Letters

by John Barth

  A restless rest period, which, so far from completing our recuperation from the DDT’s, has left us weakest when we most need strength, at the exact midpoint of our life and work, tonight and tomorrow and RESET When, as the full Pink Moon is penumbrally eclipsed, we must together confront the 1st draft as it were of the revolutionary “novel” NOTES. With the relief and weary RESET For what kept birding us as we “slept” (and Merope as she wintered the goats, made fudge, and revisited her alma mater to recruit a cadre for the struggle ahead) were such questions as whether for example notes was meant in the sense of verbal annotations, say, or of transcribed musical tones. Given the former, would the forthcoming printout be but a sort of Monarch Notes on NOVEL? Given the latter, was LILY VAC changing media?

  We shall soon know. Be assured, sir, that we are now fully awake and, if far from restored, equal nonetheless to the task ahead. Our loyal Merope is in perfect health and high spirits, having enlisted in Waltham and Boston a splendid young group whom we look forward to meeting next month when they migrate here after their finals (always assuming that Doomsday does not occur, as predicted, at 6:13 PM PST this coming Friday). The Farm hums with suspense and confident anticipation; we are as busy as a hive of mice in search of fenny snakes. It is because we expect this to be our last free afternoon for some weeks that we take time now to set down this letter.

  And we look forward to posting to you and to the Foundation, at the 1st opportunity, a report of the printout itself, to a world RESET But you must confirm to us that these communications are getting through intact. That you are an ally. That you will commence our action before the statute runs. Then let us together RESET JBB encl

  ENCLOSURE #1

  Jerome Bonaparte Bray

  General Delivery

  Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

  J.B., “Author”

  Dept. English, Annex B

  SUNY/Buffalo

  Buffalo, N.Y. 14214

  Toad that under cold stone days and nights has 31 sweltered venom sleeping got:

  You may wish to avail yourself of this final opportunity to avoid litigation and exposure. Full accounting from your publishers of monies paid you for “your” “novel” G.G.B.! Full reparation to us in that amount! Full assignment to us of any future royalties accruing to that “work”! We are willing, if you comply promptly and fully, to drop action against you in the earlier cases—your “borrowings” from our Shoals of Love, The -asp, and Backwater Ballads—though our attorney has been apprised of these also and waits only for a sign from us.

  We float like a butternut, but sting like a bean! Even as we draft this ultimatum, LILYVAC’s printers clack away at the text of RN, the Revolutionary NOTES that will render your ilk obsolete. If you have not responded to our satisfaction by 6:13 PM PST Friday April 4, you are doomed.

  JBB

  cc T. Andrews

  W: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly and Lady Amherst. THE AMATEUR, or, A Cure for Cancer, by Arthur Morton King

  The Lighthouse, Mensch’s Castle

  Erdmann’s Cornlot

  Dorset, Maryland

  March 31, 1969

  FROM:

  Ambrose Mensch, Whom It Still Concerns

  TO:

  Yours Truly (cc: GGPLA)

  RE:

  Your message to me of May 12, 1940

  Dear Sir or Madam:

  Whom it so concerned, the undersigned, You wrote not a word to, not a letter, in Your letter to me of 5/12/40. Therefore I write You, seven times over, everything.

  The enclosed You may have seen already: an early effort, abortive, on the part of “Arthur Morton King” to come to terms with conventional narrative and himself. Nine years ago tonight, on my 30th birthday, I first chucked it into the Choptank. There had been a little party for me here in my brother’s house, my wife’s contribution to which was a jeroboam of Piper-Heidsieck; walking home afterward (we had a flat near the yacht basin in those days) we enjoyed what was becoming a ritual quarrel. Marsha alleged that I was unfaithful to her, in spirit if not in physical fact, with my brother’s wife. I protested that there was a great difference, both between psychological and physical infidelity and between my wife and my sister-in-law, and that while I had admittedly loved Magda Giulianova once when she was Peter’s girlfriend and again when she was his bride, that latter “affair” (third of my life, Germaine) was nonsexual and had been entirely supplanted by my marriage.

  All which was more true than not, and irrelevant, the real burden of Marsha’s complaint being not that I loved Magda or another, “physically” or “spiritually,” but that I did not love herself as much as either she or I could wish. And to this not-always-unspoken charge I could in good faith at best plead nolo contendere: I loved Marsha and Marsha only, but not greatly—a description that fit as well my feeling for myself.

  The night lengthened; tempers shortened. Bitter Marsha went to bed alone. I withdrew to my “study” (daughter Angie’s bedroom) with the last two inches of Piper-Heidsieck, reviewed by night-light this work-then-in-progress and my 30-year-old life, lost interest in continuing either, washed down 30 capsules of Marsha’s Librium with the warm champagne, corked The Amateur in the empty jeroboam, walked drowsily across the park to launch it from Long Wharf on what I hoped was an outgoing tide, and went home to die.

  Perhaps to die: I believed that 30 Libriums (I did not know the milligrammage) was probably a fatal dose, as Andreyev believed—when, at age 21, he lay between the railroad tracks in Petersburg—that the train would probably kill him. I also knew, like him, that my belief was possibly mistaken. The probability and the possibility were equally important; no need to go on about that. As I approached the bedroom I was struck by the thoughtlessness of imposing my corpse upon Marsha and Angie. The night was not cold; I had remarked early yachts in their slips; now I returned to the basin, thinking foggily (from the hour and the alcohol, not the Librium) to borrow a dinghy and go the way of my manuscript. None in evidence. A police car cruised from High Street down toward the wharf, parking place of young lovers; I took cover in the cockpit of the nearest cabin cruiser, not to be mistaken for a thief or vandal; curled up on the dew-damp teak; began to feel ridiculous.

  And chilly. And cross. It seemed to me that my shivering and sniffling and general discomfort would likely keep me awake, and that unless I slept, the chemicals might make me only nauseated instead of comatose and finally dead. Back to the apartment, which had never seemed so cozy: let the living bury the dead, etc. Good-bye Angie, I wasn’t the best of fathers anyhow; ditto Marsha, ditto husband. My head was fortunately too heavy for more than this in the self-pity way. I stretched out on the living-room couch and tried to manage a suitable last thought: something to do with the grand complexity of nature, of history, of the organism denominated Ambrose M.; with the infinite imaginable alternatives to arbitrary reality, etc. Nothing came to mind.

  Best night’s sleep in years. Woke entirely refreshed and, in fact, tranquil. It was explained to Angela that Daddy sleeps on the couch sometimes after he works late, not to wake Mommy. Marsha’s prescription I refilled before she noticed any Librium missing. For a few days my wife was cool; then, after an ambiguous “shopping trip to Washington,” her normal spirits returned until the next domestic quarrel, a month later. The marriage itself persisted another seven years.

  God may be a literalist, but Life is a heavy-handed ironizer. Two days into my 31st year, tranquilly prowling the rivershore near here with Angie, I spied my Piper-Heidsieck jeroboam in the shallows near the crumbling seawall, not an oystershell’s throw from where Your water message had come ashore to me in that gin bottle 20 years earlier. Lest eyes more familiar than Yours fall on it, I retrieved it. Except for a brief uncorking circa 1962 to oblige a certain fellow Hedonist—who swapped me a couple of his own discarded experiments in unorthodox narrative in return for three chapters of the enclosed: my Bee-Swarming, Water-Message, and Funhouse anecdotes—both bottle and contents rested undisturbed thenceforth, in
my subsequent domiciles, until tonight.

  Something in those Libriums liberated me from the library of my literary predecessors, for better or worse. Tranquilly I turned my back on Realism, having perhaps long since turned it on reality. I put by not only history, philosophy, politics, psychology, self-confession, sociology, and other such traditional contaminants of fiction, but also, insofar as possible, characterization, description, dialogue, plot—even language, where I could dispense with it. My total production that following summer was a (tranquil) love-piece for my daughter:

  The ass I made of myself in my last missive to You dates from that same period, as does my practice—followed faithfully until tonight—of using only no-deposit-no-return bottles for submission of manuscripts. Well before Allan Kaprow and company popularized the Happening, “Arthur Morton King’s” bibliography, so to speak, included such items as Antimasquerade (attending parties disguised as oneself, and going successfully unrecognized) and Hide & No Seek (in which no one is It). The radical tinkerers of New York and Cologne associated with the resurgence of “concrete poetry” and “intermedia” seemed to me vulgar parvenus; by 1961 I had returned to the word, even to the sentence, in homeliest form: my exemplars were the anonymous authors of smalltown newspaper obituary notices, real-estate title searches, National Geographic photo captions, and classified help-wanted ads. By 1967, after a year of fictions in the form of complaining letters from “A. M. King” to the editors of Dairy Goat Quarterly, Revue Metaphysique, Road & Track, Rolling Stone, and School Lunch Journal—which if collected, as they could never imaginably be, would be found to comprise a coherent epistolary narrative with characters, complications, climax, and a tidy dénouement—I became reenamored simultaneously with Magda (I was by then divorcing) and with that most happily contaminated literary genre: the Novel, the Novel, with its great galumphing grace, amazing as a whale!

  But not the Art Novel; certainly not those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism. No one named as I am, historied and circumstanced as I am, could likely stomach anything further in the second-meaning way; and a marsh-country mandarin would be an odd duck indeed! I examined the history and origins of the novel, of prose narrative itself, in search of reinspiration; and I found it—not in parodies, travesties, pastiches, and trivializations of older narrative conventions, but…

  But I’m ahead of myself. On another front of my general campaign, meanwhile, I privately declared war upon the cinema. My resolve to know these adversaries better led me (i.e., A.M.K.) to attempt for Reggie Prinz the screenplay of B’s book. Prinz has rejected my trial draft of the opening: “Too wordy”! I know my next move.

  So: either this old story is new to You, or else You read and returned it nine years ago. It is the story of the broken seawall, the Menschhaus and the camera obscura, the cracked “castle” in whose sinking tower I live, with Peter and Magda and my daughter. It is the story of our firm and our infirmity, by which John Schott’s Tower of Truth—whose foundation-work is our doing—will prove the latest to be undone. “Arthur Morton King” is the pen name I still use; but his rhetoric is less florid, his view of authorship less theistical, than they were when he and I turned 30.

  I go now to my new friend’s apartment, to mark the advent of my 40th year. She has promised for the occasion a beef Wellington; the wine is my responsibility. Having raised Magda’s dark eyebrows with my excuses for not dining tonight with the family and my reticence about my plans for the evening (she guesses I’ve found a new lover; can scarcely have guessed whom), I went down to the Lighthouse cellar to review our family’s holdings in the champagne way, and thus came across this earlier vinting. Heavy-footed life!

  Magda followed me down; stood mutely by as I tucked two bottles of Mumm’s ’62 Extra Dry under one arm, the old jeroboam under the other. Did she recognize that crack in the masonry, down which she numbly ran her finger like some Italian Madeline Usher? No: she realized only that our recentest affair (fifth of my life, Germaine) is truly done, and that she was realizing it in a place where other things had ended, begun, reended, rebegun.

  I raised the Jeroboam. “If at first, et cetera.” And knowing I could only compound the injury, tried anyhow to explain that what I meant was that I meant to try again to launch this old chronicle on the tide, and that as I had this cover-letter to write and a dinner engagement at eight, I must get to it. I’ve felt Magda below me since, feeding Angie and the family as I’ve written these pages; she feels me upstairs setting down these words before I go, each letter scored as if into her skin. In the night to come she’ll feel me drinking to the health of my eleven-day-old sixth love-affair and to my birthday; humping hornily in the ruins of the feast; etting all the ceteras lovers love…

  A curse upon tides, Yours Truly, that turn, and, turning, return like misdirected letters what they were to carry off! Thought well drowned, our past floats back like Danaë with infant Perseus, to take eventual revenge. Would that the Choptank were that trusty sewer the Rhine, flowing always out, past the Loreleis and castles of our history; mercifully fetching off our dreck to some Nordzee dumping-ground of time—whence nothing returns unless recycled, distilled, laundered as Alpine snow.

  But tides are what tides over whom this betides; who gladly now would say adieu but must make do with au revoir: i.e.,

  A.M.

  cc: Germaine Pitt: encl.

  ENCL.

  THE AMATEUR,

  or,

  A Cure for Cancer

  by Arthur Morton King

  A

  Alhazen of Basra, Gemma-Frisius, Leonardo—from them A. learned to make his great dark camera. But he learned it Plato-wise, as it were by recollection, for that notion—like the tower itself, like Peter Mensch’s entire house—hatched from Aunt Rosa’s Easter egg, that Uncle Konrad gave her in 1910. Before he knew East Dorset was East Dorset and Ambrose Ambrose, he knew the landscape in that egg; his eye was held to it in the cradle. I smile that poor Aunt Rosa, throughout her younger wifehood, railed at Konrad’s seedless testicles and her fruitless womb. Clip and tumble as they might, dine on shellfish, ply the uterine thermometer, she went to her grave unfructified. While lo, as mistress of the egg she is mother of this world we move in: the nymph inside who leans against the Rhine-rock under the Schloss; Mensch’s Castle and the camera obscura; seawall, marshes, funhouse, Cornlot; the bees on Andrea Mensch’s breast and Ambrose’s birthmark; the mosquitoes that bite our Maryland lovers; the crabs they eat; the cancers that eat them. Our story is ab ovo: nothing here but hatched from there.

  B

  Begin again: A.‘s only child is mad, et cetera.

  Days are hard on Angie. Like her father she is, perhaps, a love child; in truth love streams upon us from her heart, she is a sun of love; but her pale eyes are troubled, she cannot grasp us. Carl and Connie, her twin cousins—their chasing games alarm her, their gentle teases set her wild. Yet “Magda not spank Connie-Carl!” she shrieks when Magda has to punish them, and she must be looked for when they cry, for once to end little Connie’s tears she nearly smothered her with a cushion. She is large for her five years, and maladroit. Her hand undoes the twins’ sand castles against her will, and when she croons, “Angie will hug Amby,” Ambrose must beware a wrenched neck. Her hours are full of fears: that Magda will put the automobile in reverse; that Peter will neglect to lift her skyward by the elbows after breakfast; that Russians will fire rockets at Mensch’s Castle.

  Most of all she fears that Magda will have lost Aunt Rosa’s egg, companion of her nights and crises.

  With the Easter egg they control her and ease her days. It is soiled and battered now, peephole cloudy, inner landscape all but gone; but its power has not vanished in the years since Peter and Ambrose would behave all Sunday morning for a glass of dandelion and a view of its wondrous innards. No tantrum or alarum of Angie’s is beyond its virtue: with her eye fast to the window she can weather even the family’s infrequent musicales, which else would set
her trembling. For Angie’s own and the house’s tranquillity, Magda must lure her twice daily from their society to “play-nap” in her room; the Easter egg baits her every time. Alone, she converses in peace with storytellers on her phonograph or assembles her picture puzzle with the face down, for the sake of the undistracted pattern on the back.

  Often at night, what with all the day’s resting, Angie does not sleep. Though her light is out, she gazes into the egg; Ambrose hears her speak to the faded nymph inside. Her room is beneath his in the tower. If the night is fine, he may leave his books and lenses and help the child into her clothes; hand in hand they stroll the seawall and the sundry streets. The town is abed. Angie has no fear of the dogs that trot in alleys or of policemen uptown, who have got used to her. Indeed it is her town at that hour: she leads her father through its mysteries. They stop to hear the Choptank chuckle at the battered wall, and Angie’s mouth turns up amused. Transformers hum atop their poles along the avenue: “Buzz,” the girl responds. They pause halfway over the Creek Bridge, which Ambrose feared to cross at her age, and regard the moonlit skipjacks moored along the bulkhead. A wandering automobile drives by to whir a note on the grating of the draw, whereat they move uptown content.

  Until recently their first stop was the bakery: from a back alley they entered to watch men labor at next day’s bread. The great ovens rumbled, the machines for kneading and wrapping clacked, the air was hot and yeasty. Pasted with flour and sweat, young Negroes slid the pans through cast-iron doors. John Grau the baker, dusty arms akimbo, aproned paunch thrust out, would hail the visitors. “Look who ain’t in bed yet!”