Letters

by John Barth

  That invitation, at risk of offending you, I believe I had really better withdraw. I return with thanks the enclosures of yours of 18 June and earnestly request that you not favor me with their sequelae (or anything else) in future. For the suggestion that I take as my ground theme the notion of First and Second Revolutions, in whatever sense, I here thank you, even though it was not exactly news. Also for your plausible relation of Chautauqua and Chautaugua: there are other, homelier etymologies, I have learned since—“fish-place,” for example—but the principle nonetheless applies.

  Do please let that proximate place-name be the one bridge between us henceforward, as it has in fact been hitherto. Let us both turn now from letters to TV: to watch the images of men first stepping upon the moon; to ponder the strange tale piece-by-piecing from Chappaquiddick of Senator Kennedy, a drowned young woman, a bridge more dark and ominous than mine and

  Yours,

  4 encl

  C: The Author to Jerome Bray. Some afterthoughts on numbers, letters, and the myth of Bellerophon and the Chimera.

  Department of English, Annex B

  State University of New York at Buffalo

  Buffalo, New York 14214

  July 27, 1969, 7 Sleepers’ Day

  Jerome B. Bray

  General Delivery

  Lily Dale, New York 14752

  Dear Mr. Bray:

  Can you perhaps make use, in your NUMBERS project, of, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition III 18b of that term (“Metrical periods or feet; hence lines, verses”)? Or the Kabbalistic tradition that the Torah was a septateuch before it became a pentateuch, one of its original books having gone the way of the 10 lost tribes, another shrunk to 2 verses in the Book of Numbers? Or the consideration (which occurred to me on receipt of your letter of July 8) that NUMBERS is a 7-letter word arranged symmetrically about your initial; that its 5th letter, or Phi-point, is also the 5th of the alphabet; that even more things in the world come in 7’s than come in 5’s; that by perfectly imitating the pattern of mythic heroism one may become not a mythic hero but merely a perfect imitation; that one might cunningly aspire neither to perfect nor to revolutionize the flawed genre of the Novel, say, but to imitate perfectly its flaws? (There is a bug in the unicorn caterpillar family, I believe, which mimics the appearance of a leaf partially eaten by unicorn caterpillars.)

  I hope you can, because while I accept your declining of an invitation I didn’t quite make—to “be a character” in my story in progress—your letters have suggested a number of things to me possibly useful in that work—e.g., that the word letters is a 7-letter word with properties of its own; that every text implies a countertext; that a “navel-tale” within the main tale ought to be located not centrally but eccentrically—at a point, say, five- or six-sevenths of the way through; that such a tale might appropriately concern itself with the classical wish to transcend one’s past accomplishments and achieve literal or figurative immortality; that such a tale might therefore appropriately take as its central figure one of the classical mythic heroes. Et cetera. Thanks.

  Cordially,

  P.S.: I recollect that Bellerophon does not get to heaven. His mount Pegasus does, stung by Zeus’s gadfly, who apparently already dwelt there: the same insect whom Hera earlier dispatched to torment poor Io, and after whom Socrates was nicknamed. Perhaps that gadfly is your actual hero?

  P.P.S.: Finally, I recall that the sort of letters Hamlet bid Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry from Denmark to England, which, unknown to them consigned the bearer to death, are called “Bellerophontic letters after the ones your man innocently delivered from the king of Tiryns to the king of Lycia. Be my guest: but N.R.P.S.V.P.

  N: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage of her affair. The Scajaquada Scuffle.

  Kissing Bridge Motel

  (near) Buffalo, New York

  9 August 1969

  Ah John,

  Novelist Nabokov ne’er conceived for his Lolita so portentous a catalogue of motels as Ambrose and I have couched in since my last, or reserved for couching in the nights ahead: old nymph and her young debaucher! Forgetting Scajaquada, as I’d prefer, can you believe (not necessarily in this order) the Lord Amherst, the Colonial Court, the Regency, the Windsor Arms, the Gulliver’s Travels, the Kissing Bridge, and the Memory Lane? All (except Toronto’s Windsor) within a Niagara Falls radius of Buffalo—a radius we will extend early next week to Toronto and Stratford—and so, perhaps, not unknown to you. May your nights in them have been agreeable as mine!

  For if the Movie is experiencing a hiatus (filming’s to resume across the river in Fort Erie on the 15th), the drama of Germaine Pitt’s sore affair with Ambrose Mensch clearly approaches some sort of climax: easier for me to savour than to characterise, yet doubtless easier for me to characterise than for any save us to savour. By the reckoning you’ll recall, it is “our” stage, this “6th” of our connexion, which I judge to have commenced sometime between the Full Buck Moon of Monday week last and last Saturday’s Scajaquada Scuffle. I had wondered what “we” would be like, if indeed we rereached “ourselves”: well, we’re All Right Jack, and not only by contrast with the madness of the past few months. Indeed, this first week of August has reminded me in some ways of our maiden month of March, except that A.’s behaviour has been more a gentleman’s and less an annuated adolescent’s.

  But my last, I believe, left the beleaguered lovers on the verge of the Battle of Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek, on 2 August 1814. (More precisely, my letter ended with a certain sick surmise—but never mind! I still believe myself to have been unbelievably ensnared and at least sexually abused by… “André Castine”… on that Friday night, 1 August. We understand the quotes, who will never, never understand the evening! If I do not sound here like a woman more or less assaulted in body and ravished altogether in spirit one week since, that is because age and experience have evidently taught me to contain the unassimilable, and because—I think coincidentally—the seven days since have been such balm to my sore psyche. I will speak no more of that rose garden!)

  Of the details and outcome of the 1814 skirmish, not much is clear: it was a raid, not a battle, between the more important engagements at Chippewa, Lundy’s Lane, and Fort Erie. Some British and Canadian troops ferried over from the Ontario shore to attack the U.S. encampment along Scajaquada Creek, a staging area and supply depot for American movements against Canada. Both the raiders and the raided suffered casualties; some Yankee supplies were destroyed; the attackers withdrew per plan.

  Our “reenactment” last Saturday evening was similarly obscure and inconclusive but, I daresay, more complex. With no further History to go on than the above, Ambrose and Reg Prinz had sharked up the following scenario, which like Freudian “dreamwork” was to echo simultaneously such disparate matters as that minor military action, the mike-boom incident at Long Wharf in Cambridge of 19 July last, the ongoing hostilities between Author and Director, and that vague circumambient business they’re calling the Mating Season or Mating Flight—which I take to refer to, at least to include, the sexual casuistries of Prinz/Bea/Ambrose/Germaine, with that horny maniac J. Bray hovering over all.

  To this last (I mean the sexual cobweb) a new strand has been added. Contrary to what a nameless informant informed me in a nameless place on a night I shall not name, it seems that young Merope Bernstein is not attached to “Monsieur Casteene”; at least not enough to prevent her having conceived an attachment to Reg Prinz, under the banner of bringing the Revolution to the Media That Matter. Our Director, in his way, neither encouraged nor discouraged this attachment, but at once incorporated it into the story. Bea Golden, you may imagine, was not pleased: indeed, it wants small wit to fancy her not only jealous of this new rival (her own ex-stepdaughter!) but frightened, inasmuch as Ambrose’s “pursuit” of her had been merely and clearly per script since their Baratarian interlude, for which (even if he directed it) Prinz seems not quite to have pardoned her. Follows
that she will now eagerly ally herself with the Director against the Author in our Scajaquada Scuffle, right? At once to reingratiate herself with Prinz, to score points against her competition, and to defend herself from her only current real pursuer, the lecherous Lily Dale lunatic.

  Got all that? Well, our Author’s projected reenactment was to go as follows: Buffalo’s Delaware Park would serve both as the battle site (which it is) and as Municipal Park in Cambridge, which it decidedly is not; the park pavilion both as the American general headquarters and as the Original Floating Theatre II. Bea, in red-white-&-blue wrapper, would represent, let’s say, Columbia, being interviewed before the pavilion in early movie newsreel-style, by the Director, on the American position in the War of 1812. Myself to make my cinematical debut (we do not count Prinz’s surreptitious and/or illegitimate footage) in the role of Britannia, being interviewed concurrently upon the same subject as I cross Scajaquada Creek by rented rowboat just prior to the battle. My interviewer of course to be the Author, fastidiously transcribing my polished periods with a quill pen for publication in the London press. Enter by helicopter (just as A. & I reach the pavilion) the Medium of the Future—in form of J. B. Bray cast as a network television reporter!—who makes off with both willing subjects and leaves the Battle of Scajaquada Creek to be fought, not by Britain and the U.S., but by Author and Director. Weapons and outcome ad libitum, except that the famous mike boom would somehow be worked in.

  Thus the scenario. I protested to Ambrose that neither Bea nor I was jolly likely to take a helicopter ride with Jerome Bray. He imagined Bea would do anything her Director asked of her at this juncture, but insisted I follow my own inclinations once the cameras were rolling: that was the Point. And Merry Bernstein? Ambrose wasn’t sure, but believed she was to begin the episode as some flower-childish avatar of his daughter (they’d not been able to lay hands on a MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS T-shirt in Buffalo, but had found one blazoned BUFFALO IS FOR LOVERS) and end it with a Revolutionary Statement made Godard-like to the camera as the ’copter reascends and the Obsolete Media slug it out.

  She had been warned, though, Merope B., that her nemesis Bray was to be there? Well, Ambrose hoped so: that was really Prinz’s department; she was his hanger-on. Himself was too busy anticipating what the Director might have up his sleeve in the ad-lib assault way to bother with such niceties: he did not fancy another concussion. On that score, I was to stay clear when things got sticky between him and Prinz: he had a couple of rabbits in his own fedora if push came to shove, and not for anything would he have me endanger our just-possible You Know What.

  It is evening when we commence. The park brims with floodlights, searchlights, portable electric generators, and the Buffalo curious, whom (true to form) Prinz does nothing to keep back, but often turns his cameras upon. Traffic on the Scajaquada Expressway makes its contribution to the light and sound track. Somewhere overhead a chopper chops. I do not get to hear, alas, Bea Golden’s extemporisings upon American policy objectives in the Second War of Independence: A. and I are busy yonder in our skiff, across the pond. Nor do I get to extemporise myself (I’d given the matter some thought, and concluded that Fatigue was the finally regnant factor on the British side of the negotiating table at Ghent, as it may one day be for you Americans in Vietnam: more than we wanted what we claimed we wanted, we wanted Out): the Script calls for our transit of Delaware Park Lake to be shot in flickering silent film-style, our Q & A to be transcribed into subtitles—but no one is there.

  Our wigs and tights and crinolines, quill pens and Union Jacks, amuse the bystanders until, muttering that Prinz has scored again, Ambrose seizes the oars and rows us out on the dark pond toward the bright pavilion, where a Newswatch Traffkopter has already landed. Buffalonians commandeer other park rowboats and follow us. Prinz has missed a good shot: we are a proper little invasion flotilla! I wave my U.J. wanly; am even moved to attempt “Rule, Britannia” against the pavilion loudspeakers, whence softly issues “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” Ambrose does my harmony, and not badly: I am touched.

  At our never shall be slaves (which coincides neatly with the loudspeakers’ free-ee and the bray-ave), we attain the landing and are instantly floodlit: score another for R.P., who has monitored our approach and gets fine footage now of the surprisers surprised! In plus fours and reversed cap, hand-cranking some relic from the Eastman Kodak museum, he grins from a camera crane; Bea frowns beside him in her Stars-and-Stripes drapery, looking more like a Chenango Street hippie than like Liberty. Between us, looking merely confused, Merope Bernstein, her uniform blue denims unaccountably exchanged for honey-coloured leotard plus the aforementioned T-shirt, a tiara, of all things, in her teased-out hair, and wings, John—those same Tinkerbell pterons that erst graced the Golden scapulae (on Gadfly III) before Bea fell from favour. Hence, no doubt, her frown. Wings!

  We disembark, some of us feeling mighty silly. The music stops. Moths commit enthusiastic suicide in the kliegs. The Author blinks, shades his eyes, cons the scene for light and mike booms. Prinz turns to Bea and asks in a startlingly clear, amplified, and mocking voice: “What do you think of Senator Randolph’s Quids?” No less than Columbia, we are as surprised by the articulation as by the question. I am all ears for her reply; I search for an opinion of my own about the maverick Virginian’s anti-Federalist splinter party; decide to approve it as a manifestation of Randolph’s prevailing Anglophilia… and again do not get my moment in the limelight.

  For Merry Bernstein, with a shriek of nonsimulated fright, upstages us all. The spot is on her—and, clearly, vice versa; Fay Wray-like (but that tiara, those wings!) she looks up from the landing into the darkness with an expression of Terrified Disbelief. She screams again… Now a smaller spot obligingly searches the pavilion balcony, passing over grips, sound crewmen, waving bystanders, until it fixes on Jerome Bonaparte Bray. He stands outside the balcony railing, balancing who knows how; he wears no wings, but his famous cape is spread like a flying squirrel’s between his outspread arms and legs. He smiles, well, nuttily. He cries a name (not Merry’s; sounds to me like Morgana); he reaches for his crotch; he leaps into thin air; and in flickering, odd slow motion—Prinz must have wired him up!—he lands upon poor Tinkerbell.

  I mean upon her. Merry is knocked flat; her wings are squashed; Bray’s cloak entirely covers the pair of them, who look to be wrestling or humping under a blanket. The girl squeals and squeals.

  Prinz and Bea are nearest by, but up on their rigs. Ambrose and I, the closest on foot, dash to pull Bray off. Not as difficult a job as one would expect: he is extraordinarily light, or else somehow half suspended still by a wire I can’t see. He comes up squeaking, buzzing, clicking, salivating; no Dracula marks on Merope’s throat, but the lap of her leotard is soiled as if by axle grease. She scrambles whimpering from under like a half-swatted dragonfly. Light as he is, Bray is hard to hold on to, something about the material of that cape. He slips silkily from my grip; Ambrose still has him fairly fast, but as I make to resnatch him I see Bea Golden dollying grimly in as if to do the mike-boom trick again!

  I prevent her. By 1814, Columbia may have been the new Gem of the Ocean, but Britannia was still its boss. We went at it on that dolly, then on the quayside proper, like a pair of fishwives, she wasting her breath on insults and obscenities, me settling the score not only for 4 July but as it were for all I’d put up with at Ambrose’s hands on her account till the past few days. Unfair, surely; paradoxical, too (since it was Ambrose I was fighting for!)—but mighty satisfying all the same. She snatches my hair: ha ha, ’tis Britannia’s wig! Hers is Dolly Homespun’s genuine article, which I lay hold of to good effect. My crinolines and whalebone corseting are dandy armor against her nails; if she rips one petticoat through, there’s another beneath. But her bit of bunting is all she’s got, and while it still waves at the scuffle’s end (in fact more than at the outset, for I’ve clawed it half off her) it sorely needs a Mary Pickersgill to restitch Stars to Stripes.

/>   All this, of course, whilst cameras roll merrily and spectators cheer. Not all of them for Old Glory, either—there must have been a few Canadians in the crowd—though I grant the applause at my most telling blow might have been as much for B.G.‘s jugs as for the stroke that bared them. Comes my Author now to “relieve” me, just when I’m in position to strike Columbia’s colours altogether. Balls! cry I, when he scolds me for so exerting myself in my Condition—but enough I suppose is enough. We step out of the light, still fixed on Columbia as she regroups. Merry B. meanwhile, in proper hysterics, has fled to her Director’s arms—anyroad to his camera crane, where he coolly comforts her whilst she bawls and swipes at her lap. Somehow reascended to the balcony, Bray shrills imprecations upon us all, in particular upon Ambrose, who he ominously vows shall Pay. The crowd applauds him to the waiting Newswatch helicopter, which promptly buzzes off—to Lily Dale? (We’ve not seen him since).

  Now bedraggled Bea sees what’s what on that camera crane and, her knockers rewrapped in the St Sp B, makes to turn the Eagle’s talons on Tinkerbell, who to my further satisfaction (her leotard mopped and her dander up) lays the same order of insults on her that were lately laid on me: M-F’ing Old Bag, & cet. The Director has his hands full keeping them apart. Britannia and weary Literature retire arm in arm from the scene, not much the worse for wear and withal fairly pleased with ourselves, as well as mightily entertained. In this reenactment at least, the redcoats might not have won the Scajaquada Scuffle, but Brother Jonathan surely seems to’ve come off second best.