by John Barth
On a few occasions the annual message has involved a kind of epiphany: Our son will go past your address in a blue push-chair at 1400 hours on his third birthday. I stand vigil, rush out at the sight; a nursemaid threatens, in agitated Swiss French, to summon the child’s parents and the gendarmerie. I cannot tell for sure; the eyes seem his…
One November André himself paid a call on me in London, incognito: I’d never have known him had he not, like Odysseus, spoken of things privy to the two of us alone. Little Henri was seven then; I was permitted to take lunch with them, on condition that I not reveal myself to be his mother. Surely they were André and Henri; there would be no reason for a hoax so cruel! But I was to understand that so much was at stake in the “game of governments,” ever in progress, that a false step by me could lead to the quick disappearance forever of both of them. Explanations would come in time, perhaps even reunion. Meanwhile… I complied.
Another time… Another time.
In 1942, Mama contrived to “introduce me to” (vide supra) Herr Hermann Hesse, then in his sixties and still living in seclusion in Montagnola, where he was completing Das Glasperlenspiel. Hesse was, in general, celibate, though less than chaste: his conviction that a certain high humour was the mark of transcendent grace, together with his all but total lack of that virtue, had led as much as anything to his breakdown in the 1910’s, his “partially successful” Jungian analysis, and his inability to keep much more than a finger, let us say, in the world. It also made him, off the page and sometimes on, a stupendous bore, though never of the active sort. Mainly he was terrified of people and, like most “major authors” I’ve known, regressive in his intimacies. He came to call me his Knädlchen; I learned to talk the Schwarzwaldish baby talk of the 1890’s; he liked me to dress in lederhosen. Once I persuaded him to swim with me: the lake was icy; Hermann nearly went under; I had to massage him for hours after, to bring back what warmth there was. Neither of us imagined he was still fertile. In an orgy of prideful remorse he drafted the ending of his Meisterwerk (I mean the narrative proper, not the clumsy addenda) and consented to appraise my own manuscripts (I’d managed three short stories in as many years!) whilst I slipped over to Lugano for the abortion. It is his guilt—not for inadvertently getting me with child and permitting the abortion, but for not honestly telling me despite all that my stories were poor stuff (he clenched his teeth and declared them bemerkenswürdig, ganz bemerkenswürdig)—that he projects onto the lad Tito when old Joseph Knecht salubriously and conveniently drowns.
My illusions of Authorhood succumbed with him. The truth—as I see it now with neither false modesty nor frustration—is that my inventive faculty was considerable, my powers of execution slight. I had no gift for storytelling.
Exposition was another matter. As I was so near Coppet, I looked into the life and works of my namesake, and published in 1943, with an English press, a little popular study of Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein. Among its handful of appreciative readers was Sir Jeffrey, who wrote me that his second wife had been killed in the London bombing. He hoped we might remeet should the war ever end and we survive it. It did; we did; he renewed his suit. I put him off through the fall of ’45; when November came and went without a sign from André, I became Lady Amherst.
Our marriage was successful, if scarcely romantic. Both libertine and libertarian, Jeffrey gave great licence to his priapic inclinations and granted similar licence to me, who did not especially wish it. It would not have occurred to him—a thorough aristocrat, but not a snob—to question whether my several pregnancies in our years together were by him or another, so long as our salon, and therefore the stud roster as it were, was of proper quality; he’d have reared any of my children proudly, as he trusted his own by-blows were being reared. In this he was much like the Baron de Staël, and I admired him for it.
Unfortunately, for one reason or another no subsequent pregnancy of mine was brought to term. On our first visit to America, in 1947, I rushed in vain to Castines Hundred (Jeffrey understood it to be a sentimental pilgrimage and discreetly went on ahead to California; I never told him the details, though he’d have been entirely sympathetic). Only a caretaker was there, who had no idea when his employers, “off travelling,” might return. When I rejoined Jeffrey, he was humping a swath through the starlets associated with the English colony in Hollywood, who could not remain perpendicular in the presence of a British gentleman both titled and heterosexual. I myself became close to Maria and Aldous Huxley, the latter then in his early fifties and, alas, as deep into mysticism as had been poor Hermann, at similar cost to his self-irony and general good sense. When I learned he had decided to write no more novels, I lost interest, and soon after aborted spontaneously in a sleeping-car of the Twentieth Century Limited, en route to New York.
There were other connexions, in other years; I have not heart or energy to retell them. We reencountered the Macks in London in ’49, when Jane quite lost her head to Jeffrey as aforementioned, and he indulged her—mainly out of courtesy and good-humoured respect for his own past infatuation. Indeed, he managed to make me feel, bless him, as though the whole mad little episode was a sort of thank-you to Jane for having rejected his earlier attentions and thus led him to me! A remarkable husband; I often miss him.
A dozen years and one miscarriage later, in 1961, upon our second visit to the States, the Macks chastely returned our hospitality. Jane had already, after her fashion, entirely repressed her romance with Jeffrey, not because (as with him) it was of no importance, but rather because it was too uncharacteristic of her to be agreeably recalled. I had by this time published my more serious articles on Constant, Gibbon, Rousseau, Schlegel, and Byron—their connexion with Mme de Staël—and brought out my edition of her letters (which had served as my entrée to Katia and Thomas Mann upon their removing from California to Switzerland during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Huxley had tried unsuccessfully to introduce us in 1947… but on this subject, too, I shall not speak). I was acquiring a small reputation as a scholar of the French Revolutionary period. Then Harrison Mack put me in touch with your Joseph Morgan of the Maryland Historical Society, on whom he already had his eye as a likely president for his college-in-the-works; and my conversation with that knowledgeable young man—so I had come to think of anyone my age!—led to my subsequent essays on de Staël and the Americans: Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, Gouverneur Morris.
In the fall of that year, marvellous to relate, I also made the acquaintance—may he not remember it!—of a literary figure of an altogether different order. Morgan had fortuitously recollected, from some transactions between his office and its counterpart in the state of Delaware, that Germaine de Staël was among the original investors in E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. in the first decade of the 19th Century. She had of course known Éleuthère Irénée’s father, Pierre Samuel Du Pont, before the Revolution: the “Rousseau” in her sympathised with the romantic economics of Du Pont père, Turgot, and the other physiocrats, while the “Jane Mack” in her—would that I’d inherited a touch of it!—recognised that munitions were a golden investment no matter whose cannons carried the day. Morgan himself arranged to have the microfilm records of those stock transactions, and her letters of enquiry about them after her father’s death in 1804, sent down from Wilmington to Baltimore for my examination. As I perused them with the society’s projector, the only other visitor in the place—a heavyset, not unhandsome gentleman in his latter forties, with curly thick pepper-and-salt hair and suit to match—began making a fuss to the young woman on desk-duty because his books, of which he’d presented autographed copies to the society, were to be found neither on display nor among the shelves of Maryland poets.
He grew louder. It was a thinly disguised political reprisal, he declared; Morgan and his ilk could expect to hear from the governor’s office. Too long had the society been a haven and sinecure for left-wing iconoclasts, self-styled intellectuals, outside agitators with no respect for the red, white, and blue, mu
ch less the red, white, black, and orange of “The Old Line State, long may she wave / O’er her detractors’ wretched grave,” et cetera.
I thought the man drunk, or mad. The desk clerk was intimidated, almost in tears. As I moved to defend her, Morgan appeared from his office, rolled his eyes, and levelly explained, when he could get a word in between tetrameters, that inasmuch as the books in question had been duly catalogued (among Miscellaneous Marylandia), their absence from the shelves must be testament of their popularity. The library was noncirculating, but given the small staff his budget permitted, some attrition by theft was inevitable. As they were none of them in print, perhaps Mr Cook would spare another set of copies from his apparently inexhaustible supply? In any case, he must cease his disturbance at once or leave the premises; others were at work.
The two clearly knew each other; their contretemps had the air of a reenactment. At Morgan’s last remark the fellow seemed to notice me for the first time: elaborately he begged my pardon (he had better begged the clerk’s) and insisted that “Joseph”—“a flaming Commie, don’t you know, but an able chap all the same”—introduce us. Even as Morgan dryly did so, the man pressed upon me broadsides and flyers from his inside pockets, advertising himself and his poetical effusions. Morgan withdrew with a sigh—it seemed they were long-standing acquaintances; the outburst had been half a joke—and I was left with Mr A. B. Cook, self-designated Poet Laureate of “Maryland! Faerie-Land! / Tidal estuary-land!”—as odd a mixture of boorishness and cultivation as I’d encountered.
He knew of Mme de Staël, though he claimed to have read neither her nor Schlegel nor any other non-Anglo-Saxon. He had read Gibbon, and retailed to me the story of Gibbon’s youthful courtship of Suzanne Curchod, later Mme de Staël’s mother. Gibbon’s father had disapproved of the match; Mlle Curchod (then eighteen) appealed to her pastor, who consulted Jean Jacques Rousseau, who advised against the marriage on the grounds that young Gibbon’s Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, which he’d read in manuscript, “wanted genius.” I replied with the postscript to that anecdote: that in 1776 “my” Germaine, then a girl of ten, had offered to marry Gibbon, then near forty and grown famous with the appearance of his Decline and Fall, so that her mother and father might continue to enjoy his conversation.
But I did not continue to enjoy ours, for having learned who my husband was, Cook now launched into a fulsome panegyric for Jeffrey’s famous ancestor, commander of British forces in America during the French and Indian War, whose notorious manner of dealing with the Indians during Pontiac’s conspiracy he lauded as “the earliest recorded example of bacteriological warfare.” Today I see that turn of the conversation in a different light, as shall be recorded on some future Saturday; at the time I thought it simply in offensive taste, and I curtly turned him off. We met again in November at the Macks’ farewell party for Jeffrey and me at Tidewater Farms, to which they’d just returned: in Jeffrey’s presence Cook did not bring up the subject of those infected blankets from the Fort Pitt smallpox hospital, but he gave me a great wink as he mused loudly upon the question, Whether our poetical attitudes might be to some extent determined by available rhymes, e.g. wife/life/strife, or savage/ravage…
A strange man; a dangerous man; a buffoon who is no fool. I have seen him since but once, at Harrison’s funeral, an encounter that leaves me troubled yet. It is unimaginable that he does not know who sits on Schott’s nominating committee for the M.U. Litt.D., and what my position is. Even Morgan, who did not fear him, regarded Cook as dangerous; could not quite account for the man’s enmity and alliance with Schott against him; considered him at once less and more serious than his manner implied. The Tow’r of Truth demagoguery and ideological name-calling, even the horrendous doggerel and self-advertising broadsides, he knew Cook himself to be ironic about, as Schott for example was never; and like me, Morgan had met the unpredictable sophistication under the bumptiousness and posturing. But he believed Cook perfectly capable of destroying people in that “unseriousness,” beneath which lay motives more serious than any of Schott’s own.
This apprehension of course proved true: where is Morgan now? As I intimated in my first letter, the hysterical tenor of which I shall not bother to blush at or apologise for…
No matter.
To end this history: back again in England, in the fall of 1962 and ’63 I received from André, not cryptic postcards, but full letters, the substance of which will keep till another letter of my own. The first prompted my essay “The Inconstant Constant,” on de Staël’s ill-treatment by Benjamin Constant and the beautiful Juliette Récamier, with whom both (and everyone) were in love: Constant had borrowed 80,000 francs from Germaine over the years, and now refused to repay the mere half of it which she wanted, not for herself, but as dowry for Albertine—her daughter by Constant seventeen years earlier! When she pressed, he threatened to make public her old (and heartbreaking) letters to him. I weep. The second prompted my sole excursion from my chosen field: the foreword to a new edition of the seven letters exchanged between Héloïse and Peter Abelard. I weep, and can say no more.
In 1965, my husband died of a bowel cancer. The estate was depleted by taxes, creditors, and anonymous bequests to his known natural children. He was not ungenerous to me, proportionately, but there was much less than I’d imagined: neither of us had done a day’s work for wages in our lives, and Jeffrey had neglected to tell me that it was the principal of his inheritance we were living on, not the income. Good Joseph Morgan got wind of my plight and himself invited me to lecture (upon the French Revolution!) at Tidewater Technical College. I declined—he was only being very kind—but was inspired by his invitation to accept others which suddenly appeared from the University of Manitoba, Simon Fraser University, Sir George Williams, McMaster: André’s doing, no question, and I went to Canada both in order to survive and in the hope that there might happen—what did happen, though it didn’t end as I had dreamed.
Nor will this letter as I’d planned. It’s past one now: I must see to what chores and errands I can, against the return of… Ambrose (I had, for an hour, forgot which letters now follow that dear initial) at teatime, when our weary, sated flesh will to’t again. These two ounces of history he shall not see: André Castine is not his affair. I permit myself this epistolary infidelity—who am too pleine these weeks to think of any other!
Thus has chronicling transformed the chronicler, and I see that neither Werner Heisenberg nor your character Jacob Horner went far enough: not only is there no “non-disturbing observation”; there is no non-disturbing historiography. Take warning, sir: to put things into words works changes, not only upon the events narrated, but upon their narrator. She who saluted you pages past is not the same who closes now, though the name we share remains,
As ever,
Germaine
Y: Todd Andrews to the Author. Acknowledging the latter’s invitation and reviewing his life since their last communication. The Tragic View of things, including the Tragic View.
Todd Andrews
Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys
Court Lane
Cambridge, Maryland 21613
Friday, April 4, 1969
Sir:
Your singular letter of March 30, soliciting my cooperation as model for a character in your work in progress, reached me approximately on April Fool’s Day. Today, which my calendar tells me is the anniversary not only of Martin Luther King’s assassination but also of Adam’s creation according to the Mohammedans and of Jesus’s crucifixion according to the Christians, seems appropriate for my reply. The more so since, if that chap in southern California turns out to have correctly predicted Doomsday for 6:13 this evening, my longhanded no will never reach you, and you will be free to do as you please.
The motto of one of our corporate clients, very big in the chemical-fertilizer way, is Praeteritas futuras stercorant. Not just my merely legal Latin, but my experience of life (your letter not excepted) makes me wonder whe
ther the past (a) fertilizes the future, (b) turns into shit in the future, or (c) turns the future into shit. This year—my 70th, sir—the past has crowded in on me apace (cropped up? rained down?), faster than I can… um… digest it.
E.g., my old friend Harrison Mack died, as you may have read in the Times, in January. His funeral brought Mrs. Mack back to Tidewater Farms and, briefly, their two grown children: the “actress” “Bea Golden” (née Jeannine Mack) and the “radical activist” Andrews Mack, named after my “conservative-passivist” self. I enclose for your perusal a photocopy of the 1969 installment of my Letter to My Father, describing this event. Mrs. Mack has not only stayed on, but wishes to retain me as her counsel in the apparently upcoming contest over Harrison’s estate, as well as in other matters. Young Mack also, whose relations with me have not always been cordial, passes through on sundry dark enterprises of his own and, between ominous announcements that Marshyhope College’s “Tower of Truth” must fall like the Rotten Capitalist Society It Represents, offers grudgingly to engage me against his mother in the same contest, he having learned from V. I. Lenin that the institutions of the established order may legitimately be exploited to their own ultimate subversion.
Jane Mack (who is, more power to her, a handsome and vigorous 63 and a wealthy woman in her own right) wants the estate diverted to her new fiancé: a titled but no longer affluent fellow whom we shall call “Lord Baltimore,” though he is no Marylander. Drew wants it to finance a Second American Revolution. Neither seems to imagine that I might consider it my prior responsibility to defend the interests of the Tidewater Foundation, Harrison’s principal beneficiary, for whom my firm has long served as counsel; far less that I might simply wish to see my late friend’s testamentary desires, however eccentric, faithfully executed. Had he instructed me to liquidate his holdings and float the proceeds out on the Choptank tide, I would endeavor to do it.