Letters

by John Barth

  A declaration: Angela is not your daughter, ha ha. Full and plausible description: the circumstances of her engenderment on a certain night fifteen years since, in a period when, over and above my limited fertility, my then considerable potency was in relative abeyance by reason of marital quarrels. Graphic and sarcastic account of Marsha’s rousing to adultery my fertile but indifferently potent brother. Et cetera. No occasion given for the writer’s tendering this news now, which I passed on to Germaine, and she to Magda, without comment.

  Peter wondered merrily from the kitchen what we were up to: the champagne was losing its cool. Magda kissed first me, then Germaine, and took the liberty of shredding the letter. “Poor bitch,” she said, and left us. Angie squealed at her Uncle Peter’s popping of the cork. Milady wondered, with a sigh, Must we really reenact this stage? I suggested we wed without waiting for either further tidings from her uterus or clearer economic weather; (she agreed, Art, right readily, and) we went upstairs to announce the news. Angie hugged us all noisily, her wont, and was noisily hugged back. Embraces and the bubbly all around.

  There remained the matter of date. Germaine herself proposed Saturday, 13 September, as being by her reckoning the 6th day of what would be the 6th week of the 6th Stage of our affair. I concurred. As to the hour, she was less certain: ought it to be 6 A.M.? 6 P.M.? Or (dividing the 24 hours into half a dozen equal periods) sometime between 8 P.M. and midnight?

  About 10:17 A.M., said I. Or about 5:08 P.M. Your choice.

  (About?!)

  Let’s say tennish that morning or fivish that afternoon.

  Um. She didn’t get it. (Doesn’t yet, at this point in her transcription.)

  Depending, you see, on whether our wedding should commence the fourth or the sixth period of that day: i.e., the “Marsha/Marriage” Period or the “We-Ourselves” Period.

  Oh, the We-Ourselves, definitely (said Germaine). Sixes all the way, luv.

  Done, then: 13 Sept., fivish.

  But, um.

  Um?

  Yes. When Germaine elle-même divides 24 hours by 6 (went on Germaine), she gets a day whose 6th Period commences at 8 P.M sharp

  Aye.

  Is her arithmetic wrong (she wants to know)?

  Not her arithmetic.

  Well. She had been patient, had she not, my fiancée asked, with my exasperating schedules and programmes? Patient and more than patient? And it was, was it not, in a spirit of loving accommodation thereto that she (right readily) put by whatever qualms the probably and delicately pregnant might, if even slightly superstitious, entertain about marrying on the 13th?

  Aye.

  Then she lovingly requests of her hopeful impregnator (you understand, Art; we’ve not seen Dr Rosen yet) and willful fiancé a full farking outline of what we’re up to, that she may judge for herself whether certain tacit understandings have all along been tacit misunderstandings, e.g., her betrothed’s hexaphilia. Call it an engagement gift.

  Okay. Up to a point.

  What point?

  The sixth point.

  O shit, Ambrose! (Aye! Aye!)

  Leave a double space here in the transcript, Germaine: we come now to the business of this letter.

  But she was, as (almost) always, patient, and I herewith honour her request, up to the farthest point that I myself could see as of, say, 4 August: the date of that final letter to Yours Truly and the end, as I saw and see it, of my life’s first cycle and the career of “A. M. King.”

  The mistake, my love, was not in your arithmetic, but in your understandable choice of divisor. Hexaphile I am; but 7, not 6—so I saw when I outlined my life for old Yours Truly—is the number that finally rules us. Thus our wedding time: 24 hours -=- 7 periods = 3.4285714 hours per period x 5 periods gives us a 6th period commencing at 17.142856 hours, i.e., about 5:08 P.M. Happy hour! A 7th then runs from about 8:34 P.M. to midnight: but in it we hexaphiles take no interest, nor have we foresight of it.

  Think me mad, Germaine (I do; Art won’t); revoke if you will my Honorary Membership in Humanity (not yet): here are the 6’s I saw—they are, you guessed it, 6 in number, the last three in outline only—in a moment of clairvoyance that August Monday at the brink of Horseshoe Falls, as I bid adieu with you to Y.T.:

  1. That our love affair, Q.E.D., is the 6th and climactic of my life, its predecessors being each of a certain character, and with certain partners, not necessary here to re-rehearse. Call these love affairs Series One.

  (Check.)

  2. That—as I began to realise round about May of this year, you will recall—our connexion itself, at first by chance and then at my intrigued (obsessed) direction, recapitulated in its development its predecessors, as ontogeny repeats phylogeny. No need to outline that; we’ve lived (& suffered) it through, to when—Monday, 4 August, 1969—we were done with amorous gestation and born to ourselves: this happy 6th Stage, which you have been pleased to dub, and rightly, Mutuality. Call these stages of our love affair Series Two.

  (Check, check.)

  3. That, however (uh oh), this 6th Stage itself, no doubt by this time from mere reflex, has week by week echoed, more or less, that ontogeny that recapitulated that phylogeny. August 4-10 was not unlike our early courtship of February-March, our “1st Magda” Stage, excuse the expression. August 11-17 echoed our horny April, itself, etc. Etc. Thus we are just done for good and all with “Marsha,” in more ways than one; and today we commence Week 5, i.e. Stage 5, i.e. etc.(Entendu.) Thus too our thought to marry in Week 6, Sept. 8-14. Call these several weeks of our 6th Stage Series Three.

  (Check, check, check. But.)

  4. But all this implies, to you as well as to me and for better or worse, further concentric series: e.g., your immediate suggestion that we wed on the Saturday of that week: its 6th, climactic, “ourmost” day. Call these days Series Four.

  (Check X 4. But that’s not all it implies, Ambrose.)

  5. You foresaw further, though reasonably mistaken in your divisor, that a late-afternoon or early-evening hour might be more appropriate than some other to the fine print of this programme; that in any case our “ourmost” day of our ourmost week of our ditto stage of our love affair might have so to speak an ourmost hour, or period, fittest for nuptials. Call these periods Series Five.

  (Check etc.; but screw Art, Ambrose: get to it!)

  6. Let’s not trifle around with minutes and seconds, but rather imagine that upcoming 6th week as a honeymoon week, our wedding-Saturday its climactic day, itself climaxed by our wedding. Come, Germaine: let’s imagine the 6th 6 to be, not some minute of some hour, but the climax of that climax: our first coming together as wife and husband. (I like that, Ambrose.) Eros, Hymen: give us strength! If we’re to have a Series Six, let it be the stages of our day’s sixth sex together, that initial legal lovemaking, and its 6th point our first connubial climax. Betcha we can, Milady—and be damned if I can think of any fitter way to peak, vindicate, purge, and be done with this obsession for reenactment!

  For your patience wherewith, Art and Germaine, once again my thanks.

  A.

  (Pause. Now I am not pleased, love, as I was some sentences since. Au contraire: I am frightened to the heart as I push the Pause on your machine. Each and every of those six sixes implies a seven; that parade of climaxes a ditto of dénouements. Even a Seventh Series, it would seem, is pending: seven several strokes, must one presume, of that connubial climax? Now, betrothed sir: though I love you despite all this, very possibly carry your child, and brim with joy at the prospect of wifing you whatever our economic and other woes, you are as it happens not the first formalist I ever fucked. You say you could see, at Niagara-Fallsbrink, but 6/7ths through our story. What I see is, at the end of Series Seven, detumescence, say, and postorgasmic release. Dandy! At the end of Series Six, postcoital lassitude. Who cares? In the 7th period of Series Five, last hours of our wedding day, a weary, blissful 7th coupling. Fatigued joy! In the 7th day of Series Four (I review the transcript), the Sunday of
our “honeymoon” week, a similarly lazy spell, let us imagine, of loving rest.

  (So far, so good. But the 7th week of this honeymoony Mutuality, the close of your Series Three—am I to look not only for a week-long falling-off from loving vows so freshly vowed, but (chilling prospect!) for the end of Honeymoon before even the Sturgeon Moon is followed by the Harvest? And then (cold hand upon my womb!) a 7th Stage of our affair—commencing, let’s see, 22 September, Yom Kippur on my calendar, and ending God knows when—characterised, on the level of Series Two, by the fin d’orgasme of Series Seven, the postcoital blah of Six, the final fuck of Five, the day of rest of Four, the week’s falling-off of Three…?

  (!

  (And then—O January in the heart! O ice!—in Series One…

  (I can see, Ambrose, but cannot say! O love, love: posttranscript me when I unpush this Pause!)

  P.S.: Adieu, Art. Now: Will you, dear Germaine, circa 5 P.M. Saturday, 13 September 1969, take me Ambrose as your lawful wedded husband, in dénouements as in climaxes, in sevens as in sixes, till death do us et cet.?

  (Pause!

  (Hm!

  (Well…

  (I will. Yes. I will.)

  AM/ggp(a)

  cc: JB

  A: Ambrose Mensch to Whom It May Concern (in particular the Author). Water message #2 received. His reply. A postscript to the Author.

  The Lighthouse

  Erdmann’s Cornlot

  “Dorset,” Maryland

  Monday, September 22, 1969

  TO:

  Whom it may concern

  FROM:

  Yours truly, Ambrose Mensch

  RE:

  A new letter to me of yesternoon, “washed up” in an otherwise almost empty, barnacled, sea-grown magnum of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge upon the beach before Mensch’s Castle during the refilming of the “Water Message sequence” of the motion picture FRAMES, duly discovered by yours truly, and found to consist this time wholly of body, without return address, date, salutation, close, or signature. To which the late “Arthur Morton King’s” reply would doubtless be the inverse, like Yours Truly’s to me of May 12, 1940. But I have commenced the second cycle of my life; I am striving through, in order to reach beyond, such games.

  Dear Madam, Sir, or both:

  A, in traditional letter-symbolism, = the conjoining of 2 into 1. Ad-mi-ra-ti-on, Be-ne-fi-ci-al, Con-so-la-ti-on, De-cla-ra-ti-on, Ex-hor-ta-ti-on, For-ni-ca-ti-on, Ge-ne-ra-ti-on, followed by Ha-bi-ta-ti-on, In-vi-ta-ti-on, & cet.: another bloody cycle of awakening, adventure, atonement at the Axis Mundi, apotheosis, and apocalypse.

  All those sevens and sevenths seen together, in an instant, as if in a vision in Angie’s egg, on the 7th stroke of the 6th stage of the 6th lovemaking, etc., etc., on G’s & my wedding day: I.e., (a) that 7th stroke itself; (b) the postcoital embrace to follow it; then (c) the final lovemaking of that loveful day; then (d) the final day of that honeymoon week; then (e) the final week of that fine seven weeks of our Mutuality; then (f) this final stage—may it last long!—of our relation, wherein I am devotedly in love with my bride and she is serene, serene; then (g)…

  Alphabetical Priority, yes: as if to discipline, even if only by artifice, as in formal poetry, our real priorities; Example follows.

  Angie, at age not-quite-fifteen, is, so Magda’s gynecologist reports this morning, pregnant! Appointment made some weeks ago by M., without our knowing it, and kept secret since—through Mother’s dying, Peter’s dying, my remarrying, our own efforts at impregnation, etc.—“not to bother us prematurely” with her suspicions of my daughter’s skipped menses and recent morning nausea. Abortion, all hands agree, to be arranged.

  Anniversary View of History: one Saturnian Revolution ago today, when I was eleven and she twelve or thirteen, Magda Giulianova introduced me, in the toolshed behind the old Menschhaus, to my sexuality—green then, still far from gray, but mightily toned down by this new news, by recent events, and by that seventh seven.

  An old-time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual.

  Author, old comrade and contrary, funhouse fashioner and guide: how’s that for your next and seventh?

  B = mother of letters: birth, bones, blood & breast: the Feeder.

  Birthmark itches like an old bee-sting; my turn to confront the family nemesis?

  Bottled message: TOWER OF TRUTH 0700 9/26/69, plus some dark, grainy odd-odored solid, like freeze-dried coffee spoilt by moisture: not exactly a bombshell letter!

  Break-in at M. M. Co. remains unsolved; Todd Andrews confides suspicions and reasons therefor, but has neither grounds nor inclination to prosecute; we neither.

  Bray (with a rush of red rage I now recall his never-quite-explained tête-à-tête with Angela down by the Original Floating Theatre II in mid-July, which I broke up at cost of concussion from mike-boom blow; could he, of all the hair-raisingly creepish male animals upon this planet…)?!

  Brice and/or Bruce it was who fetched me that blow that day; the same who—surely—planted Water Message #2 for my discovery yesterday; and they have intimated that Bray may make his “final appearance” at the Tower of Truth dedication ceremonies this Friday: the Ascension sequence, in which, I begin to think, I too must play a role.

  Brother: thy will be done.

  C = the crescent tumescent: creation, call, crossing, coincidentia oppositorum, catharsis, cataclysm.

  Cancer of the Muse: if I am dying of it, it is living of me.

  Castine (this reader of G’s collected letters suspects) may be, or at some point may have become, a chimera: three decades, years, days ago?

  Conflict: last-ditch provincial Modernist wishes neither to repeat nor to repudiate career thus far; wants the century under his belt but not on his back. Complication: he becomes infatuated with, enamored of, obsessed by a fancied embodiment (among her other, more human, qualities and characteristics) of the Great Tradition and puts her—and himself—through sundry more or less degrading trials, which she suffers with imperfect love and patience, she being a far from passive lady, until he loses his cynicism and his heart to her spirited dignity and, at the climax, endeavors desperately, hopefully, perhaps vainly, to get her one final time with child: his, hers, theirs, (cc: Author)

  Cook IV’s Ampersand Letter and the rest were supposedly written and posted after his alleged death in 1814; Cook VI’s “Francis Scott Key Letter”—so Prinz had Bruce say to me (Voice Over) at Fort McHenry—would “no doubt wash up in a bottle somewhere”; Coast Guard won’t say what they saw aboard Baratarian; what is this new water message the key to?

  Cornerstone in round tower: letters to future, letter-bomb to present?

  Cycle II must not reenact its predecessor: echo, yes; repeat, no.

  D = departure, dark descent through door of dreams and domain of dragons to deep sleep and dissolution.

  Dates (of letters) should also “count”: alphabetics + calendrics + serial scansion through seven several correspondents = a form that spells itself while spelling out much more and (one hopes) spellbinding along the way, as language is always also but seldom simply about itself; and the narrative, like an icebreaker, like spawning salmon, incoming tide, or wandering hero, springs forward, falls back, gathers strength, springs farther forward, falls less far back, and at length arrives—but does not remain at—its high-water mark (making this note made me late arriving at Bloodsworth Island last Tuesday and possibly thereby saved my life).

  Day of Atonement: Forgive me, Germaine; forgive me, son or daughter who may or may not exist in my wife’s womb, and Angie who exists imperfectly upstairs as I write this in the Menschhaus basement, and God whose image we have but darkly glimpsed in camera obscura and Easter egg; forgive me what wrongs I’ve done since, say, last year’s Kol Nidre, and others I may be about to do.

  Dedication ceremony scheduled for 10 A.M. Friday; Sunrise at our meridian—I reckon from my almanac—approximately 0654 EDST. Daylight begins to dawn.


  Design for LETTERS attached (see P.S.), courtesy of Ambrose M.: Doctor(er) of Letters, honoris causa.

  Dramaturgy = the incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium. Dénouement: not the issue of G’s appointment with Dr. Rosen tomorrow, or of her pregnancy, or of the dawn’s early light 9/26/69, or of the puzzles of Barataria and Baratarian; all those locks, and whatever lies beyond them, may be diversions: the real treasure (and our story’s resolution) may be the key itself: illumination, not solution, of the Scheme of Things.

  Drew Mack: then Andrews is likely to be there too; even to get there first, as at McHenry and Barataria…

  E = Eros, erection, ejaculation, egg, embryo, ego escape, epiphany, elixir theft, etc.

  “Easter-Egg Vision,” Item 7: see G:g, below. Echo, yes; repeat, no.