Letters

by John Barth

  My lover saluted me with half a ham sandwich.

  What is the Second Conception? Merope innocently enquired of Prinz, who replied without turning his head: Same as the first. Bruce?

  This last to Tweedledum, who promptly brandishes some sort of periodical—clearly they’d rehearsed this bit of business at their end of the table and were ready for that inadvertent cue from ours—and read (I paraphrase, but pretty closely): The question put by the film Frames, says scenarist A. M. King, comes essentially to this: Can a played-out old bag of a medium be fertilised one last time by a played-out Author in a played-out tradition? King himself invokes William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife, whose hero pretends to be impotent in order to cuckold his sympathetic friends. Viewers of Frames may judge this wishful thinking on its “Author’s” part.

  Smirks Tweedledee: Frames is our new working title. Adds Bruce: “Author” is in quotes.

  The publication he identified as a Buffalo “underground” film newsletter; the article a report on Those Crazy Goings-on in Delaware Park. He had another copy; Ambrose and I were welcome to this one.

  Well, I was appropriately shocked. Not stunned, exactly, but startled for sure. But the cameras—and at least four pairs of sunglassed eyes—were on us.

  Dirty pool, growled Ambrose: they left out the Author’s Trenchant Irony; his Mordant Wit.

  Don’t they always, I said, as levelly as I could manage. And to Prinz: If that’s your Magazine Explosion, luv, it’s a bleedin’ dud. See you at the fort.

  Exeunt Played-Out Old Bag of a Medium and Scenarist A. M. King, the latter smitten (by his own protestation) with pride in my self-possession and presence of mind, the former mad as a wet hen. He was misquoted, for Christ’s sake, Ambrose complained all the way to our motel; I must learn, as he had learnt, the Larger View of Journalism, to wit: that newspapers are no doubt necessary even though they never get anything quite right. Bugger yer Larger View, humphed I: I really am nothing but an effing symbol for you, what?

  Symbol yes, my companion ardently acknowledges. Effing Symbol yes; Also an Effing Symbol yes. But Nothing But? Never!

  I had aborted one fetus already in Fort Erie Ontario, I reminded him; I could abort another. Ambrose was transported: Was I telling him I truly might be et cetera? If I was, said I, I wasn’t by “Scenarist Arthur Morton King,” who for all I cared could stuff himself into a bottle and post himself over the Falls. Done, said Ambrose: done and done! That King is dead!

  We were stripping as we quarrelled, to shower and change for the afternoon. This last was his In-vi-ta-ti-on to come off our spat and into bed, and though I wasn’t yet mollified enough for that, my ire had indeed peaked and was passing. I understood what he meant by also symbolic but not merely symbolic, and if he truly intended to have done with that corny nom de plume and write straightforwardly under his own name, I took that for a healthy developement. In short, I was ready to return to our Mutuality and, in time, lend a hand to King John Thomas’s Restoration. But as I came from the W.C. to kiss and make up, I had a chilly flash that was nothing menopausal: the Second Conception scene!

  I tore the room apart to find mikes and cameras. Ambrose swore (when he understood what I was about) he’d not Set Me Up, but agreed that Prinz might well be setting us both up, and joined in the dismantlement of Erie Motel Room 21. Nothing there, unless on the C.I.A. level of miniaturization and concealment. Spent and laughing by now at the mess we’d made—and would have to restore—we were indeed tempted to take a tumble in its midst; “bang the old symbol,” as Ambrose put it from where he lay naked on the piled-up bedclothes. Yet however well we’d searched, and however much I assured him I believed his protestations, I couldn’t bring myself to climb aboard, so repellent was the thought of Prinz’s somehow bugging our intercourse. Indeed, the more that possibility laid hold of my imagination, the more inclined I grew to declare a moratorium on sex—but not on sweet Mutuality!—till we were safely out of camera range.

  Ambrose was delighted; I soon realised why, and rolled my eyes to heaven. The weekend, you see, was upon us: if we now put by our heavy humping for a spell of Chaste Reciprocal Affection, then Week 3 of this happy 6th Stage of ours would echo Stage 3 of our affair (approximately May), itself an echo of his chaste “3rd affair.” Moreover it was, I now recalled, at about this juncture in our affair that we began to realise how its ontogeny, so to speak, was recapitulating its phylogeny. Did that portend on the one hand that our Happy Sixth Stage was good for another month at least? Did it mean on the other hand that we had only another month? And—dear God!—that we were not really “ourselves” yet after all, at least not entirely, and would not be until, let’s see, the 2nd week of September (i.e., the 6th week of this 6th Stage)?

  I offered to go vomit. Was truly nauseated, whether by that tiresome prospect or by the Last Brunch. Morning Sickness! jubilated Ambrose. I made good my offer.

  Sunset at Old Fort Erie! Mighty Niagara chugging north before our battlements! The lights of the U.S.A. to eastward; of a coming thundershower to southwestward, out over the muggy lake; of Tweedles Dum and Dee positioned about our ramparts and especially in the neighbourhood of the restored powder magazine, a brick-vaulted subterranean chamber in the northeast bastion atop which, in director’s chairs, sat the Director and the Director’s moll: empty-handed, neither smoking nor drinking nor reading nor talking, only waiting, he in his uniform nondescripts, she in her Salvation Army chic.

  And the lake flies, John! Do you have them at Chautauqua, I wonder? Overgrown mosquitoes in appearance, they neither bite nor sting, only fill the night in such numbers at the peak of their week-long hatch that the whole air thrums; gather so thickly upon any light surface that it is darkened; immolate themselves by the thousands on any exposed electric light bulb (small hills of the immolated were piling already beneath the floodlights). Tons of idle protein on the wing: the phenomenon is African, prodigious! We walked through it, exclaiming and waving our arms (luckily our clothing was not light-coloured; the insects are not attracted to people; they landed on our clothes and skin and hair only accidentally, but given their numbers, such accidents occurred by the dozens per second. Once perched, they stay there; brushed off, they obligingly die), to where the lighting crew amused themselves with raising and lowering the volume of that huge thrum at will, as if with a control knob, by brightening and dimming the floodlights. Astonishing!

  Once over our initial revulsion, we found we could move through the swarm without injury or much difficulty, and that a constant easy fanning of the hands kept one’s face and hair reasonably bugless. The scene that follows you must envision in ever dimming light, however, as the lake flies becloud the floodlight lenses with their cumulative dying juices.

  Can we shoot in these conditions? asks Ambrose when we reach the magazine. We’re shooting, replies the video Tweedle (Dum); you’re on. Must be the Fort Erie Assault scene, quips our Author: American and Canadian Soldiers are dying like flies.

  No response from the filmists to this Mordant Wit. I then declared to the company (what Ambrose and I had rehearsed en route from our motel by way of joining the battle, as it were) that in our judgement no Second Conception scene was called for until and unless the First should prove a mis-take. In plain English: played out or not, we had reason to believe ourselves preggers already. The charade Prinz meant as Squeezing Blood from A Turnip would in fact be Carrying Coals to Newcastle; I could not reconceive till I was delivered. Preggers!

  We were regarded: the tiniest hint of interest in Merry Bernstein’s eyes; none whatever in the others’ (Prinz still wore his sunglasses, so who knows). Not exactly a triumphant opening, though it was exciting for us so to declare ourselves. Ambrose therefore commenced an improvisation that led to the following exchange, which I approximate from memory and edit for concision:

  A.M. (to Prinz and Merry B.): Maybe you should do the Second Conception, what? Film’s as played-out a medium as Fiction. Off with your clothe
s, Merry.

  R.P.: I’m the Director.

  A.M.: Direct, then. My script calls for a Fecund, Vital New Medium to conceive a Major Work of Art by a Virile Young Director who liberates her from residual contamination by the Old Medium she has rendered obsolete. It’s your big scene, Mer.

  R.P. (quietly, to Yours Truly): You undress, ma’am.

  Y.T.: I jolly shan’t.

  R.P. then makes a small sign to Merope, no more than a twitch of the mouth and turn of the hand, and she begins peeling off her Salvation Armies for the cameras. I am more and more cheered: Merry’s jugs are gross of nipple and ill suspended, her thighs and bum unappealingly slack for a girl’s and striated already, her legs unshaven. Naked, she stands self-consciously in the (ever dimming) lights: a lumpy Lake Erie Venus shooing flies.

  MERRY B. (approximately): Shoo!

  AUDIO TWEEDLE (to A.M.): Let the Muse come to you and Reggie now. The camera will show which medium she inspires.

  And dear A.M. (an able ad-libber when he’s up for the game): She’s not my muse, Reg. Exhibition is your business.

  R.P. (with smile): You withdraw?

  A.M. (ditto, and still ad libitum, mind): I cannot withdraw from what I decline to penetrate. Germaine and I stand pat.

  This sally gained something, no doubt, from the ambiance. I happily took my Author’s arm; he bussed my cheek; the lights dimmed another quantum. Reggie shrugged, fetched up the little megaphone he’d affected in the Scajaquada Scuffle, and terminated what will no doubt prove to be the longest stretch of dialogue in this flick by calling down into the magazine for “Private Blank.”

  Yup. Forth issued into the failing light the former Mrs Ambrose Mensch: dazed, sullen, and much the worse for whatever wear she’d been at. Marsha’s complexion was flushed and mottled, her gait unsteady; her eyes were wide and glassy, her hair and frock a wreck, as if she’d been in dire clutches indeed. But she was smiling, albeit loonily, as she wandered our way, waving a tiny American flag.

  Ambrose squeezed my arm. Jacob Horner cried her name and hurried (for him) from the shadows behind us—we’d not seen him there—to her side. Marsha blinked and flagged him wanly off, as if he were a lake fly. Merope wondered to the Director whether it was okay to put her clothes back on—but Prinz was watching us watch Marsha. Though Ambrose’s concern was evident from his grip, he said and did nothing, sensibly leaving to Horner the anxious interrogation of His Woman.

  He got not much out of her—or of Prinz, whom he understandably pressed to tell where she’d come from, where been, and doing what with whom. She’d been to “the other farm,” Marsha woozily acknowledged, and now was back at this one; bugger the rest of it. She declined to be taken to the infirmary, or home to bed. She managed after all a sort of smirk of recognition at Ambrose and me. The cameras rolled.

  Joe Morgan, expressionless, appeared beside Prinz, who tersely called for “the Exercycles.” Grips at once fetched forth from the magazine a pair of those machines and placed them side by side before the Director, who clearly had prepared this odd business in advance. Docile Marsha mounted as readily as she could manage, saying Ouch, wow, I’m still sore, and began pedalling. Frowning Horner joined her on the other. Merope (dressed now) resumed her chair and lost interest in the spectacle.

  It’s the Horseback-Riding scene, Tweedledum explained to a microphone held by his comrade. How can that be? that chap dutifully enquired. In the original it’s “Rennie Morgan” who gives “Jacob Horner” his riding lessons. Where’s Ms Golden?

  It was her or me, Marsha muttered. What on earth, I whispered to Ambrose. He shook his head, touched my hand, replied that it looked to him very much as if his ex-wife was stoned out of her mind. Marsha was pedalling now more industriously; one would say almost grimly. Horner reached over to dab her brow with his handkerchief. Looking straight at Ambrose she enounced: You’ll get yours, too.

  Prinz signalled Audio Tweedle (so it appeared to us), and, a moment after, there issued from some loudspeaker in the magazine—unnaturally clear, even strident, but as whacked-out mechanical as Marsha’s was whacked-out narcotic—the voice of Bea Golden, delivering what sounded like a pronunciamento: As of yesterday, “Phi-point of the calendar year and of LILYVAC’s Five-Year Plan,” the Mating Season was closed. Today—“St Neapolus’s Day and Bicentennial of the Emperor’s birth”—began “the Fall Work Period of Year E: i.e., Year Four of the Five-Year Plan.” Which, however, in the light of “the Perseid Illuminations,” might well prove to be “Year N, the first of a new Seven-Year Plan.” Et cetera, and don’t ask me! To be fertile matters little, Bea’s voice went on; to be fertilised, little more (this, John, addressed as if directly to Ambrose and me!): What matters is the bringing to term and the successful delivery of that Hero who is both Saviour and Golden Destroyer. Germaine Gordon Pitt, Lady Amherst: nota bene! Morgana Le Fay: your turn will come! The New Golden Age will commence April 5, 1977!

  All this last, John, truly spoken as though in italics, and if any doubt remained of whose particular lunacies Bea’s voice was iterating, that doubt was blown away by her closing words: The revolutionary future belongs neither to Pen nor to Camera, but to one… two…

  On three a hollow boom boomed either from the loudspeaker or from the magazine itself, whence billowed now a great puff of white smoke, and from out of that smoke a presumably recorded male laugh that could be none but Jerome Bray’s, and a great many flittering sheets of paper, as if a post office had exploded.

  We all withdrew a safe distance (except Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank, who went on exercycling as if hypnotised), till the air cleared of everything save the ubiquitous lake flies. Even Prinz leapt back from his chair at the blast, and his lieutenants from their microphones and cameras. Merry Bernstein sat on the ground not far from where Ambrose and I had jumped to, drawing her clothes tight about her and verging reasonably upon hysterics.

  Much shaken myself, I did what I could for her whilst the men gingerly investigated. First back at their stations were Dum and Dee, to record the last wisps of smoke and leaves of paper. Morgan demanded to know what was going on and where his missing patient was: Prinz and Ambrose both disclaimed responsibility for and foreknowledge of the stunt; indeed, each was inclined grudgingly to credit his rival with a bravura special effect. The papers, blowing about now in a mild breeze off the river, proved to be covered with printed numbers, meaningless to us. The magazine, upon inspection, yielded a portable tape machine, an auxiliary loudspeaker, and an empty canister, presumably a spent smoke bomb. No sign of Bray or Bea Golden.

  Jacob Horner volunteered from his mechanical mount that it was in fact the name day of the Bonaparte family and 200th birthday of their most celebrated member, who took his Christian name from a saint martyred under Diocletian in the 4th Century. Birthday too of Princess Anne, Ethel Barrymore, Thomas De Quincey, Edna Ferber, T. E. Lawrence, and Walter Scott. Deathday of Wiley Post and Will Rogers in plane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska. Likewise, traditionally, of the Virgin Mary, whose passing is referred to as her Dormition. Repeated Marsha: Better her than me. And on they pedalled, going nowhere.

  I know for fairly certain, John, that Ambrose had no foreknowledge of the Great Magazine Explosion, and we’re fairly persuaded that it took Prinz by surprise as well. His signal had been for a tape made a few hours earlier by Marsha, whose bedraggled arrival by bus from Buffalo had inspired this more modest surprise for Ambrose. The tape—we heard it shortly after—reveals that she had indeed gone voluntarily, with Bea Golden, to Bray’s Lily Dale establishment a few days since, and returned when her unspecified business there was done. That Bea, unhappy at the Remobilisation Farm since the Doctor’s death, has chosen to stay on in Lily Dale. That coaxial television is a minor technological innovation, not a revolutionary new medium. Et cetera.

  Unless, then (what we briefly considered), Prinz’s assistants have taken over the Movie (Frames!), it would appear that neither he nor Ambrose but Jerome Bray carried the field in the A
ssault on Fort Erie, turning all the rest of us into Withdrawing Britishers—and that he has had his revolting, nefarious Way with both Marsha and Bea. Merry Bernstein is scared out of her knickers, as well she might be. I think the New York State Police ought to be dispatched at once to Lily Dale to see what’s what, but I can interest no one in Bea Golden’s fate enough to take action (I shall ring up Morgan before we leave, and prod Ambrose again when he wakes up).

  Can the Epical Feud between Author and Director have run its course, one wonders, now that the Prize is flown and nobody cares to pursue it? If so, ’twas a Conflict with much Complication and no Climax! But the two parted company last night downright cordially. And my lover is sleeping through this morning because—as excited Authorially by the day’s events as were Prinz & Co. Directorially, and liberated by our new Abstinence Week from a night of making love—he sat up happily till dawn turning St Neapolus’s Day into sentences. Not, praise be, another of those regressive epistles to Yours Truly, but (so he teases, and I’m honoring my promise not to peek) a fiction in the form of a letter or letters to the Author from a Middle-aged English Gentlewoman and Scholar in Reduced Circumstances, Currently Embroiled in a Love Affair with an American Considerably Her Junior.

  Ho hum, said I, and toddled off to sleep. Whereupon that simpleminded dramaturge, my subconscious, contrived to dream that all my letters to you after the first one—not excluding this, whose sentences were already forming in my mind as I fell asleep—are in fact from the pen of our common friend Ambrose Mensch, whose Middle-aged English Et Cetera does not exist!

  Good old subconscious. But now it’s I am awake, and he asleep: rest assured these pages are not from our Ambrose, but from,

  As ever, your

  Germaine

  P.S.: Speaking of authors: I have I believe now gone quite through your published oeuvre, sir, per program: a book a month since March. What am I to read in August? In September?