether or not Father was the author of the Nicola or the Newburgh letters, their effect was altogether in Washington’s favor; Arnold believed they had been authorized by the General himself, to provide occasion for his famous replies. On the other hand, Arnold thot it very likely that Washington or his aides had arranged to have Father quietly done away with at the same time as Major André, to prevent the great duplicity’s becoming known.

  Thro this new lens, so to speak, I now perceived in a different light my father’s other alleged efforts in the cause of the Loyalists & the Indians. His activities in Maryland with the Marshyhope Blues against Joseph Whaland, supposedly to keep the Picaroon inform’d in advance of the attempts to capture him, had led in fact to Whaland’s only arrest. Most painful of all to acknowledge, the Mohawk massacres led by “Joseph Brant” in Pennsylvania had led to such ruinous retaliation that the proud Six Nations were in effect no more: a decimated rabble of drunken vagrants along the Grand River. Had Father’s plan from the start been to exterminate the Iroquois, he could scarcely have devised a better means!

  All this I saw, & pisst & pisst. Mme de Staël’s attendant, a boy my age who had stood courteously & curiously by, inquired whether I had any further reply to his mistress, who hoped I would wait upon her that afternoon, as upon a friend of both my father & Mr. Barlow. I bid him good day; but Barlow said I ought to go, and I would not disoblige one who had been so kind to Mother & to me. He was full of praise, was Barlow, for the young baronne, who he said had taken an interest in my situation. He hoped I might see much of her household—more particularly as his own must now change character: he was off posthaste to London to fetch Mrs. Barlow at last. It had been his design that Mother & I should return to Canada when her child was born. Now that she & it were dead, he urged me to go to my father, in Baltimore or wherever, to put an end to that painful mystery & decide with him my future course. If I would not (and I made plain that I would die first), I might always count myself welcome in his childless house. But a season in the society of Mme de Staël would improve my literary & political cultivation, he declared, and afford himself & his Ruthy a chance to reacquaint themselves after their long separation. Mrs. B. was not an ardent traveler; new cities alarm’d her, Paris especially, & the Revolution; and while not given to irrational jealousy, she was quite susceptible to the rational sort…

  Good Joel Barlow: if only his poetical talents had been capacious as his heart! For the next five years I stay’d in Paris, completing my schooling in the Lycée, in the avenues of the Terror, on the margins of Mme de Staël’s salon, and—he being, as always, good as his word—chez Barlow, once “Ruthy” had settled in.

  Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein, ten years my senior, was 24 when I first met her, that afternoon. She was no beauty, excepting her great brown eyes & her bosoms creamy as ripe Brie; but she was possest of wondrous energy, knowledgeability, & wit, and seem’d to me the embodiment of what was most appealing in the French liberal aristocracy. Her father (who had arranged the French financing of the American war) was unendingly wealthy. Her mother had been young Gibbon’s mistress and might have been his wife, had not Rousseau disapproved of Gibbon’s early literary style. At 20 Germaine had married the Swedish minister to France, Baron de Staël, & publisht anonymously her 1st novel, Sophie. By the time I met her she had brot out in addition her Lettres sur les écrits et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau & an unfortunate tragedy, Jeanne Grey. The Revolution at that point (that is, the reforms imposed upon Louis XVI by the National Assembly) was much to her liking, as it was to Barlow’s: liberal, atheistic, constitutionary, at once “enlighten’d” &—a term I heard for the 1st time that afternoon in this particular usage—romantique. She was thick with the Moderates: Talleyrand, Joucourt, Narbonne. This last (the Baron was complaisant) had become her 1st serious lover, who by year’s end would get her with her 2nd child, the 1st to live.

  She liked my father—I mean the man who had represented himself to her, to her own father, & to Barlow as Henry Burlingame IV. She call’d him, & me, américain… Indeed, she spoke of him in the same breath with the late “Monsieur Franklin,” as entrepreneurs de la révolution! “We” were, she declared, l’avant-garde du genre humain.

  My protest—restrain’d indeed, considering my feelings—that I did not regard myself as a citizen of anyplace, much pleased her: To be sure, she said, “our kind” are citizens of the world: but the new idea of political nationality, much in vogue since “our revolution,” was in her opinion the wave of the future, & not to be snift at. For my observation that, whatever his talents as diplomatist or spy, my father had been less than exemplary as a husband & parent, she took me spiritedly to task. Quite aside from such possibilities as that my father’s secret & dangerous work might truly have made a proper family life out of the question, despite his best efforts; that he himself might have been heartbroken at the deceptions & disguises he was forced to; that he might have been acting in our best interests, given for example our value as hostages to his adversaries—had I not consider’d
the possibility that he had simply outgrown his wife? Or that his enemies had forged those cruel letters of invitation & promist reunion? In any case, was I still child enough not to forgive parental negligence in one whose gifts were, of their kind, comparable to Gibbon’s or Rousseau’s?

  She urged me to go to him, in Baltimore. I bid her bonsoir. She complimented my independence & my unaccented French, and hoped I would call on her again: I was the first américain she had met both very young & civilized. If I would discuss our revolution with her—whose differences from the French she thot more significant than their celebrated similarity—she would discuss with me another sort of revolution already under way, tho scarcely yet acknowledged, in all the arts. Its inspirers were her old family friend Rousseau & his German counterparts. Its values were sentiment & sensation as against conscious intellection; it aspired to the rejection or transcension of conventional forms, including the conventional categories of art & social class; its spirit was manifest equally in the assault on the Bastille, in the musical innovations of certain pupils of Joseph Haydn, in the plays & essays of Schiller, above all in Goethe’s novel-in-letters, The Sorrows of Werther, even in the investigations of natural historians. Had I read, for example, Herr Goethe’s botanical treatise Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, just publisht? She would lend it me: if I had my father’s (& the author’s) eye for the connexions betwixt apparently disparate things, perhaps I would discover that an essay on the forms of plants can illumine the storm & stress, so to speak, betwixt certain parents & their children, or innovative artists & the conventions of their arts. I did read German?

  I fell in love with her at once, and remain’d so for the next five years, during most of which I served in her household as a sort of English-language amanuensis & library clerk. Because my politics were more radical & sanguinary than Germaine’s (I was to cheer—& witness—the King’s beheading, & many another’s), I was able to render her a signal service on 2 September 1792. The King & Queen had been arrested, the Revolutionary Tribunal establisht; Robespierre & Danton had led the insurrection of the Paris Communards, who were now inspired to slaughter all the Royalists they could lay hands on. They broke into Mme de Staël’s house and demanded of me that I deliver my mistress up to them as a prisoner & join them in the morrow’s executions. But I had known of their coming from my friends in the Hôtel de Ville, and had bid Germaine disguise herself as one of her own servants, whom I now introduced as my mistress in the tenderer sense, & who was in a delicate condition besides. Our employer, we declared, had fled that day to Switzerland.