Letters

by John Barth

  Asked for confirmation, I acknowledged that no rules of the American Association of University Professors or bylaws of the state university had been violated, inasmuch as they did not cover adjunct and visiting professorships. Ms. Pitt’s appointment as acting provost had been unusual in the first place, given her visiting status, and might be argued as de facto regularization of her professorial appointment; but if she really had resigned instead of being fired, she could of course not litigate. Had she, though? I asked. And why, since the college clearly had no case against her? Indeed, I declared (as forcefully as I could in my still-torpid state), it had been my intention to urge once again her reinstatement, the dropping of all charges against the demonstrators, and the recall of “our” recommendation to the regents concerning Mensch’s Litt.D. The 1960’s were winding down; so was our war in Southeast Asia; such demonstrations were not very likely to recur in the coming decade unless our government embarked on another adventurist binge, and inasmuch as (this time) no property damage to the campus or personal injuries were involved, prosecution of the demonstrators, including our founder’s son, seemed to me likely to gain us little more than undesirable publicity. Even as we foregathered, I pointed out, the U.S. Court of Appeals was reversing the conspiracy convictions of Dr. Spock and Messrs. Coffin, Goodman, and Sperber: a sign of the changing climate of public and judiciary opinion.

  Schott disagreed. What it was a sign of, in his view, was simply the old liberal Commie-coddling responsible for such conspiracies in the first place. Today was the anniversary, he observed, of the worst of the first series of Cambridge race riots, in 1963, a summer so violent that even the July 4th fireworks had had to be canceled. His point seemed to be that uncompromising prosecution could have spared us the decade, and was still necessary if we were not to carry the sixties into the seventies. The deans did not disagree. Harry Carter, less flaccidly than usual, reminded me (so had my authority waned!) that we had after all pressed no charges against Lady Amherst. There were none to press, said I. He and Schott smiled knowingly at each other.

  Cook then, apropos of who knows what, remarked that today was also the anniversary of Alexander Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr on the Hudson palisades at Weehawken. We must be vigilant, gentlemen! And just seven years ago, on 7/11/62, Telstar I had inaugurated the era of satellite communications with a transmission from Maine to England. This very moment, eight Russian vessels were steaming toward Cuba! Who knew, he asked darkly, what seven years hence, the 200th birthday of our republic, would bring? Again I considered questioning his presence in the room. But to my surprise he here came off his patriotic bluster and, with a show of reluctance, agreed that revoking Ambrose Mensch’s degree would prolong the publicity of the late lamentable events; he urged Schott to withdraw his recommendation in that matter. Further, he declared himself gratified to hear that Lady Amherst had not been stigmatized by summary dismissal: no doubt she was under young Mensch’s unfortunate influence; very likely she’d been a party to the disruption; he Cook even understood that the pair were, ah, a couple. But she was, after all, a lady.

  Schott’s secretary made an audible, disagreeable hmp. Her employer, with a reproving smile, asked her for The Letter. There were then triumphantly distributed to us photocopies of a document which Schott directed us to read forthwith and return: it could not decently be read aloud, he averred, and ought not to go beyond our meeting room. But it would, he trusted (with a glance at me), put to rest any notion of continuing Professor Pitt on the faculty, and explain both his demand for her resignation and her tendering it without protest.

  Well, it was a remarkable letter: more precisely, a 7-page abridgment or reverse bowdlerization of the discarded carbon copy of an 18-page draft of a letter from Germaine Pitt to the author of The Floating Opera and other fictions, with whom she has evidently been in personal, if one-way, correspondence. It was typed on the letterhead of the provost’s office and dated 7 June 1969. It commenced with the outcry John, John, and set forth its writer’s complaints about her tyrannical lover Ambrose Mensch, who among other things obliged her to dress beneath her age and dignity, use narcotics, and forgo contraception (he wants a child by her). The language was candid and British, often witty, the detail intimate, the complaint affecting, the spirit prevailingly good-humored, even brave. I was more touched than scandalized; indeed, my chief surprise was that so admirable a woman would put up with such bullying from so otherwise feckless a fellow, go on about it at such (apparently) unreciprocated length, and foolishly make a copy of her confessions. But the letter itself suggested an explanation: the woman is middle-aged and lonely; she upbraids herself for indulging her lover’s whims; is indeed at a loss to account for her own behavior, of which she vigorously disapproves; finally, she loves the chap despite his misbehavior, in part it seems because he evokes for her an earlier passion, in her young womanhood, for a Frenchman, by whom she bore a child. The letter was unsigned, but no one else in Dorchester County could have written it. My heart went out to Germaine Pitt: lucky, undeserving fellow, that Mensch, whose promiscuity with Jeannine aboard the O.F.T. II irked me now even more in retrospect!

  My interest was caught too (should have been even more so, but other scales had not yet fallen from my eyes) by the coincidence that her former lover’s name was André Castine: I recalled, before she invoked, the Castine-Burlingame intrigues in the Sot-Weed Factor novel and the peculiarity of Andrew Burlingame Cook VI’s having a French-Canadian son named Henri Burlingame VII (we met him at Harrison’s funeral, Dad, remember?). I was struck too, of course, by the further coincidence that Jane Mack’s mysterious fiancé was named André: no more meaningful an accident, I suppose, than that Cook’s first name and my last are nearly alike, or that I happen to live on Todds Point, next to Cook Point—we’ve seen how that other Author works! But still… And there were tantalizing implications of some connection between this modern Castine and our Mr. Cook: near the letter’s end, for example, Lady Amherst complains of being variously tormented by “you [i.e., ‘John, John,’ who does not reply to her letters], Ambrose, André, A. B. Cook.” But if that connection was illuminated in the original, it was lost in the abridgment.

  The committee were mightily entertained. I was not, and objected as strenuously as I was able both to the distribution of the letter in the first instance and to its abridgment in the second. Schott replied that we were not a judicial body: he had excerpted and put before us evidence of Professor Pitt’s moral turpitude by way of justifying to us his demand for her resignation, a demand he was in fact under no legal obligation to justify. I responded that my objection was moral, not legal, and all the stronger for his being not legally obligated to justify his action. Schott countered—cleverly for him—that his obligation was moral, too. As for the abridgment, Cook now put in, he would attest that it was mainly in the interest of moral—he smiled: Perhaps he should say immoral?—relevance and consideration for our valuable time; but also (and this is why he himself had been shown the “original”) his good friend President Schott had seen fit to delete references to a matter Cook would now reluctantly acknowledge, and which would explain Lady Amherst’s including him among her “tormentors.” One of the novels written by the addressee of the letter involved his, Cook’s, ancestor, the original poet laureate of Maryland, as well as an early New-Frenchman from whom (for example) the town of Castine, Maine, takes its name. Among the regrettable aberrations of Lady Amherst—for whom otherwise Cook professed esteem—was her persuasion that there must therefore be some connection between himself and that former French-Canadian lover of hers. She had, embarrassingly, gone so far as to fancy that his son by the late Mrs. Cook might be her own illegitimate child by that early romance! The missing portions of the letter, then, included her account of an expedition earlier in June to his house in Anne Arundel County, in pursuit of this aberration. Fortunately he had not been at home: his former secretary-housekeeper had reported the visit of a strange Englishwoman who claime
d to have urgent business with him. Aware of Lady Amherst’s delusion and its origins, he had avoided her, and she’d not bothered him since.

  Schott gruffly declared that he himself never read novels. Neither, said Provost Carter, did he. A great pity, Cook cordially chided: though his own muses were those of poetry and history, he believed that fiction, and in particular the novel, was your great mirror up to life. A dark mirror sometimes, to be sure, in which nevertheless, and whether transfigured or merely disfigured—here he gave me a surprising, meaning wink—we could best recognize our world and ourselves.

  Perhaps he meant what I took him to mean by that wink: that he had read the novels in which the Macks and I—and Schott and Carter—are severally “figured.” Or perhaps the wink was no more than a sort of conspiratorial self-irony: “You and I see through these high-minded clichés, eh?” It might even have been a mere tic. But my mind had wandered from poor Germaine Pitt to Jane Mack and the young fellow in the beige Arrow shirt in 1921; from the Floating Opera novel (wherein young “Todd Andrews” sees himself copulating in a mirror) to my experience on Captain Adams’s Original Floating Theatre on June 21 or 22, 1937: my happy resolve (13 L) to blow up the showboat and myself after that dreadful dark night before.

  Some things that are perfectly obvious to others aren’t obvious at all to me, “Todd Andrews” remarks somewhere in that novel, and vice versa: hence this chapter; hence this book. OK, Dad: you saw it coming a long way back (let’s presume you’re closer than I to our Author). But it took me now by total, exhilarated surprise, what Cook’s mid-sentence, mid-committee wink disclosed to me; nor can I say now what connects the wink to the revelation, any more than I can say what if anything connects A. B. Cook to André Castine. But there it suddenly, astonishingly, beautifully was: 13 R, not yet in detail, but in clear principle, as plainly as if carved into the conference table.

  Well! Too bad, Germaine: nothing I could do for you beyond insisting that those photocopies be destroyed at once (I shredded mine; Cook followed suit; the others were duly shamed by our example); I wish you a better job and a better companion, or better luck with the one you have. Adieu, Jeannine: if you can’t find what you want, may you at least learn what it is you can’t find. Adieu, Drew, less and more my child than your sister is. And bye-bye, I think, dear Jane: belatedly cured of the passion I belatedly recognized, I leave you to “Lord Baltimore” and Cap’n Chick.

  Good-bye! Good-bye!

  But having been so tardy, now I’m being premature. I shall be seeing you all again. We have business together. Even as “Lord Baltimore” observed, there is no hurry, no hurry, not even to resolve the details of what’s so clear in outline: 13 R.

  The threshold once crossed from middle to old age, it is not recrossed: I am still and irrevocably an old man, and the world is what it is. But my energies returned, and my self-possession. My authority with Schott I judged to be impaired for keeps; therefore I called for the sense of the committee on the question of dropping all charges against the demonstrators, declaring in advance my resignation as Marshyhope’s counsel if they chose to proceed. The vote to prosecute was closer than I expected (I’m surprised Schott permitted one; it was strictly advisory), but the ayes—loudly led by Cook and Carter—carried the resolution. I shrugged and bid them cordial good-bye, good-bye.

  Back to the office: Ms. Pond & Co. cheered to see me Myself again. I put in a couple hours’ fruitful clearing of my desk, another of yet fruitfuller staring out my window at the oyster-shell pile. Yes, yes!

  Then here (Thank you, Marian; I feel better, too), where I thought to reopen at once my Inquiry, then understood I’d better address the old Letter first.

  Ahem, Dad: Nothing has intrinsic value! Everything has! Notwithstanding which, bye-bye!

  I’ll get back to you. What an Author! But then, what a reader, your slow son

  T.

  I: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His discovery that he is in love.

  7/10/69

  TO:

  Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

  FROM:

  Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

  In a sense you Are Jacob Horner, Making Ready to Leave Baltimore in July 1953 at the Doctor’s prescription to be Interviewed by John Schott and Joseph Morgan at Wicomico Teachers College as a Prospective Instructor of English grammar. It is the birthday of John Calvin, Giorgio de Chirico, James III of Scotland, Carl Orff, Camille Pissarro, Marcel Proust, James McNeill Whistler. The Allies are landing in Sicily, Apollo-11 has sprung a leak, Vice-President Fillmore has succeeded Zachary Taylor to the U.S. presidency, the first contingent of U.S. Marines is leaving Viet Nam, Ben Franklin is proposing a Colonial Union modeled after the Iroquois League of Six Nations, the Germans have begun their bombing of Britain and ratified the Versailles Treaty, Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is swamping again in rough seas and may not make it to Barbados, Korean truce negotiations have begun, the stock market continues its decline, and Woodrow Wilson has presented his League of Nations proposal to the U.S. Senate. But Der Wiedertraum is out of synch, out of focus, perhaps out of control. The world’s turned upside down; you Scarcely Recognize yourself; you Begin To Wonder who’s writing whom, at whose prescription.

  Three Thursdays since, when last you Wrote you, the Minstrel Show was on the verge, which in the event turned all our screws. In the Progress and Advice Room, just before it, you Observed to the Doctor that you’d Experienced no Recurrence of Reparalysis since April 2, Casanova’s birthday; nor had you on the other hand Achieved Suicide. You Remarked Further that your Scriptotherapy could not claim the credit, inasmuch as Joe Morgan’s reappearance had inspired both your Immediate Resumption of that therapy and your Later Relapse into the condition it was meant to treat. It Was your Guess that Morgan’s Wiedertraum, despite the Doctor’s misgivings and your own, was the mobilizing factor, if only because it occasioned the reinstitution of these weekly P & A’s.

  Et cetera. You Nattered On to fill the time; your mind was Nervously Elsewhere. The Doctor’s too, you Would Have Thought—though he mouthed his dead cigar and regarded you as entomologically as ever. It was his afternoon to fish, but the day, indeed the approaching weekend, looked to be another stormy one, and he was chagrined. Presently he said, as confidently and acidly as ever in 1953: “Merde Homer. Blank attracts blank. You are In Love with Pocahontas. You would be Better Off Paralyzed.”

  You were Entirely Startled. Indeed, you Blushed. But you Could Not Deny what till then you’d Not Acknowledged even to yourself: that Ambrose Mensch’s ex, the blonde Medusa who froze even limber Tombo, somehow moved your Heart—if not to Love, at least to a Surprising Sympathy. It Seemed Likely to you, however, that this unlikelihood was in some measure another aspect of Der Wiedertraum: Marsha Blank’s miscasting (as the high school teacher you’d Bedded Cavalierly in Wicomico in 1953) had occasioned your Reviewing both herself and “Peggy Rankin” in a new, more compassionate light. Sixteen years after the fact, you Wished you Had Been Less Cynical with Ms. Rankin; and you Dared Say Pocahontas had her reasons for being bitchy.

  Genug, the Doctor ordered: your Balls, such as they were, were your Own, to Lose as you Would, but kindly Spare him the smarmy sympathetics. He did not regard you as Prepared for a Genuine Emotional Engagement—you Recalled perhaps that he’d advised against it in 1953 as well, vis-à-vis the late Rennie Morgan?—but neither did he regard you as Capable of one. If your Feeling for Marsha Blank helped keep you Alive and Mobile, the rest was your Funeral.

  Der Wiedertraum itself he still considered dangerous, both to the mobility of its principals and to the security of the Farm, which he did not want jeopardized so near to his retirement. What was more, he didn’t understand the timetable. The novelized version of the original trauma corroborated his own recollection: that Mrs. Morgan’s abortion and death had occurred in late October 1953. Wherefore then “Saint Joe’s” ultimatum that she be redreamed, reborn, by Labor Day, which
would fall this year on the 1st of September? More important, whatever Morgan’s dramaturgical calendar, how could the reenactment imaginably have a positive outcome? It was a time bomb, and unless (what the Doctor could not conceive) you Had Some Possible Strategy for defusing it, he was resolved to move it off the premises before it blew.

  What Struck you as Odd about this colloquy was that for all his customary hauteur the Doctor appeared, for the first time in your connection, to be consulting you. He was asking your Advice! Moreover, he seemed now not only superannuated but impotent, at least far from omnipotent. It Occurred To you, irrelevantly, that by the rules of B-movie dramaturgy he was as of that moment a dead man. You Were Not Surprised when thunderstorms crashed as if on cue immediately thereafter, and a tornado watch curtailed the evening’s show. That the twisters spun off Lake Erie, not into Ontario, but into New York State across the way (and wrecked specifically the Chautauqua Lake locations that Prinz and Mensch had just done filming) underscored the portent. And if you Did Not Quite Assume—when after the abbreviated entertainment the Doctor declared an end to Der Wiedertraum, gave two weeks’ notice to Casteene, Morgan, and the draft evaders to begone from the Farm or be removed therefrom by the provincial police, and forbade the film company ever to return (Bea Golden excepted, whose family’s patronage was still prized)—that it was his own termination notice the Doctor thus pronounced, it is because you Doubted Fate was such an artless hack.