Letters

by John Barth

  The flag was up: outgoing mail. My courage faltered at sight of those four bold letters, so less equivocal than the man they surnamed or the epistles in my briefcase. A lane of boxwoods and azaleas led to a pleasant white frame cottage, its screened porches shaded by sycamores. The lawn continued to a creek or cove, where pleasure craft rode at moorings; from a staff on the T of the laureate’s dock flew the motley banner of the state, bright as racing silks: the Baltimores’ chequered black and orange, the Calverts’ red-and-white cross botonee. I tapped the door knocker, a bright brass crab, and waited, slapping the odd mosquito. My heart misgave me. Hoping to catch him off his guard, I had not rung up ahead or written. Look here, I hoped to say to him, can we not put by all mystification? Let me tell you what I’ve been through these two dozen years at the hands of Castines, Cooks, and Burlingames, and there’s an end on’t! If you and André are not kin; if your son is not my son—let me hear you (and him) tell me so, plainly, fully, amicably, when I shall have told you (ditto) what-all has fetched me to imagine otherwise…

  A blank-faced woman opened but did not unchain the door, and through that unfriendly space regarded me. Too well dressed to be a domestic, too old (I judged) to be Cook’s daughter, yet too young to be “Henri’s” mother. A second wife, perhaps? Her nose was soft, but her chin and jaw were hard; her brow was high and fair, her eyebrows were plucked to a sharp line, her lips were thin—well, verbal portraiture is not my forte: sufficient that while in no particular uncomely, her phiz tout ensemble was remarkably empty, like that of a receptionist mildly inclined to mask her essential incordiality and profound uninterest. I identified myself, asked for Mr Cook, was told curtly he was not at home. I had historical papers concerning his family to show him, I declared, certain to be of considerable interest to him. Granted, I’d made no appointment, ought to have done… But these documents were truly remarkable. When was he expected to return? Or had he an office I might stop by, as I was in the neighbourhood?

  She had no idea when he would return, tonelessly intoned Ms Blank—I was put in mind of Ambrose’s depiction, no doubt exaggerated, of his ex. He was on a speaking tour of Pennsylvania and upstate New York, but she believed he meant to return in time for the Dorchester County tercentenary celebration in July. She waxed more particular, though no more warm, like an answering service: He had meant to take in, en route, the anniversary commemoration of the Fenian invasion of Fort Erie, Canada, from Black Rock, near Buffalo, in 1866, in which one of his ancestors had played a certain role. He was supposed too to do something at Niagara Falls, she believed, and, later in the month, at the other Chautauqua: the one in west New York spelled with a q. She didn’t know. Something about a movie, she thought.

  End of professional grip. The woman neither closed nor unchained the door, but waited for me to turn away. Adieu, sanity! I didn’t think to ask whether she was Mrs Cook; at that point an incordially neutral reply that she was Mme Castine or Mme de Staël would scarcely have surprised me. Numbly recrossing the Chesapeake, I heard reported on ABC News that the American Falls at Niagara was about to be turned off, so that engineers and geologists could examine its fast-receding face and study ways to retard its crumbling: the accumulated rockfall at its base had made the drop less spectacular than that of Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, and what with the U.S. Bicentennial but seven years off… Meanwhile, in the city of Niagara Falls itself (the American, not the Canadian, city), fire had melted the famous wax museum: George and Martha Washington, Abe Lincoln, FDR and JFK and RFK (whose likeness was to have been unveiled on the morrow, 1st anniversary of his assassination)—all had gone up like so many candles, or down into expensive puddles of wax. Nevertheless, the chamber of commerce expected tourist traffic to reach an all-time high this summer: who would not go out of his way to view such wonders as a turned-off waterfall and a melted museum?

  God bless America! And spare me.

  Ambrose did not. I drove home too dazed by all these obscure comings-together to bother rechanging into go-go garb. My lover was cross, unreasonable. Of course I might go where I pleased—to Chautaugua, to London, to Hell—but why hadn’t I notified him? He was not at all surprised that A. B. Cook might be involved in Prinz’s film, inasmuch as your Sot-Weed Factor novel involves the Cookes and Burlingames, and the film has a retrospective as well as a prospective aspect. What did surprise him was that I would be as it were unfaithful to him with “old Cook.” Never mind the accident of Cook’s not being there: I had slipped out, slipped into my Old Lady clothes, slipped across the Bay on pretext (at best a pretext to myself) of verifying those patently concocted letters, to a chap whose obvious interest to me was his possible connexion with my erstwhile lover…

  Jolly enough of that! I shot back. That day’s driving had been a shlep, not a slip, and made for good if futile cause. Those letters were not obviously false, though very possibly tampered with. Those Old Lady clothes were a welcome respite for this old lady, in whose neck moreover that A. B. Cook had been almost as considerable a pain as present company. And even if I had pursued him for his connexion with the grandest pain in the arse of all, my erstwhile lover, lifetime tormentor, and father of my lost child—even if I’d bedded the bloke in hopes of solving that nasty little riddle—well and bloody good, and he Ambrose ought to bloody aid and pity me instead of bloody banging a weary old lady on the head with his bloody mad jealousies and petty despotisms, et farking cetera!

  In short, a little lovers’ quarrel. It did not last long. I was weary; am; and Ambrose knows how to play me. Under my fatigue I liked it that he was jealous; knew he knew I liked it; even liked knowing he knew, etc. God and my sisters forgive me!

  He made me doff the O.L. oufit instanter; tupped me a good one. As I lay propped after for the sake of his low-motiles, he announced more agreeably that whilst I’d been taking French leave that morning, he’d solved with his diagrams a tricky problem in the plan of his Perseus story, and authorised me to pass the info on to you if I was still writing these weekly one-way letters. I begged him fill that blank another time; I was too weary. And speaking of blanks, I mentioned my blank informant at Chautaugua. Ambrose was not interested.

  I asked him whether he thought André Castine of Castines Hundred and Andrew Burlingame Cook of Chautaugua could possibly be the same man. He crisply replied, to my surprise, that he thought the question as academic, under the circumstances, as that of the authenticity of those 1812 letters: the skill and subtlety of those circumambient impostures over so many generations, the welter of obscure purposes and cross-purposes, made a kind of radical positivism the only possible approach to, or bridge over, the vertiginous quicksand of history, including my own past. Much moved, I sprang to hug him. He gruffly bade me look to my insemination; gave me liberty to explore the matter as I would whilst we were in Ontario and west New York, up to the point of physical infidelity: should there be even the slightest possibility of my impregnation’s being attributable to another, we were kaput; if on the other hand I managed despite all to conceive, and indisputably by himself… then he hoped we might marry.

  Ontario? West New York? Marry? Flabbergastment! Arrant presumption!

  A. shrugged: did I think he’d permit me to go uninseminated for the week and more he’d be there? The very middle of my month? They would be shooting background footage at Forts Erie and Niagara, at the Falls, perhaps at the old Chautauqua Institution and at Lily Dale, a spiritualist centre in the area. Prinz’s intentions were as usual unclear. There had even been mention of a rôle for me, following upon a remark I’d made about Mme de Staël’s pleading on the one hand with Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin to forestall the 1812 War on behalf of Britain’s struggle against Napoleon, and on the other her subsequent intriguing with the emperor during the 100 Days. A. B. Cook might play his own ancestor Ebenezer Cooke, the virgin poet, and/or his other ancestor the antivirgin Henry Burlingame III. And there was to be an intensification of the rivalry between himself and Prinz for the favour of
Bea Golden, whom they had more or less persuaded to play the rôle of herself playing the role of several younger women in your fiction. Prinz had warned him to be on his guard; he now passed the same warning on to me. We would return in time for the Marshyhope commencement exercises, which Prinz also wants to film for use in the campus sequences—whether the dreary little teachers college in End of the Road or the universal university of Giles Goat-Boy, Ambrose couldn’t say: both, neither. I was not, absolutely, to take along my Old Lady clothes: he would pack my bag himself.

  Would he, now!

  We go tomorrow (I packed my own bag): by car back across the Bay Bridge to Washington National Airport, thence by plane to Buffalo and by rented car to Niagara Falls. It will be no honeymoon. I am properly intrigued by the reflection that as we fly along the axis of the War of 1812, from Chesapeake Bay to the Niagara Frontier, you may well be doing likewise, en route home from D.C.; that we might—improbably en route, but not so improbably during the business ahead—meet. Or do you take as little notice of the film-in-progress as of these letters?

  I do not even mention my emotions at the prospect of revisiting the little town of Fort Erie, Ontario, where not so very long ago—though it seems a world away already!—this aging uterus having Done Its Thing yet again with the high-motile, unerring sperm of André, André, I underwent a different sort of D.C…

  André. Who, mon Dieu, may be there too, somewhere about! Then why do we not rendezvous, you three (or four) gentlemen and the lady whose tormenting is your common pleasure? At the “farm” of that nameless Doctor, say, for Prinz’s cameras, let us do a scene, not from your writings, but from de Sade’s: you, Ambrose, André, A. B. Cook—strip me of my ridiculous mini, bind me fast, and take turns with literal whip and brands instead of figurative!

  Enough. My office work is done; I must back to 24 L lest my master’s jealous ire be reprovoked. By now you are, I presume, an official doctor of letters, as Ambrose will be a fortnight hence. Look to your patient, sir; ’ware malpractice; if you will not presume to save her, leave her at least no worse than you found her: as played out, worked over, tricked up, but withal still fecund as (let us pray)

  Your patient

  G.

  I: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage continues. Filmmaking at Niagara Falls and Old Fort Erie. Dismaying encounters at the Remobilization Farm.

  Erie Motel

  Old Fort Erie

  Ontario, Canada

  14 June 1969

  Dear J.?

  It’s eerie, right enough: this foul and ghostly lake that must once have been so fair, but now regurgitates dead smelts and ripe green eutrophy; bleak, blasted Buffalo across the way, coughing up steel and cars and breakfast cereals in clouds of smog; flat frozen Canada, just now blanketed in flowers—how all countries except yours glory in flowers!—but ever mindful, in its dour domestic architecture and glacier-scraped terrain, of the cold that never leaves this dominion, but only withdraws a bit, and briefly, to its northern reaches.

  Eerier yet your absence—as well say nonexistence!—and my presence here amid the caricatures of your characters. I have not read all your works, sir; I begin now to think I shan’t, lest I find myself cast up for keeps upon this charmless shore with the other flotsam; doomed like the skeletal constellations to a reiterative danse macabre, a spooky rerun—ever less intelligible—of the story of my life. Somewhere over there you plug away at your trade, stringing letters into words, words into sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters. Between us the international boundary surges past to flush itself over Niagara Falls, called by Canadians the toilet bowl of America.

  Where are you? Where am I? What am I doing here in the Erie Motel, Ontario, Canada? I’ll tell you what.

  On Sunday last, the 8th (when in 1797 my luckier namesake bore her 4th child, Edwige-Gustavine-Albertine de Staël, her daughter by Benjamin Constant), mio maestro and I flew up to Buffalo. I proposed he call you from the airport. Ambrose wasn’t interested; said you and he were not “that sort of friends.” Out of curiosity I checked the directory: no listing. The university was of course closed—with relief, I’m sure, after this dreadful year of tear gas, “trashings,” truncheons. We hired a car, drove up the parkway to Niagara Falls, N.Y. (I was mildly interested in reconnoitering your campus; Ambrose wasn’t; we didn’t), and registered in a nameless, featureless motel. The clerk smirked. In my costume—I cannot think of these skimpy outfits as clothes—I felt like an old Lolita; once the door was shut, the spread drawn down against crab lice, and the six o’clock news tuned in, my humbug Humbert duly humped me. No surprise: it had been three days.

  Maryland had been muggy; at the Falls it was overcast and mild. We dined at a nameless, featureless restaurant and then strolled the tacky town, the melted museum, the ubiquitous and awful souvenir shops…

  Enough of this. You know Honeymoon City better than I; even if you didn’t, I’ve no business “writing” to a writer, especially one who doesn’t write back. Job enough to report the news! Next morning (and all the mornings since), Ambrose worked on his Perseus story whilst I lay about with the Times, too embarrassed to go out alone in my costume. His unusual absorption in “Arthur Morton King’s” composition reminds me again that my current lover, like my more eminent earlier ones, is after all a Writer, as I once aspired to be. Surely the length of these letters to you has been a relapse into that aspiration—from which your silence, Doctor, bids to cure me. Whether Reg Prinz’s contemptuous casting of him into that rôle (with the uppercase W) has reenergised Ambrose’s muse, or whether on the contrary Ambrose’s rediscovery of his writerly powers has inspired Prinz to escalate his half-improvised, ad hoc hostility, I don’t venture to guess. But I report that both proceed apace.

  Over the next couple days the “Baratarians” assembled: the technicians, I mean, for (except for some unrehearsed “rehearsal” sequences at the Remobilisation Farm, to be duly reported) Prinz seems not ready yet to deploy his actors on these locations. On the Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday (bright, mild, pleasant) they shot footage of the Falls, as if the film were to be a remake of Niagara minus Joseph Cotten, Marilyn Monroe, and any connexion whatever with your work! Having shared blind Joyce’s interest in the cinema, and that of most of the other European writers I’ve had to do with, I do not especially share my lover’s mystification of that medium, his mythicised antithesis of Image and Word. I watched with crowds of others; sure enough, the American Falls was half shut off by a temporary dam above the rapids… But stop: you’ve no doubt been up to view it; may even have been among the throng of camera-clicking tourists who photographed with equal interest the Falls, the non-Falls, and the film crew photographing both and them.

  On the Wednesday (at first bright, then turning muggy) the Baratarians and I “did” Queenston Heights across the river, where good General Brock won the battle but lost his life in 1812; Fort George, captured, lost, and burnt by the Americans in 1813; and handsome Fort Niagara, taken at night by bayonet from the Americans that same year, by Canadians who then swooped down with the Indians to burn Buffalo. If the “2nd War of Independence” is not yet in your fiction, you’d best see to putting it there, for it is most certainly in the film!

  Ambrose played with his logarithmic spirals till noon and then joined me, as we’d planned, at the Rush-Bagot Memorial near the French Castle, on the Lake Ontario rampart of the fort. In the crowd I felt slightly less ridiculous; moreover, three days had passed (and, I learnt shortly, the episode he’d been drafting all morning was erotic): he was horny; I likewise, and only in that humour did his petty despotising arouse me. If I have given the impression in recent letters that our friend has been merely insufferable, I here correct it: insufferable indeed have been the matters I’ve complained of (and suffered him to lay upon me), but he has not even now lost his engaging, affectionately attentive side; had not in particular in the three days of our visit thus far, when his work was going well and neither Bea Golden nor Magda Giulianova
Mensch nor starlets nor coeds were on the scene. We watched the “Baratarians” at work for a while, especially fascinated by Prinz’s inarticulate communion with his technicians when cinematography alone, without actors and story, was the business at hand (he began, I now recall, as an avant-garde documentarist). But we were “turning on”; could not leave off touching each other; people were beginning to look at us. Prinz wanted us all to move before dinnertime from the mouth of the Niagara River to its head: specifically, back across to the Canadian shore and down (on the map, but upriver, most confusing) to Fort Erie, to the motel on whose stationery this is written, which he’d reserved for the next five nights. There was to be a “general story session”—filmed, of course—in the evening, after he’d inspected the locations at Old Fort Erie and the Remobilisation Farm, where most of the rest of the cast would rejoin us.

  Touching, gripping, squeezing arms and hands, we hurried back to make love in our “old” motel before packing and checking out to move to the new. I wept a bit; was given permission (I hadn’t sought it) to pick up a midlength skirt for morning wear if I wished to explore “the Cook/Castine business” whilst he was writing. Ambrose was tender; it was love we made. We have not since, may never again, though I have been inseminated daily in the three days since (it’s ovulation time), despite my being shut off and dry as the American Falls.

  Then we passed through customs and across the Rainbow Bridge to Canada again, around the Horseshoe Falls and down (up) along the flowered margin of the dominion to that less prepossessing other fort—captured, recaptured, rerecaptured, leveled by accidental explosions, rebuilt, releveled by Lake Erie storms, rebuilt, de- and re-lapidated, restored—near where I write this; across the river from where you write whatever you write as I write this.