Letters

by John Barth

  See here: there was no call to call. My letter was nothing urgent—a trial balloon, not a cry for help. But perhaps the urgency was on your end; on the phone you sounded, with every good reason, strung out to the limit.

  Therefore, while I look forward to the promised letter amplifying your remarkable suggestions and too-generous offers of your own invention, I’ve no mind at all to accept the latter—certainly at least not before you’re calmly sure you’ll never use that Perseus material yourself, and not unless I can present you with some quid for so handsome a quo. J. L. Borges (whose birthday today is, along with Beardsley’s and Beerbohm’s) maintains that “originality” is a delusion—that we writer chaps are all more or less faithful amanuenses of the human spirit. So be it: but let it be the human spirit, not one particular fellow human’s!

  So I shall perpend with thanks, but put by for the present, your suggestion that I make a chimerical book out of Perseus, Bellerophon & Something Else before tackling LETTERS, though I acknowledge its fitness and am much impressed by the conceit.

  On the other hand, I accept at once and gratefully your other suggestion: that the ground theme be not so much revolution or recycling as reenactment: the attractions, hazards, rewards, and penalties of a “2nd cycle” isomorphic with the “1st.” It’s what I’d thought around without thinking of: a kind of key—to what treasure remains to be seen. And your remark that I cannot rescue Ambrose Mensch from the Funhouse because he’s no longer there I take for good news amid all your bad. At least I understand, to the heart, your impulse at the midpoint of your life to “empty yourself before commencing its second half. Surely that’s what midpoints and the Axis Mundi are all about.

  But the coincidence of that midpoint with your family griefs, and with what looks to be the climax of that crazy business between you and Reg Prinz, gives me pause. As I work and play through this bright hot Sunday (St. Bartholomew’s Day) on my upland lake, I anxiously imagine you-all down there in Tidewaterland “reenacting” today on their anniversary—which is also the traditional date of Muhammad’s flight and John Gilpin’s ride—the “Bladensburg Races” and the burning of Washington. Are you not, in your condition, playing with fire?

  I must trust your excellent Lady A. to see to it you don’t get burned. Speaking of Conditions: is it premature (or presumptuous) of me to add, to my thanks and my best wishes to you both, my congratulations?

  As ever,

  E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Explaining her fortnight’s silence. The Burning of Washington. Two more deaths and a memorial service. Preparations for the Bombardment of Fort McHenry and for her wedding.

  “Mensch’s Folly”

  Saturday, 13 September 1969

  Dear Mr B.,

  Enclosed, if I remember to enclose it when this is done, is a copy of my transcript of Ambrose’s taped letter of 1 September to (the late) “Author Morton King,” with whom we are no longer concerned. It will explain to you, more or less, a vertiginous business of 6’s and 7’s that I myself intend to think no more of, though it still directs our lives as did astronomy the ancient Mayans’.

  Today, for example, is not really Saturday, 13 September; it is Wednesday 10th. But having written you faithfully for 21 sixth days straight (21 Sabbaths if you’re Jewish or 7th-Day Adventist) and then—for very good reason!—having missed the past two Saturdays together with another menstrual period, I’ve so much and mattersome to catch you up on that I’m starting this letter three days early. And I shall be lucky, even so, to get it up to the “present” and posted by its letterhead date.

  My wedding day!

  But there I spring already into the future, doubtless in flight from the shocks of the three weeks since my last: a period of being at sixes and sevens indeed. Then we had just got the horrid news of Peter’s bone cancer and were wondering whether or not to go down to “Barataria” for the “Burning of Washington.” Already an age ago, another world. Peter Mensch is dead, John! And Joe Morgan is dead! (And maybe Mr Jerome Bray, and for all we know Bea Golden. And, to be sure, Mr Ho Chi Minh.) “Washington” is in ashes; Baltimore’s about to take its lumps—and the Menschhaus is in deep mourning, and Mensch Masonry’s office has been burglarised, and we’re pretty sure I’m pregnant, and Magda is amazing, and A. B. Cook is being strangely friendly, and Marsha Blank has declared that Peter is (was, was) Angie’s father, and nobody (but Marsha) cares a damn about that one way or the other, and Ambrose and I will marry at Fort McHenry at 5:08 EDST this coming Saturday, Rosh Hashanah!

  See A.‘s letter for explanation, more or less, of that specific hour and date: the 6th something of the 6th something else of the 6th 6th 6th 6th what-have-you.

  Peter, Peter, Peter! and poor Joe!

  Bloodsworth Island. We went down there after all on that Sunday morning, 24 August, after I’d reported to you the bad news of Peter’s diagnosis and Ambrose had telephoned you, much distraught, late that Saturday night, in reply to your letter. (On the matter of your writing to him, after half a year’s silence to me, I shall not speak.) And as he mentioned in his subsequent letter from Barataria on the Monday morning—typed with his left hand because his right was out of action and I was too busy with hysterical Merry Bernstein to do his writing for him—a lively time was had by all.

  Ambrose was, you understand, feeling as emptied—by his mother’s death, by Peter’s crisis, by M. M. Co.‘s final bankruptcy, by his abandonment of that lovely Perseus project and his longtime pseudonymity—as I, in the 3rd loving week of our “mutuality,” was feeling filled. We went down there, despite our then distress, for the same reason that we will go forward with our wedding plans despite our even greater bereavement now: because Magda (and, back then, dear Peter) insisted. We wound down through your endless marshes—still, steaming, buggy—across the labyrinth of shallow waterways and distant loblolly pines in Backwater Wildlife Refuge, where I saw my first American eagle, down past Crapo and Tedious Creek to Bishops Head, at the lonely tail of Dorchester County. I thought uncomfortably of Ambrose’s having brought Bea Golden through these same marshes in July, at the beginning of hateful Stage 5, to roger her up and down the beach whilst I stewed and fretted in my flapper drag up in Dorset Heights… A hundred years ago!

  But clearly, and fortunately, nothing of the sort was on my lover’s mind. I distracted him as best I could with bird and marsh plant and movie questions, but his eyes kept filling at the thought of poor Peter, poor Magda. We left our little car at the road’s end, where nothing is but a fisherman’s shack and pier, open water on three sides, and, across a mile-wide strait, low-lying, marshy Bloodsworth. Several other empty cars were parked there, among them a black limousine I knew to be Jane Mack’s—but no one was about. We wondered. Presently a lad puttered up in a “Hooper’s Island workboat” (A.’s designation) full of crab pots, and ferried us across to Cook’s lodge: a cheerful young Charon who would not accept our proffered fare.

  So this, thought I, is where they fucked. Well well. There was in fact no beach, only tidal mud flats, spartina grass, cattails. A brown “gut” of water marked with stakes led to Cook’s dock; “Barataria” was a modest but comfortable white frame house, a small caretaker’s cottage, a flagpole, grass doing badly on a sandy lawn. A few crabbing skiffs and a runabout were tied at the pier; a few untidy young people loitered about (refugees from the Remobilisation Farm, they looked to me); a few mosquitoes and biting green flies said hello to us.

  Where was the movie? It would arrive after lunch, Cook’s caretaker told us: a wizened, brown-burnt, friendly local whose “down-county” accent defied my ear and whose employer was off with Prinz & Co. The grips—they were indeed from Fort Erie—showed us crude sets of which they were inordinately proud, meant to represent the U.S. Capitol and the President’s House in 1814. “Gonna burn them fuckers, come dark,” etc. We were given lunch. The main company of Frames, it seemed, were shooting across the Bay, where the British had landed and reboarded after their remarkable expedition. They would r
eturn by boat sometime that afternoon.

  Nothing to do but sip iced tea, worry about Peter, watch the hippies smoke dope, and wish we hadn’t come so early, or at least had brought along the Times. We were, you remember, winding up our week of ritual Abstinence, the Echo of our Reenactment of et cetera. We agreed that Monday would be welcome, family crisis or no. I found in Cook’s library a Mr Glen Tucker’s Poltroons & Patriots: A Popular Account of the War of 1812 in two volumes (1954) and did a spot of homework. Ambrose made desultory notes on his scenario.

  Not till afternoon’s end did the others finally arrive, in a fine big motor yacht named Baratarian. It belonged, we assumed, to the lord of Barataria Lodge: the laureate poet and new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope State University. He was in any case conspicuously aboard, along with a paid captain and a crowd of others, including Reg Prinz, our old chums Bruce and Brice, and that Rising Young Starlet Merope Bernstein, of Fort Erie and Scajaquada fame.

  They were late, Cook explained (after a bluff, booming welcome to us as the Shameless Lovebirds of Liberal-Land, who however, despite our egregious political and moral error, were to regard his Barataria as ours) because of a fortuitous encounter with Mr Todd Andrews’s cruising boat across the Bay; they had made good use of it to film Baratarian under way and had filmed it in turn for “establishing footage,” it being a renovated old oyster-dredging sailboat. And they had stopped off at Bishops Head to unload another pair of lovebirds: Jane Mack and her fiancé, “Lord Baltimore.” It turns out that the yacht is hers, or theirs; they had kindly lent it to the Frames company for the weekend, but had themselves returned to Cambridge.

  I have neglected to mention that this ruddy, fulsome nemesis of mine was rigged out in period costume; made up as, and bent on playing, his ancestor and namesake Andrew Burlingame Cook IV, of whom you know from my reports of a certain painful project whereof I long since washed my hands. The fellow had been a double agent, Cook maintained, in the British Chesapeake expedition of 1814 (news to me), and indeed was allegedly killed at Ft McH., though subsequent letters over his signature are said to have reached his widow at Castines Hundred. Be that as it may (the mere mention of that fateful place-name, and of ancestral letters, gave me a proper heartache, which Ambrose perceived, and squeezed my hand), his descendant seemed very much in charge of Prinz, B. & B., the whole business. Fresh from Mr Tucker’s history, I was struck by Cook’s likeness in face and manner, not to his forebear, of whom there are no extant portraits, but to Admiral Sir George Cockburn, Scourge of the Chesapeake, whom he had better played. Reggie framed and filmed; Bruce and Brice did their audiovisual things; Merope slouched about with wary eye, doubtless on the lookout for Jerome Bray—but Cook ran the show, in high-spirited (and high-handed) collaboration with my quondam Doctor of Letters, whose undoctoring, and my dismissal, he himself had advocated!

  What to make of him? Neither André nor “Monsieur Casteene,” he was the hale, unpredictable fellow I’d first encountered, along with Joe Morgan, in the Maryland Historical Society back in 1961: back-slapper and back-stabber, yet disarmingly “up front” about both and particularly forceful. Unrepentant for having sided with John Schott against Morgan, and later against Ambrose and myself, Cook nonetheless managed, whilst improvising with my friend a whole new scenario for the evening’s shooting, to intimate to me that he was having second thoughts about his Marshyhope appointment: he had urged Schott to sound me out on possible reinstatement! “Of course,” he went so far as to add, “you’ll want to tell him where to get off. But we must have a chat about Germaine de Staël and the Bonapartes, especially between Elba and St Helena. Fascinating!”

  As, one must acknowledge, is he, whoever he is. For all my urge to keep him at arm’s length (I curbed my urge to press him about his ancestor’s letters to his unborn child, and reacted neither way to the mention of my reappointment), I found myself involved—if only because Ambrose was, with a clearly therapeutic relish that warmed my heart—in the most preposterous bit of business yet mounted in this absurd production. We are a long way, John, from where we started in March, with a “motion picture based on your latest work, but echoing its predecessors”!

  Are you ready? As thunderclouds pile up out over the Bay (and a pleasant buffet supper is spread by our host), Cook recounts in the first person to all assembled, from memory, his ancestor’s “posthumous” description of the burning of Washington. The man is a raconteur of some talent and has obviously absorbed his Poltroons & Patriots; whether Andrew IV’s letter is real or not, Andrew VI gives us a convincing “eyewitness” account of the events of 24 August 1814. And the shtik (to borrow Ambrose’s tidewater Yiddish) is that as he chronicles the destruction—for us and for the microphone and cameras—we move outdoors from set to set and, approximately, reenact it.

  Not forgetting, alas, the ongoing subplot, what’s left of it: the War Between Image and Word, a.k.a. Director and Author. Nature cooperates with approaching lightning bolts and thunderclaps as the “Capitol’s” canvas doors are battered down and “Andrew Cook IV” answers aye to “Admiral Cockburn’s” motion to fire the building. The hippies set to with a will; Cook’s caretaker brings umbrellas for the ladies, none of whom, save myself, minds getting drenched. Merry B. is inclined to huddle against Reg P. from the flames and the lightning, which are indeed impressive; but that silent fellow has been waiting his moment, and when we move now, in a pause in the downpour, behind the burning flat to a row of dripping bookshelves representing the Congressional Library, he breaks away from her to do a surprising, dangerous thing. Ambrose has of course been cast momentarily as the librarian, reading aloud from Tucker’s history of this episode; Bruce and Brice stand by, a-filming; suddenly an eight-foot case of “books” (actually painted rows of spines, but the case itself is a heavy wooden thing) comes tumbling upon them, pushed by the Director, from an angle such that to avoid it they must spring toward the flames!

  I am astonished (it will later be surmised that Prinz’s real targets, ever more ascendant, were B. & B., not A.; he had better gone after C.). My betrothed, however, seems scarcely surprised: in the same motion with which he leaps clear, he whales Tucker Vol. 1 at Reggie’s head, and seeing either that his aim is off since the famous First Conception scene or that Tucker’s history is a less accurate missile than Richardson’s novel, unhesitatingly he pulls half of the burning flat itself—a flimsy thing which the storm is breaking loose from its supports—down upon his adversary, knocking him into the mud!

  No injuries on either side. Merope and I restrain our macho mates from further such exchanges. Right on, the hippies cry. Cook applauds and resumes his recitation. T-Dum and T-Dee exchange meaning glances and take up their stations.

  I pass over other such notable moments to sing their culmination. The mise en scène is a flat representing the Tripoli Monument in the Washington Naval Yard, whose original was defaced by a British demolition team. We are to turn its (painted) sculptures into the following tableau vivant: Merry B. to represent Fame, as indicated by a great bronze palm; myself to represent History, wielding a similarly impressive pen (these props Cook claims to be the originals, long in his family’s possession and much coveted by the Smithsonian). At a certain signal, “Director” and “Author”—both of whom have long since been usurped of their functions!—to see which can snatch what.

  Places, everybody? But wait: I have not mentioned that our signal is to come, not from A. B. Cook, IV or VI, or any other of us, no, but from the United States Navy itself. Bloodsworth Island—as everyone seems to know except me—is mainly an aerial gunnery target, uninhabited below Barataria except by very intrepid herons and muskrats. At 2200 hours there is to commence a night-firing exercise in the Prohibited Zone, just south of us; there will be helicopters and patrol boats to insure that the area is clear before the fighters roar in from Patuxent Air Station, across the Bay. It is half after nine already; there they are now, the choppers, blinking and flashing and raising a frig
htful racket, obviously interested in our floodlights and smoking scenery. Cook waves at their searchlights. The hippies raise clenched fists and shout obscenities. The cameras roll. We take our places.

  Am I mistaken in remembering our last sight of Jerome Bray (not counting the sound of him at the Ft Erie Magazine Explosion) to have been his departure by Newswatch helicopter, early in August, from Delaware Park in Buffalo? Well, sir: as if reinvoked by these awesome, clattering navy machines (we do not know how in fact he arrived; Cook alone seemed surprised to see him), just as Fame and I take our rain-soaked places, and Reggie and Ambrose toe the mark some metres off, and Cook makes ready to flag the start, a Union Jack in one hand and the Stars & Bars in t’other—it is 2155; it is 2156; we await the roar of jets—

  Yup. Jerome Bonaparte Bray, on top of our trompe-l’oeil monument. Had anyone doubted the man is mad? Then picture him now, as Brice’s cameras do, in archetypal madman’s garb: his alleged ancestor’s tricorn hat; the cutaway coat with turned-up collar and epaulets; the waistcoat under; and, yes, the wearer’s right hand tucked in above the third button. He has escaped from Elba, Bray declaims, to aid the U. States against G. Britain: also from St Helena, to establish his Second Empire in America! He claims for himself both palm and pen, in token of his “conquest of letters by numbers.” Able was I, he concludes, and I swear I quote him exactly: Able was I… er…

  Here the chopper drowns him out; the fighter planes blast in at heart-stopping low altitude to fire tracer shells and heaven knows what else into the marsh below us; the storm has paused but not passed, and contributes its own apocalyptic sound-and-light background. Taken aback by Bray’s appearance (in both senses) and by the racket, we are spellbound—all save Merope, who at first sight of him shrieks, flings away the palm, and runs. Reg Prinz jumps the gun and dashes for her trophy. Bray comes down at me, loony-eyed; it is the pen he wants (thank God), and I find myself, despite my alarm, in a proper tug-o’-war: plain limey stubbornness, I suppose. Wham! Here come the planes again, taking all our breaths. Ambrose rushes to my assistance: everyone is shouting over the din, myself included; Bruce and Brice impede my lover with lights and dollies; Prinz trips him up, swings at him with that palm. But like Perseus at the wedding feast, Ambrose wades through all obstacles to my side and snatches up the pen. Bray flees at once, behind or over the Tripoli flat, whither lately flew Fame.