Letters

by John Barth

  En attendant, as I despaired here in Dorset Heights, and wondered where on earth a sacked acting provost might go from Marshyhope, the cinematographic action shifted down-county to “Barataria,” where it and Ambrose and Bea got on quite well without me. I wonder who does Prinz’s cost accounting? That set, elaborate for him, was built months ago and has scarcely been used; as of the end of Giles Goat-Boy (I’m done), there is no mention of the 1812 War in your works. But on 23 June 1813, a British naval force attempted to dislodge Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians from their stronghold on Grand Terre Island, near New Orleans, and on the following day Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake fleet sacked Hampton, Virginia, raping a number of American ladies in the process. It was decided to combine “echoes” of both events in an obscure bravura scene shot on their approximate sesquicentennial down at the Bloodsworth Island set. Don’t ask me why they didn’t throw in Napoleon’s abdication on the 22nd (which coincided nicely with my cashiering and Jerome Bonaparte Bray’s abandoning the goat farm and pursuing Bea to Maryland on the Sunday), or Custer’s Last Stand against Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn on the 25th.

  Don’t ask me either what exactly went on down there. I was—perhaps you noticed?—still too distressed in last Saturday’s letter to be either a good listener to, or a good reporter of, the news. Ambrose passed through on the Thursday and the Friday en route to spend time with his mother and his daughter; we slept together (this was just before the Hot Moon rose and my last hopes sank); I gather from his perfunctory accounts that Bea was as frightened of Mr Bray as he and Prinz were intrigued by him, and that the chap had fastened himself upon the company like a solicitous mosquito. Merry Bernstein (before she jumped the bail Drew Mack put up for her and fled underground upon Bray’s appearance in Cambridge) had confided to Bea that Bray’s assault on her, in her flat at Chautauqua back in May, had been of a bizarre anal character and literally venomous: she believed he had sodomized her with some exotic C.I.A. poison on his member, out of spite for her leaving him; she warned her ex-stepmother that the man was scarcely human. At this point Bea was still as much amused as alarmed by Cook’s protestations; she confided to Ambrose (a mark of their increased chumminess) that the story had reminded her of Merope’s father, whose penchant for anal copulation had been a factor in their divorce. She’d learned, she said, to keep a tight arse in such company. Ambrose himself was still fascinated by the correspondence of some of Bray’s obsessions—1st and 2nd Cycles, Midpoints and Phi-points, Fibonacci numbers, Proppian formulae—with his own preoccupations, of which they seemed to him a mad and useful limiting case. Bray’s rôle as a new rival for Bea’s favours did not much concern him: it seemed to frighten her closer, and Bray himself appeared to regard him as an ally against Reg Prinz—who, we must remember, was at this time still Bea’s lover.

  Well: at some point in the shooting, Mr Bray—an amateur Stanislavski-Method actor, it would seem, as well as something of an amateur historian—carried over into the Rape-of-Hampton sequence his piratical characterisation from the Assault on Barataria (sound effects courtesy of the U.S. Navy), in which he’d taken the rôle of one John Blanque, a Creole friend of Jean Lafitte’s in the Louisiana legislature who later joined the buccaneering crew. Now it happens that Admiral Cockburn blamed the rape of the Virginia women, not on his English sailors, but on a gang of unruly French chasseurs britanniques whom he had impressed from the Halifax prison-ships into his Chesapeake service, and as the two events were being as it were montaged… Our Beatrice finds herself not only leapt upon, per program, by two extras and stripped fetchingly of her hoopskirts and petticoats to the accompaniment of “Gallic” grunts and leers, but “rescued” suddenly by Monsieur Blanque, who with surprising strength flings other Baratarians off her (one has a swelling the size of a goose egg on his thigh) and very nearly accomplishes Penetration before his victim—who must have felt herself back in her blue-movie period—can unman him with a parasol to the groin.

  Yup, parasol. It was late June, Prinz had reasoned; they’d’ve had parasols. And never mind verisimilitude, he liked the fetishistic look of naked ladies with open parasols, and had instructed the girls to hold tight to their accessories whilst being stripped. Our pirate now clutches his family jewels and begs Bea’s pardon: he was overcome with love; it was that season of year. Ambrose not quite to the rescue this time, but nearby enough to get his comforting arms about the victim, I daresay—who is inclined to bring assault charges against Bray until Prinz dissuades her. Indeed, the familiarity of the tableau—Bea in extremis, the Author to the rescue (sort of), Bray apologising—has given the Director an Idea: inasmuch as the movie reenacts and re-creates events and images from “the books,” which do likewise from life and history and even among themselves, why should it not also reenact and echo its own events and images?

  Ambrose is enchanted, Bray is willing, Bea is appalled, Prinz is boss. The 4th of July re-creation of the Gadfly party is devised. But it mustn’t be a strictly programmed reenactment: we are on the Choptank now, aboard the O.F.T. II, with a different backup cast. Time has moved on: it will be Independence Day; never mind the War of 1812. Let each principal, independently, imagine variations on the original Gadfly sequence.

  How is it, I wonder, Prinz gets so much said when I’m not there to hear him? In any case, my own variation, proposed at once, was that this time around I stay home in bed. Ambrose’s idea—which, along with my menstruation and the completing of his Perseus-Medusa story in first draft, kept him from me most of the week since my last letter—was to reply to Prinz’s triumphantly Unwritable Scene (on the beach of Ocean City back on 12 May) with a victoriously Unfilmable Sequence.

  He was in a high state of excitement; didn’t even remark upon the fact, if he noticed it, that since the full moon I’d ceased to wear my teenybopper costumes, too depressed to give a damn what he thought. Did I not agree, he demanded to know, that we were amid a truly extraordinary coming together of omens, echoes, prefigurations? Item: On the Tuesday noon, 1 July, the midpoint of the year, he was in midst of a fiction about the classical midpoint of man’s life, and felt himself personally altogether nel mezzo del cammin etc. Item: Our sacking from Marshyhope U. had occurred (so said his desk calendar) on the anniversary of the end of Napoleon’s 100 Days. Item: Wednesday the 2nd, when Prinz began preparing his reenactment of the Gadfly’s grounding and Ambrose all but wound up his tale of Perseus and Medusa, was the date on which in 1816 the French frigate Méduse ran aground off the Cape Verde Islands and put out the raft that inspired Géricault’s famous painting; the frigate itself had just the year before—and at just this same time of year—been involved in Napoleon’s postabdication scheme to run the British blockade at Rochefort and escape to America. And—get this, now—he had just that day (i.e., midday Thursday, 3 July) been informed by Todd Andrews, whom he’d happened to meet in the Cambridge Hospital and with whom he’d had a chat about the strange Mr Bray, that that gentleman had once represented himself to the Tidewater Foundation as the Emperor Bonaparte, and had even mentioned, in one of his mad money-begging letters, his abdication, his flight to Rochefort, the plan to run him through the British blockade, his final decision to surrender and plead for passport to America: where (Bray is alleged to have alleged) he lives in hiding to this day, making ready his return from his 2nd Exile!

  But we are not done. Item: Among the American friends of the emperor’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte was the King family of “Beverly,” in nearby Somerset County; and among the several plans to rescue Napoleon from St Helena, one of the more serious was that of Mayor Girod of New Orleans, who built a fast ship in Charleston to run the emperor across the Atlantic and into the trackless Maryland marshes, where he would hide in a secret room in the Beverly estate until the coast was clear enough for him to remove to New Orleans. Only the news of Bonaparte’s death in 1821 kept the Séraphine from sailing. And who are these Kings of Somerset if not the ancestors of Ambrose’s mother Andrea King, from whom he had both this
story as a child and his adult nom de plume?

  Pooh, said I, that’s a game anyone can play who knows a tad of history: the game of Portentous Coincidences, or Arresting But Meaningless Patterns. And I volunteered a couple of items of my own, gratis: That the British man-of-war that accepted Napoleon’s surrender and fetched him from Rochefort to England was named after Perseus’s cousin Bellerophon; that the officer who then transported him to exile in St Helena instead of to America was the same Admiral Cockburn who had raped Hampton, burnt Washington, and bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore in previous summers; that my late husband’s ancestor William Pitt, Earl Amherst (a nephew of Lord Jeffrey), stopped at St Helena to converse with Napoleon in 1816, after the wreck of his ship Alceste in Korean waters; that my other famous forebears Mme de Staël and Lord Byron first met at just about this time, and among their connexions was surely their strong shared interest in the exiled emperor (Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte dates from 1815; the “Ode to St Helena” in Canto III of Childe Harold from 1816). And one of B.‘s cousins, Captain Sir Peter Parker of H.M.S. Menelaus, was killed in a diversionary action on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during Cockburn’s assault on Washington and Baltimore, the news whereof inspired Byron to add to his Hebrew Melodies an ode “On the Death of Sir Peter Parker.” And the ship which carried Napoleon III to his American exile in 1837 was named for Perseus’s wife, Andromède; and it was the same Louis Napoleon’s grotesque replay of his uncle’s career that prompted Marx’s essay On the 18th Brumaire etc., in which he made his celebrated, usually misquoted observation of History’s farcical recyclings. And none of this, in my opinion, meant anything more than that the world is richer in associations than in meanings, and that it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two.

  “Thou’rt a very prig and pedant,” said my lover, not unkindly, and kissed my forehead, and repeated his hope that our connexion would survive the hard weather he foresaw, our 5th Stage.

  Two things worthy of note occurred that same day, Thursday the 3rd, both reported to me by Magda when she called on me in the evening (Ambrose was Out). One was that the general migration of Strange Birds down the flyway from the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake had fetched to Dorchester County not only Bea Golden and Jerome Bray but, that very afternoon, the former Mrs Ambrose Mensch, née Marsha Blank, a.k.a. Pocahontas of the Remobilisation Farm: she had telephoned that morning from across the Bay (Chautaugua, surely) to announce that she was en route to Bloodsworth Island on business for her “employer” and, as she would be passing through town, wished to take her daughter to dinner. Magda was distressed: the woman’s infrequent, imperious visits never failed to disturb poor Angela’s fragile tranquillity, the more precarious lately anyroad on account of her grandmother’s condition. Ambrose too was always distracted by fury for days after, she said, even when things were serene on other fronts: given Andrea’s dying, the Marshyhope incident, the new crisis at Mensch Masonry, and what she gathered was the less than blissful state of affairs at 24 L, she feared for him as well as for Angela when he should learn of Marsha’s presence on the scene.

  New crisis?

  About the foundation work for the Marshyhope Tower, which was already showing such unexpected, impermissible signs of settling that there was real doubt whether construction could continue. Bankruptcy loomed, larger than usual. Peter was at a loss to account for the phenomenon: it appeared that the analyses of his test borings had actually been falsified to give optimistic results, on the basis of which he had made the winning low bid! He had already, at his own cost, exceeded the specifications of his contract when actual excavation had revealed a ground situation at variance with his predictions; someone had bribed the building inspectors not to disclose the truth earlier; to correct the problem now, with the superstructure so far along, he had not the resources.

  What was more—and this alarmed l’Abruzzesa more than any threat of poverty or the disagreeable reappearance of Marsha Blank—Peter himself was not well. He had lately had difficulty walking; had developed a positive limp in his left leg, which he’d been as loath to acknowledge to her as he’d been to acknowledge that it was his own late father who, almost certainly, had falsified those core samples from Redmans Neck. But their family doctor had confided to her privately that X rays had been made and Tests taken; that, though Peter had sworn him to silence, he felt it a disservice to his patient and to her not to tell her that her husband had cancer of the bone in his lower left leg. Inasmuch as Peter would not consent, whilst his mother lay dying, to the prompt surgery his own condition called for, the doctor had to hope that his elder and terminal patient would get on with it before his younger became terminal too.

  Well! Having been down that horrid road with my Jeffrey, I was able genuinely to sympathise, if not to help. We had our Good Cry. The ice broken and Magda so obviously harbouring me no ill will, I acknowledged that things were indeed less than blissful between Ambrose and me. Further, I candidly apprised her of the Pattern business: how, starting from that play upon the opening letters of the New England Primer in his first love letter to me, Ambrose had come to fancy a rough correspondence between the “stages” of our affair and the sequence of his major prior connexions with women. How this correspondence had so got hold of his imagination that he could no longer say, concerning the subsequent course of our love, what was cause and what effect.

  Magda was sharply interested; I reviewed for her the four “stages” thus far, as I understood them, (a) The period of our first acquaintance, in the fall semester of 1968, through Ambrose’s unexpected declaration after Harrison’s funeral, to his mad overtures of March and our first coition in the ad hoc committee room—which-all he compared to his youthful admiration of Magda as rendered in his abandoned novel, The Amateur. The ardour then (I wistfully recalled) had been altogether his, merely tolerated and at length yielded to by its object, (b) That month of frenetic copulation, with no great love on either side, from early April to early May, which put him in mind of his late-teen fucking bouts with the Messalina of the Chesapeake, Jeannine Mack, (c) Our odd and gentle sexless first fortnight of May, when we both had felt stirrings of real love, and Ambrose had flabbergasted me with intimations of his wish to make a baby. In his mind this was not unlike the period of his second, innocent “connexion” with Magda, by then Mrs Peter Mensch; the resemblance is not obvious to me. (d) That disagreeable “husbandly” period just ended, during which, alas for me, my ardor exceeded his, and our physical connexion was sedulously procreative in intent, if not in issue. All I could say of this interval was that, if it really did resemble Ambrose’s marriage, I’m surprised the thing lasted fifteen months, not to mention fifteen years; and unless I was confusing cause and effect, I quite sympathised with Marsha’s busy infidelities. But I could not imagine that chilly individual’s permitting for a fortnight the highhandedness I’d indulged for a month already. Those ridiculous costumes! His insulting attentions to Bea Golden! What’s more (and more’s the pity for me), I loved him despite that degrading nonsense; loved him still and deeply, damn it. I could not imagine Ms. Blank’s entertaining that emotion for anyone.

  Be that as may, we were by A.‘s own assertion done with d and entering e. Inasmuch as he had declared to me in his Ex-hor-ta-ti-on of 3 March that I was the 6th love of his life, and as the evidence was that he had come to me from a painful third connexion with Magda, I urged her now to tell me what I must look forward to from Our Friend in Stage #5.

  More tears. Then she told me, in two longish, earnest installments: one then and there, the other this morning, both punctuated with the good womanly embraces aforementioned. Ah, the Italians! Only her suicide convinces me that Carthaginian Dido was of Phoenician and not Italian Catholic origins. God damn me if I go that route! Which, Kleenexed and synopsised, appears to have been this: In 1967, when their marriage was officially kaput, Marsha ran off to Niagara Falls with the lover whose subsequent early rejection of her had fetched her to the Remobilisation Farm
and the sexual-clerical employ of “Monsieur Casteene”/Cook. Ambrose, at Peter’s urging, had reluctantly moved back into Mensch’s Castle with his daughter; he had finished the conversion of the Lighthouse into a camera obscura, and—not at his own particular initiative, I gather—had become party to a tacitly acknowledged ménage à trois, the guilty background whereof we have had hints in an earlier letter. Look it up: as Ambrose says, that’s what print’s for.

  Magda again, then. But with a difference! At a Ambrose had been a callow, adoring amateur; there’d been no sex till the end, 1947, when in Peter’s absence Magda had bemusedly (and fatefully) accommodated the boy’s ardours as the stone house rose up about them. At c—1949 and after—their feelings had been reciprocal but for the most part unspoken; they did not couple, nor did Magda question her heart’s commitment to Peter and their newborn twins. This time ’round (1967), worse luck for her, Ambrose was passive, aloof, still shaken by the wreck of his marriage; whereas Magda found herself possessed, for the first time in her 38 years, by unreserved, overriding, self-transcending (and self-amazing) passion: a possession so complete as to make her wonder whether, after all, the man Ambrose was not as much its occasion as its cause and object. She knew him thoroughly; she saw and did not admire his faults; she found altogether more to respect in her husband; her contempt for mere adventurous adultery, Marsha-style, was profound—and none of those considerations mattered. She was Swept Away!