Letters

by John Barth

  I summarise. With the greatest difficulty we got out of there—never did see the famous “printout” Bray claims to have been spoilt by Ms B.—back to Chautauqua; thence, Ambrose and I on the Friday, back Home. I do not envy Bea Golden her new admirer! Bray declares he will Put Things Right for her sake; that he will follow her to Fort Erie, to Maryland, anywhere she goes, let the goats fend for themselves; that with her aid and inspiration he may yet solve the Riddle of LILYVAC II and get the 5-Year Plan back on schedule before the “Phi-Point” of his life…

  Ambrose finds him both frightening and fascinating: the Phi-Point, did he say? Point six one eight etc.? Bea finds him merely frightening, and threatens legal action if he attempts to follow her across either Peace Bridge or Bay Bridge. She was never close to Mel Bernstein’s daughter, she tells us now, whose mother of course had the custody; she thinks it possible Merry doesn’t even recognise her with her new name, any more than she Bea recognised her; but she cannot account for the coincidence. Ambrose cannot either, and worries for the ladies’ safety.

  Castine, Castine, I assure him: there is the very god of Coincidence. Bea has but to place herself under his ubiquitous protection, as “Pocahontas” has evidently placed herself under “M. Casteene’s.”

  He will thank me, says Ambrose, not to speak of his own prior incarnation. Jee-sus, what a week! And though it included that dismaying reencounter with Marsha (Did I see what he’d meant? Those thin-plucked eyebrows; the cold eyes under them; the mean turn of her jaw; the featureless regularity of those features he’d once thought attractive, then come to find empty of character, and now saw as the very stage mask of Vindictiveness… I said nothing), not to mention the grave tidings from Magda re his mother—despite all, it had been a long while since he’d felt so potent…

  Oh really.

  Yes, well, he meant that way too, and we’d see, we’d see. But what he really meant was Musewise: the Perseus story was clipping along in first draft; he was delighted with the conceit, equally with the execution; it made him feel Writer enough to more than hold his own with Reg Prinz, whose movie he thought he now quite understood and rather relished. He took my arm (we were on the United flight down from Buffalo to Baltimore): no doubt it had been a rough week for me, on more than one front. Aye, said I. He daresaid there would be rougher weeks ahead. O joy, said I. What he meant was that his new “ascendancy,” whether real or set up by Prinz, would doubtless provoke an escalated retaliation. He told me frankly then what was pretty obvious anyroad: that while he regarded our connexion as Central, and central to it his desire not only to impregnate but to wed me straightway thereupon, he was determined by the way to make conquest of Bea Golden if he could. It was a kind of craziness, no doubt (Yup, says I), a playing of Prinz’s game. Just for that reason he meant to do it; beat the man at his own game; out-Prinz him.

  Hum, says I. You could help, you know, says he. Forget it, says I: I’m sorry your mum’s dying; I’m happy you’ve done with that Marsha Blank, and happier yet your muse is singing along. If that gives you a leg up on Prinz and his nutty movie, well and good. But I shan’t pat you on the head for making a fool of me, with Bea Golden or generally; and to suggest I pander to your billygoatery is bloody sick if you ask me.

  He liked that: put a great load in me directly we got back to 24 L, another this morning early before he took off for the hospital. But last night it was Bea, Bea, Bea. The Original Floating Theatre II is in Cambridge for the weekend; B.G. was to have flown down yesterday to open in their revival of The Parachute Girl, but stayed behind to do her “Minstrel Show” at the Remobilisation Farm. She’ll arrive today, worse luck, if Mr Bray hasn’t flown away with her; the rest of the Baratarians too, to recommence the movie after Marshyhope’s commencement. Big things are planned for the 4th of July, but Ambrose hopes to Make His Next Move even before then.

  Andrea King Mensch is indeed terminal. Ambrose is taking it hard. La Giulianova is Right There, of course and thank God, ministering to her and being very real and strong and Mediterranean about last things. I must hope—and a slender hope it is—that the Litt.D. business this afternoon will put my friend in mind of our old connexion, in better days, on the Ad Hoc Committee for Honorary Doctoral Nominations.

  Time now to robe for the ritual consummation of that committee’s work, which I approach with considerable misgivings—indeed, in a flat-out funk that I’ve tried in vain to smother under these many pages. I haven’t even mentioned that John Schott and Shirley Stickles, when I stopped at my office yesterday, were thick as thieves in hers, and saluted me stiffly indeed, very stiffly.

  Hm!

  Must run. Jee-sus!

  G.

  T: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Marshyhope commencement debacle, and its consequences.

  Office of the Provost

  Faculty of Letters

  Marshyhope State University

  Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

  Saturday, 28 June 1969

  John:

  Total disgrace!

  I’m in this office for the last time, Where it All Began with that wretch of an Ambrose, that beast of an Ambrose. Cleaning out the desk he once laid me on. Packing up my personals.

  I have been fired, John. Sacked! Cashiered! Not only as acting provost, but from the Faculty of Letters altogether! I am unemployed; when my visa expires I shall have to leave or be deported! John Schott has appointed Harry Carter as provost. Marshyhope’s Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English next September will be A. B. Cook VI—whose punitive doing, for all I know, this may well be.

  Fired!

  The commencement ceremonies? A debacle. Drew Mack’s “pink-necks” rioted after all: the last American campus demonstration of the season. They caught “us” completely off “our” guard, lulled by their earlier shows of reasonable apathy. A well-planned caper, assisted surprisingly by Merope Bernstein and her crew, who came all the way down from Fort Erie to spray stolen Vietnam defoliants on the elms and ivy of Redmans Neck.

  Ambrose was in on it. Seems to have been, anyroad; we don’t talk much. His (unscheduled, unexpected, out-of-order) “acceptance statement” upon receipt of his honorary doctorate appears to have been the demonstrators’ cue. Whilst Prinz’s cameras rolled, and—as provost of his faculty—I cited his “provocative contributions to the life and health of the classical avant-garde tradition in 20th-century letters,” Ambrose appropriated the microphone and launched into a distracted discourse on the mythical-etymological connexions of the alphabet with the calendar and of writing with trees: how “the original twelve consonants” each represented a lunar month, the five vowels the equinoxes and solstices (A and I representing the winter solstice in its aspects of birth and death respectively); how therefore the Moon is the mother of Letters (the man’s mother’s dying is his only excuse); how spelling is related to magic, as in spellbound, and author to augur, and pencil to penis; how book > M.E. boke > O.E. bok meaning “beech tree,” and codex > L. caudex meaning “tree-trunk,” and a leaf is a leaf in both cases…

  “Right on!” cried Merry B. and her Remobilisers, and let go with their herbicides, the others with their raised fists and Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh’s, before the state police could nab them.

  On what grounds does G. get sacked for A.‘s misconduct? (Ambrose was arrested too, but no charges placed; his part-time connexion with MSU is of course terminated; the board of regents will doubtless revoke his degree at their next meeting.) Schott needed no grounds: I was nontenured; my contract was renewable year by year. Even so, there are protocols of due notice; the American Association of University Professors has its rules and guidelines, I don’t have to tell you. Was I inclined to invoke them, Schott wanted to know on the Sunday, when he got ’round to ringing me up? I jolly was! Why then, says he, our grounds will be either Moral Turpitude or Academic Incompetence Stemming from Mental Instability, depending. Depending on bloody what? Why, depending just for one example on whether my behaviour as confessed in my letter to yo
u of 7 June, of which they had the carbon, was real or fantasized: e.g., my Living in Sin with Ambrose (Schott actually used that term), my use of illegal drugs, my generally immoral and profligate course of life. If I did not repudiate my letter, Moral Turpitude; if I did, Mental Instability, which my sudden change of manner and costume frankly inclined him to favour. Even the fact that I would type out such a document in my office, to a man I did not know personally, and make a carbon, argued the latter. To be sure, the 18-page document was unsigned; but there were emendations in my hand. No one could deny me my day in court, if I was determined to Hang It All Out; but…

  I hung it all up. God damn writing! This bloody farking scribbler’s itch that you (most recently) seduced me into scratching! (Write > M.E. writen > O.E. writan: to tear or scratch. Ditto scribe, and pace Ambrose.) Yes, yes, yes: that one time—when, like this, I was in the office, and for a change not longhanding it—I made a carbon, such a relief it was to feel businesslike when Ambrose had begun to make a public arse of me with such a vengeance. It gave my weekly confession at once a more official and (what have I to lose now?) a more fictitious aspect: as if I were a writer writing first-person fiction, an epistolary novelist composing—and editing, alas, in holograph—instead of a stateless 50-year-old widow, failed mother, failed writer, and scholar of no consequence, tyrannised and humiliated by a younger “lover” as she enters her menopause with little to look back upon except abortive liaisons with a number of prominent novelists, and nothing to look forward to.

  And of course it took me no time at all to feel a greater fool yet for making that carbon, for editing it, for writing to you in the first place; and I “destroyed” the copy (i.e., wadded and wastecanned it) but posted the letter; and Shirley Stickles got to the wastecan before the custodian did, unless that worthy was in on the plot too; and it was too late to undo the award to Ambrose, they’d just have to hope, but once they were safely past 21 June they’d cut off the pair of us, using my letter as their trump card…

  Et voilà!

  Well: I am at the end of my forties, and the rest. I have been carrying on like a madwoman, and madly confessing it by the ream. The crowning irony now occurs to me: that perhaps you too believe, at least suspect, that I’m making all this up! Fantasizing! Writing fiction!

  Jee-bloody-farking-sus!

  Alors: if I am truly turpitudinous, and not hallucinating my tender connexion with Doctor Mensch, then I am now altogether reliant upon that spectacularly unreliable fellow. My “hope” this time last week was that Marshyhope’s commencement might remind him fondly of ours. Ha! Now my only hope is that I’m pregnant, and that conceiving a bastard by that bastard will restore him to me and to his senses. Some hope, whilst he climbs all over Bea Golden (but not yet into her knickers, not yet, not yet) as the Baratarians reenact on Bloodsworth Island Admiral Cockburn’s Rape of Hampton, Virginia, in 1813!

  Total, total disgrace, such as my namesake never knew. This dispossessed augur can scratch her poor encausticked penis across these miserable beech leaves no further. Where is the peace Mann promised his ruined

  G?

  O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage concludes; the Fifth begins. Magda’s confession. The Gadfly fiasco reenacted: an Unfilmable Sequence.

  24 L Street

  Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

  5 July ’69

  J.,

  Oh, yes: still here. And still scratching.

  You recall last Saturday’s last hope? No sooner hoped than hopeless. True, when the Mother of Alphabets rose full on the Sunday (the “Hot Moon,” and it has indeed been sweltering hereabouts), I failed to flow with my recent celestial regularity, and for some moments dared imagine—But it was a cruel false hope: next day, her name day, the last of the sorry month, I began, if not to flow, at least erratically to leak, and have dripped and dribbled this week through in pre-Ambrosian style.

  As befits what looks to be the commencement of my post-Ambrosian life. Having been the efficient cause of my dismissal from Academe, the man has, as of Monday last, dismissed me, and as of yesterday abandoned me. Whilst I write this in air-conditioned solitude at 24 L, he is alone at “Barataria” with his new mistress, Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, of whom he made triumphant conquest last night by the rockets’ red glare.

  Do I seem calm? I am, rather: that bitter hopeless peace old Thomas promised. Everyone is being frightfully understanding: good Magda Giulianova Mensch, of whom more to come; Todd Andrews; Jane Mack; even Drew Mack, who regrets by telephone that his disruption of the MSU commencement cost me my job (an example of bourgeois capitalist academic capriciousness, says Drew). My old friend “Juliette Récamier” has written sympathetically from her current post at Nanterre (don’t ask me how she heard so fast), where “for such an outrage [as my cashiering] we would burn down the university.” Oh, yes, and “Monsieur Casteene” also deplores (from Castines Hundred) John Schott’s move, of which he disclaims foreknowledge; nor had he imagined, when as A. B. Cook he accepted Schott’s invitation to visit Marshyhope for the fall semester (a detail he neglected to mention in our Remarkable Conversation) that he would be replacing me. He’d hoped, as my temporary colleague, to change my mind yet about publishing his ancestor’s letters: a service to himself, to historiography, and to the 2nd Revolution which he now prayed my altered circumstances might reincline me to, but which he would not solicit from me against my wishes. He is making “other arrangements” for their publication. If things should go ill between me and my current friend, God forbid, and I needed a change of scene, I was of course welcome at any time, and for any time, to Castines Hundred.

  I thanked him politely for the invitation, but told him that things between my current friend and me were just dandy.

  I have not mentioned that, even as he left me for Bea Golden (more precisely, upon Monday’s evidence that his low-motile swimmers had failed again with me, but before his Independence Day triumph over Reg Prinz), Ambrose informed me that our affair is not ended; only its 4th Stage, corresponding—somehow—to his failed marriage. As I was not pregnant, the 5th Stage would now commence—it was how he felt—and he hoped it would be of short duration, for he could not imagine my enjoying it any more than #4. I was a fool, he added (not for the first time since Commencement Day), to have persisted in this one-way correspondence with you, and especially to have made a carbon of such compromising stuff: but in my circumstances it was an understandable and forgivable folly. He was very sorry that it and he had cost me my job; contemptuous as he was of John Schott’s vulgar ambitions and pretentions, he was not finally so of mass public colleges like Marshyhope, as long as one did not mistake their activity for first-class education. He knew I’d done excellent things for the few really able students who had come my way, and at least no harm to the commonalty. Even he is sympathetic!

  He could scarcely say what had possessed him at the exercises: he’d had an equivocal hint from Prinz, who had it from Drew Mack, that the radicals might be Up To Something after all; we both had heard from Bea with some amusement that Merope Bernstein had mobilised herself and disappeared in a hurry from the Farm when her ex-stepmother, after a sympathetic reunion, had cautioned her that Jerome Bray might well materialise in Fort Erie. But there wasn’t “really” any prearrangement: it had merely occurred to Ambrose that some sort of neo-Dadaist, bourgeois-baiting stunt would suit the movie, and he was distraught about his mother’s dying, and for that matter he was professionally preoccupied with the roots of writing, its mythical connexions with Thoth and Hermes, ibis and crane, moon and phallus and lyre strings… He too had been disrupted!

  Oh, yes, and by the way: he still loved me, he declared; still hoped to impregnate and to marry me. To that end we ought still to Have Sex from time to time, once my bleeding stopped, what? Not to worry about the rent and the groceries; we’d manage. But I might be seeing a bit less of him in the days ahead, when he suspected that Andrea’s condition, his authorial concerns,
and his activities in Prinz’s film might all approach critical levels.

  Have I mentioned that, unaccountably, I Still Love Him too? Elsewise I’d clear straight out of this incubator of mildew and mosquitoes and get me to the clear cold air of Switzerland, or the at-least-civilised perversions of my “Juliette” in Nanterre. I could truly almost wish I were lesbian! When Magda came ’round this morning—ostensibly to ask whether I wanted to go with her to visit Mother Mensch in hospital, but actually to comfort me for Ambrose’s infidelity—when to the surprise of both of us we found ourselves embracing and enjoying a good womanly weep together—I was so moved by her direct understanding and sympathy, so relieved to be close to another woman for a change, I could almost have Gone Right On. She too, I half think, and altogether guiltlessly. There was a rapport there… But we didn’t, and I’m not, and what would please me even better would be to be sexless altogether, as shall doubtless come to pass soon enough. In the meanwhile, and mean it is, I love and crave (and miss) that unconscionable sonofabitch Ambrose; that—that scratcher of my itch; that writer.

  And I have got clear ahead of my story. No question but moviemakers have the world in their pocket in our century, as we like to imagine the 19th-century novelists did in theirs. Let Ambrose ask the skipper of the Original Floating Theatre II to delay his leaving Cambridge for half an hour so that he can make a few notes thereupon for a novel in progress: the chap wouldn’t have considered it. But let a perfectly unknown Reg Prinz show up with camera crew and the vaguest intentions in the world… the world stops, reenacts itself for take after take, does anything it can imagine its Director might wish of it!

  The showboat was docked at Long Wharf on the weekend of the Marshyhope fiasco: we were to have gone to see Bea do her Mary-Pickford-of-the-Chesapeake on the Saturday evening—and Ambrose actually went, straight out of the pokey, as did Prinz & Co., but yours truly was too ill with consternation for further vaudeville. The O.F.T. II was to have sailed on the Monday, but lingered till the Wednesday, cast and all, so that Prinz could get footage for possible use, and agreed to an unscheduled return to Cambridge on 4 July so that he could combine shots of the locally famous fireworks display with—here we go—a “sort of remake” of the Gadfly excitement of just a fortnight past! History really is that bird you mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament!