Letters

by John Barth

  Okay: I like it that his Robespierre’s gone to guillotine at last. Though I believe life to be no more probable in my old womb than Tuesday’s Mariner-6 photographs show it to be on Mars, and though the season’s maiden tropical storm (Lady Anna) is moving our way from the Caribbean, I am much gratified by this serene “developement” and look forward with appropriate interest to learning what the character of the Sixth Stage—our stage!—of our affair will be. (I would be tempted to wonder, with your Menelaus, how Proteus can ever be confidently known to be “himself again, having been all those other things—but a mad experience last night has shown me how.) I still truly love Ambrose, don’t ask me why; daresay I shall even if he comes ’round to loving me, as he most certainly appeared to do from March through May.

  Nevertheless, sir, and though my late behaviour argues contrariwise, I am not by disposition a hand puppet, whether it’s Ambrose’s or even André’s hand under my midlengths. Mr Mensch’s apparent abdication of his tyranny has not ipso facto cancelled my resentment of so extended and public a humiliation as mine since spring: the loss of my job, my “self-image,” my self-respect. When in my last I threatened reciprocal infidelity—a rum sort of retaliation, that, and retaliation itself a rum sort of game—I was only half-serious. I.e., I was half-serious! I came back up here with Ambrose because I do still love him; but I did in fact try to ring you up, no doubt with mixed motives, but principally I’m sure with a view to terminating all tyrannies, including this insulting one of our one-way correspondence. I learned among other things that you’ve vacated this city to live year-round in your Chautauqua cottage… whereupon I lost interest in your pursuit, realising I’d prefer after all not to discuss with you what I have at such immoderate length confessed. Hence my salutation.

  I even imagined myself ready to kick this habit, my Saturday epistolary “fix,” whatever the withdrawal pains. Then came last night’s dreamlike adventure, which, though I was its victim, I am still far from understanding.

  As we have seen, all doors open for the maker of movies. Reg Prinz & Co. had preceded us to Buffalo, and a bit of judicious PR had evidently preceded him. Both local campuses of the state university, I don’t have to tell you, have modest but active departments of film, and I gather the city prides itself generally on its hospitality to new art. A word to the right people that Prinz will be “echoing” the Scajaquada Creek Battle of 1814 has put at his disposal, with attendant fanfare, as much of Delaware Park (through which Scajaquada Creek runs, I learned yesterday, dammed now to form Delaware Park Lake but memorialised by an eponymous expressway) as he needs for as long as he needs it, plus the resources of the flanking institutions: the Erie County Historical Society and the Albright-Knox Museum of Art. Plus more graduate-student volunteer helpers than he can sort out, all eager to improve their credentials, and at least half of them (so it seems to me) stoned out of their American minds.

  We were scarcely checked into this unpronounceable motel (accent on the antepenultimate) before being whisked off last evening to a cocktail buffet in the Park Pavilion, hosted by the directors of the institutions aforecited. Hello from a cultural attaché of the mayor. Welcoming statements from the two curators, praising what they took to be our combination, in this Belligerently Antihistorical Decade, of the historical foretime and the avant-garde present, a combination nowhere more aptly symbolised than in the architecture and the collection of the museum beside us: half Greek revival and half front-edge contemporary. Trustees and local patrons of the arts turned out spiffily in evening clothes among the jeans and patches of the with-it young. Whatever justice there may be in the proverbial put-downs of Buffalo, N.Y., I found it agreeable indeed to be back in a genuine city, among what appeared to be genuinely civilised folk: the black-tie crowd and the blue-jean crowd on easy terms; the night balmy; the catering not bad at all; the sweet smell of Cannabis sativa mixed with that of roses, pipe tobacco, and chafing-dish chicken tetrazzini; taped rock music on the pavilion P.A. Add Ambrose’s new mildness, the contrast with Dorset Heights, the being back in my own clothes, even the absence of humidity and mosquitoes—I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

  Joe Morgan was there! Come over from the Farm as historical consultant (A. B. Cook, it seems, remained behind in Maryland), he was more conventionally dressed than at last sight, but still long-haired, necklaced, somewhat crazed-appearing about the eyes. In the spirit of the evening I was delighted to see him; we hugged hello and had a good talk. Crazed or not, Morgan has still his low-keyed, quick-smiling, intense, but almost boyish authority, once so appealing to his students and colleagues. He has I gather rather taken over the Farm, by his natural leadership, since the Doctor’s death, but we didn’t speak of that. We talked History for a bit, apropos of the occasion, two ex-professionals reminiscing: How a pathetic remnant of the Iroquois League, some 100 warriors, fought on the American side under General Brown in these last engagements on the Niagara Frontier, hoping to retain what was left of their reservations in western New York. How underrated by historians was the influence of anti-British sentiment among French Canadians generally throughout the war, and the particular Anglophobia of wealthy French refugees from the Terror, who like Mme de Staël had bought huge landholdings along Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, but who unlike her had emigrated, raised impressive châteaux in the forests, and after 1814 confidently expected fallen Napoleon to appear among them and establish a sovereign French-Canadian state. Et cetera.

  When Ambrose and Bea—separately—joined us, the talk turned to gossip. My lover had been dancing with, of all people, Ms. Merope Bernstein—remember?—who, her bum apparently mended, had come over from the Farm with Morgan and their polyglot comrades: a large black girl, a somewhat sinister-looking Latin, and an echt Manhattan greaser of indeterminate ethnicity. Her quondam stepmother had been dancing with this last, looking alas neither unattractive nor out of place in a boutique redskin outfit—Tuscarora mod?—and came to our table clearly to flirt with Morgan in demonstration of her indifference to us. I paid her no mind. Ambrose merely smiled. Joe indulged her lap-perching and osculatory effusions with mild indifference. Bea soon went off to find her Reggie.

  Ms. Bernstein, Ambrose reported, was relieved to find her erstwhile protector Bray nowhere in evidence. She and her colleagues had come armed with unspecified weapons against possible menace from him, whom they regard as a dangerous lunatic and counterrevolutionary. Their attitude gave Ambrose to wonder, temperately, about the physical welfare of his ex-wife, last seen (we recall) on 4 July in Bray’s company aboard the O.F.T. II. Thereby, it turns out, hung a little tale, which discreet Saint Joseph had been going not to tell, as not particularly our business, but now judged it best to:

  Seems your ex-protagonist (and Morgan’s old antagonist), creepy Jacob Horner, has conceived some sort of—love?—for Marsha Blank (we laughed at once, derisively; Morgan did not), and in his way was Much Concerned at her failure to reappear at the Farm after Independence Day. Especially when Bea Golden came back from Maryland with the glib report that “Pocahontas” had gone off with Bray to his Lily Dale goat ranch, presumably as Merope Bernstein’s successor, Horner grew distressed.

  Ambrose and I are grinning guiltily; the whole business is bizarre! But Bray is a lunatic. Ambrose takes my hand; heart-stirred (yet still resentful) I squeeze his. Now: in the Doctor’s absence, and as part of some larger, ongoing project of his own, Joe Morgan has assumed the role of Jacob Horner’s therapist and spiritual advisor: the Director, as he put it, of a sort of personal “remake.” In this capacity, fast and loose with their text as Reg Prinz with his, he cancelled whatever had been Horner’s therapeutic programme and prescribed instead that he sally forth from the Farm, make his way to Lily Dale, determine whether Marsha is there with Bray and if so whether voluntarily, take whatever action seemed appropriate to that determination, and report back to his therapist.

  This Rx, mind, for a chap who has seldom ventured from that peripatetic commune in fifteen years! B
ut—with every hesitation and apprehension in the world, I gather—Horner managed not only to fulfill his quest, but to fetch back the empty Grail herself. Bray wasn’t home (we know he was in Cambridge again by this time, at the Dorchester Tercentenary); Marsha was, in a condition of some dishevelment and mild derangement, but not apparently against her will. She actually returned to Fort Erie with Horner—they expect Bray will be furious to find her gone—and is now (ready, John?) Horner’s woman, so Morgan neutrally declared. She is, however, mysteriously obliged, to Horner’s further distress, to go back to Bray temporarily in mid-August, to finish, in her words, some unfinished business.

  You may be sure we are mightily intrigued by this bit of gossip; but Morgan, characteristically, would not deal in details. If Ambrose was curious about his ex, he was free to visit the couple (!) at the Farm. Insofar as anything on those premises is normal, they cohabit and receive guests like any normal couple. Joe himself had been their “dinner guest” only a few nights since, in the common dining hall. They are contemplating marriage!

  He would not say more; visibly disapproved of Ambrose’s raucous whoops. “Pocahontas” and Jacob Horner: movable object meets resistible force! Morgan turned the conversation back to “our” film, its apparent theme of echoes and reenactments. 1812 was obviously something of a reenactment of 1776, and he Morgan was more and more inclined to oscillatory hypotheses, both historical and cosmological. But he hoped we all understood that redreaming history, reenacting the past, is a deadly serious, sometimes a seriously deadly business. (He would not elaborate; his eyes got That Look again, that I never saw before he left Marshyhope, vanished from Amherst, and surfaced among the crazies at Fort Erie.) As for our other theme, which “Bibi” Golden had told him of on her return from “Barataria”—the mano a mano between Author and Director, Fiction and Film—Morgan gently scoffed at it, and was supported in his deprecation by the young media types in our conversational vicinity. In their opinion, that was a quarrel between a dinosaur and a dead horse: television, especially the embryonic technology of coaxial-cable television, was the medium that promised to dominate and revolutionise the last quarter of the century.

  These young people—Morgan too—were discreetly smoking marijuana laced with hashish, as were numbers of the artsy faculty crowd; at Morgan’s invitation Ambrose and I shared their smoke. In some spirit compounded of dope, curiosity, the residual grudge mentioned above, and who knows what else, I asked “Saint Joe” in Ambrose’s hearing (apropos of Eternal Recurrences), how fared my protean friend “Monsieur Casteene.” Was he still at the Farm now the Doctor was dead, or had he moved the hot center of the Second Revolution back to Castines Hundred, where I had once been party to no trifling reenactment of my own?

  Why, declared Morgan (and his eyes were the penetrating sympathetic blue now of my friend’s and employer’s at Marshyhope, not the wigged-out middlescent casualty’s), the chap was somewhere about the pavilion; fact is, he had gone up to his baronial digs for most of July, but was back now at the Remobilisation Farm and had come over to the party with Merry B. and the others. Should we look for him outside?

  I would look for him myself, I said, declining also Ambrose’s carefully put offer to assist me. What I really wanted, I declared, was to clear my head. My ex-master considered this declaration for a grave half second, smiled, bade me take care on the stairs (we were in the open upper storey of the pavilion, overlooking the park lake to the front and an extensive rose garden to the rear, towards the floodlit museum). As I left, they were back to the Movie again, Morgan asking what exactly was this Mating Flight sequence Bea had mentioned, and how it related to the skirmish at Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek. I was tempted to stay for a reply to that one, but I made my way out and down through silky night air to the paved, lamplit, leaf-shadowed lake edge—where, on the first bench under a streetlamp hard by the pavilion, as in a crudely plotted dream, I promptly espied my André!

  Not A. B. Cook VI, John. Not any of the various “M. Casteenes” of Fort Erie. André: the André who’d last materialised between acts at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1967, rendezvoused with me après-theatrically at the Wolpert Hotel, fetched me thence home with him to Castines Hundred, and there—a mating flight indeed—impregnated me with his unerring sperm. It could be no other; it could be… no other. André!

  He saw me too, perhaps had done before I saw him, and stood to greet me with two hushed baritone syllables: “Germaine.”

  Pipe dream? Then repass the hookah, please! So fine, so gentle, this man; so truly masterful, in the way that made me feel so easily my own again: Germaine Gordon the aspiring writer; familiar of Hesse, Huxley, Mann; acquaintance of Joyce and Stein; scholar; woman! He took my hand. It was the most natural thing in the world to stroll with him along the little lake, out of range of the loudspeakers, and say easily to each other the things one felt to say. E.g., that life goes by, most of it vanity and vexation of spirit; that we understand too late what is truly precious, how we ought to have lived. Yet after all one has survived in this monstrous century, and not fared so ill. The Six Million are dead, the dozens of millions of others; the Second Revolution has not come to pass, any more than the Second Coming. Yet here we walk among the lights and roses, well dressed and fed, fit still and handsome, much vigorous life left in us. Forgive us then our trespasses, as we etc., and never mind all the vast unanswered questions. Surely it was André!

  We attained the rose garden, a little open labyrinth of teas and multifloras. The Albright-Knox could have been the Louvre, Scajaquada Creek the Seine, Lincoln Parkway the Champs-Élysées. I wept; my André comforted me, without pointless apologising. That business of Andrew Cook IV’s letters, which I’d refused to play his game with? A baritone chuckle: too ingenious by half, no doubt, all that indirection: occupational hazard in his line of work. We were past two-thirds through the century, doubtless through our lives as well; God knew what form the Revolution would take, and when: maybe it would come to nothing more than two-way telly by 1976! André had in fact lost entire track of our son; was reduced to writing long letters to him which he could not post for want of address. Should he ever discover one, or otherwise locate that young man (he took both my hands; we found a secluded bench; the night was aromatic), Henri Cook Burlingame VII would be straightforwardly apprised of his true parentage and the circumstances of his rearing, let him make of those facts what he would, and urged to put himself in communication, if not with his father, at least with his too-long-suffering mother. Might it come to pass before Guy Fawkes Day next!

  It was astonishingly easy, John. Heaven bless whatever chemistry made it so! Was he alone these days? I enquired. André smiled and sighed: Oui et non. He believed I knew of his little arrangement with the Blank woman? That had become quite impossible. He was both relieved and sorry to hear that she had involved herself with the peculiar M. Bray; felt perhaps even sorrier for Jacob Horner for having “rescued” her and—as was said to have been the custom in prerevolutionary China concerning preventers of suicide—thereby assumed lifetime responsibility for her welfare. Himself, he satisfied his needs with whatever lay untroublesomely to hand—I would be amused to hear that the Bernstein girl, for example, had conceived a veritable passion for him, which he saw fit to indulge shrug-shoulderedly whilst deploring her want of personal hygiene—but he had no companion; he was alone, and neither happy nor wretched so to be. But how was it between me and my friend, whose ex-wife had unbecomingly reported about him so many and poisonous things? I was, André was gratified to observe, in my own clothes again: might he take that to mean that Ambrose and I had worked out our difficulties and were happy?

  Things had indeed been troubled, I replied, but seemed less so presently. And I loved Ambrose, yes.

  Eh bien. And he me?

  In his way. As you did, André. My fate.

  For some moments we reflected silently in the dark. André bade me excuse him for thirty seconds. It took some doing not to clutch at
his jacket sleeve, but I said, “Just now I could almost excuse you these thirty years.” He brushed my forehead with a kiss; stepped into the shadows behind our bench; returned smiling in half a minute or less. Then: Would I take a short drive with him? He had a thing to show me. I smiled and declined. He clucked his tongue. The scent of the roses was preternaturally strong; no doubt the hashish intensified my perceptions. When André put an arm about my shoulders and drew me to him on the bench, I kissed him unhesitatingly, but without passion. His tone changed. He touched me; I responded. Just into the car, he whispered; please? I shook my head, but permitted myself after all to be led off, a proper Clarissa. The drug really was getting to me; the little walk from bench to curb seemed miles.

  Even so, I drew back when he opened the door of a small black car. André Castine in a dusty Volkswagen? He was huskily urgent: Who cared where? In the road, in the treetops, in the sky! Firmly now I said no. And he—what a grip!—yes. Really, I would call out! He clapped a hand over my mouth, forced me toward the car like any rapist. I bit his finger; felt at once a tremendous shock from behind (where he now was), as if I’d backed into one of those electric cattle-prods the riot police used to be so fond of. I managed (I think) a single shout.

  Dot dot dot.

  Hashish plays hob with time! Ambrose and Joe Morgan discovered me on the park bench in the rose garden in less time by far, so it seemed to me, than it had taken to walk the fifty feet from that bench to that car (now gone) with André (ditto). They were of course alarmed to have found me “passed out” (they’d heard no cry; my clothes were intact; I seemed uninjured; no aches or pains, though my head was woozy). Casteene? He had been with them the whole time, in the pavilion; had joined them directly I left to find him, thinking his company not welcome to me since our little difference of June, concerning which he assured Ambrose he bore no grudge. I was okay?