Letters

by John Barth

  Et cetera, until half the kids are laughing, most of the rest too confused to get their indignation organised, and the handful who try to storm Schott’s office easily stopped in the corridors, out of view, by the main body of campus police, who then usher them out a rear door, lock the building for the night, and patrol its vicinity till today.

  When, I daresay—tomorrow too if the weather holds fine—my lover, the author turned actor, will have improvised, may be even now improvising, “the Funhouse Scene” at Ocean City, with his nondirective director, his cast of ex-activist amateurs, and his professional (if not expert) co-star…

  But here my pen falters, and not only from writer’s cramp. A tiny—yes, jealousy—keeps me from sleep, though it’s now the first hour of, ah, the 11th. Of that painful American invention, Mother’s Day. I return now, for comfort and solace, to your hapless virgin poet Eben Cooke and his too-familiar mentor Henry Burlingame III, wearily wondering whether your novel is not some enormous coded reply-in-advance to these letters. What turns lie ahead in its plot? In mine? What have you in store for your exhausted

  G.?

  M: Lady Amherst to the Author. Three miracles in three days. Ambrose’s adventures with the film company. The Fourth Stage of their affair begins.

  24 L Street

  Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

  Saturday, 17 May 1969

  Dear J.,

  Mirabile, mirabile, mirabile dictu! Three miracles in three days! The plot of our lives as turned and returned as a baroque novel’s!

  1. Mr A. B. Cook VI—to the entire astonishment of our ad hoc nominating committee and the great but discreetly concealed delight of two-thirds of its membership (i.e., myself and Ms Wright of the French Dept: a far cry from dear “Juliette,” but worlds away withal from Harry Carter: “Mr Wrong”)—thanked us by letter three days ago for the honour of our invitation… and declined!

  Declined, John! Oh, that I were after all a writer, or had had Reggie Prinz’s cameras, to catch forever Harry Carter’s crestfall when I read that letter aloud! Which he must then inspect with his own eyes, hold to the light, examine the blank verso of, the signature, the return address, the postmark and cancelled stamp on the envelope (CHAUTAUGUA MD, spelled with a g where yours is q’d; and an American Legion commemorative), as if looking for some clue that the laureate’s no was a cyphered yes, or that I’d forged the letter. Ms Wright at last crisply opined that, given the lateness of the season, we had better propose Mr Mensch’s name at once to President Schott, and hope our colleague would not follow your and Cook’s example.

  A fortnight earlier, at the crest of our “Second Stage,” I’d have blushed, if not dismissed the idea outright. But Ambrose and I had been that fortnight sexless, as you know, and while my heart had in large measure taken over from my orifices the labour of his admission and receipt, so that now I loved where then I’d merely lusted, the complete propriety of this “Third Stage” lent me sufficient “cool,” as the students say, to pretend to consider the matter for some moments before seconding his nomination. Ambrose had been of considerable assistance in containing the late demonstrations, and his presence on the platform might just discourage the activists’ turning our commencement exercises into yet another, as has been happening elsewhere. The modesty of his literary credentials is attributable in some part to his avant-gardism: “concrete narrative” is not poured out ready-mixed by the cubic yard! And if I myself remain less than utterly convinced that such desperate innovation as his is “the last, radical hope for the profession of letters,” I can in good conscience at least honour that apocalyptic argument.

  I called for the question: two-nothing in Ambrose’s favour, Harry Carter abstaining in the spirit of a diplomatic emissary awaiting instructions from his government. Considering the date, I proposed we ring up at once both Mensch and Schott to insure their informal agreement before sending our formal invitations. Carter telephoned our acting president (to whom, a subscript apprised us, Cook had sent a copy of his letter); I telephoned Ambrose at the Lighthouse—a.k.a. Mensch’s Castle, his brother’s house—and heard for the first time, with a proper pang of jealousy, the voice of Magda Giulianova Mensch. Did it catch at the accent of my own, which she too was hearing for the first time and must surely recognise?

  “I’ll call him,” she huskily intoned. What a vulnerable, what a stirring, what a sexual voice! Which then called, “Ambrose? Telephone,” up some nearby flight of stairs which I had yet myself to see, but which l’Abruzzesa had doubtless many times ascended, crooning Ambrose? in even sultrier tone. I heard children’s voices in the background—no, one child’s voice, his backward daughter’s, to be sure; her normal twins would be at school, or at work. I was smitten with envy, jealousy, rekindled desire—the objective, no doubt, of our Third Stage abstinence. When she said, “He’s coming”—her voice as throaty as if she were—my “Thank you” was gruff and mannish as John Bull. And when Ambrose, fetched from his writing desk, dully hello’d me, I found myself declaring despite myself, for the first time to him, and in a lump-throated whisper, not “acting Provost Pitt here,” but “I love you.”

  ! (As my lover would put it in his own style of dialogue.) Fortunately I had withdrawn from the conference room to my inner office to make the call; Carter to Ms Wright’s, hard by, to make his (Miss Stickles, who would normally have placed both, was out to lunch). When we reconvened, we were both somewhat disappointed: Carter because Schott now warmly ratified our nomination, hoping only that, in reciprocation of the honour and in gratitude for Cook’s gracious deferral thereof, Ambrose would consider the incorporation into his screenplay of some Splendid Ideas that Cook had proposed to Schott in a handwritten postscript to his copy of the letter to our committee: ideas concerning not only the Tower of Truth, but the burning of Washington and the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812… and I because Ambrose, so far from immediately accepting, in whatever spirit, our nomination (for first proposing which, sir, I am as grateful to you now as my thanks are belated), was stipulating that the honorary doctorate be awarded to his nom de plume “Arthur Morton King”! I could not imagine Schott’s welcoming so irregular a proviso, any more than Ambrose would welcome those “splendid ideas” of A. B. Cook’s (There is nothing in your fiction, is there, of Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake expedition in 1812?). Where would we turn next with our wretched degree? Finally, some intuition told me that Mrs Peter Mensch had forgiven her intermittent lover his affair with me. Ambrose was telephoning Schott directly and promptly, at his own insistence, to spare me the brokering of their respective stipulations and to expedite, on the committee’s behalf, his decision. He would ring back promptly. I was relieved but pessimistic—and disappointed yet further, I realised as we adjourned, that he had not accepted the bloody distinction simply as a loving favour to yours truly.

  The good news came, however, from Schott himself, not a quarter hour after we’d glumly gone our professorial ways: Great guy, this Mensch! Had welcomed Cook’s suggestions, ever’ doggone one! Thought he might even find a part for Mr Cook himself in the movie, how ’bout that! As for the pen-name business, damn good idea! Gave the whole show more class, if you asked him; made it more what you might call literary? And that was the name of the old ball game, right?

  Thus our ad hoc committee came at last ad hoc, and is no more: on 21 June our friend “Arthur Morton King” becomes Marshyhope U’s first Doctor of Letters! How came this miracle to pass? Wherefore this sudden deference of A. B. Cook’s, this sweet rage for accommodation of John Schott’s and Ambrose’s? I burned to know; but my curiosity must itself needs be deferred when Miracle One was yesterday eclipsed by

  2. A warm mid-May evening: Friday, thank God, and the last day of classes for the spring semester. A week-long “reading period” has begun (Is there a research library on the boardwalk at Ocean City? For thither have flown the student body), to be followed by final examinations and, three weeks after that—when nine-tenths of our students
and staff will surely have scattered for the summer—our belated commencement ceremonies. The official reason for this delay is to combine the awarding of degrees with the cornerstone laying of Schott’s Tower of Truth, far behind the schedule of its construction. It is an open secret among us administrators, however, that the real reason is Schott’s fear of activist disruption: he has anxiously enquired of Ambrose whether “the right camera angles” can make his minions into a multitude. But I digress, savouring the anticipation of what’s next to write as I savoured the anticipation of my lover’s visit, who had rung back after all in the evening of that eventful Wednesday to invite me to cocktails aboard Todd Andrews’s ancient sailboat, moored in the municipal harbour, and dinner afterwards somewhere across the river. We were, he felt, at the end of our Third Stage and the commencement of our Fourth: he much wanted to talk to me on that mysterious head, bring me up to date too on his adventures with Prinz and Co., and speak of Other Things—his past and our future—which his preoccupation with movie making had kept him from communicating to me till now. Have I mentioned that in the six weeks since he mailed me that abortive confession of “Arthur Morton King’s,” ostensibly addressed to an anonymous Yours Truly and sent floating down the tide, I’ve received no further “love letters” from him? And that with the close of our seminiferous Second Stage he ceased reading these weekly letters to you?

  He offered to fetch me in from 24 L; I decided to drive instead, I’m not sure why: the portentous announcement of an impending change in our connexion, perhaps, however cheerily put, suggested the precaution of vehicular independence. As it turned out I rode in in Jane Mack’s chauffeured limousine, seldom seen in Dorset Heights since Harrison and I vacated Tidewater Farms. Jane too was to be Mr Andrews’s cocktail guest; she and “dear Toddy,” she apprised me en route to Cambridge, were old old friends, dear dear friends; I wasn’t to be fooled by his down-home manners and modest law practice into underestimating his professional ability: a first-class legal mind, whose counsel she’d prefer in really thorny matters to that of Mack Enterprises’ whole legal department. Did I know that it was his adroitness in the probate courts, some thirty-odd years since, that had rescued her late husband’s inheritance and made possible the firm’s expansion from mere pickle pickling to its present conglomeration of enterprises?

  What could I say, John? As levelly as possible I acknowledged that I had read something to that effect somewhere; couldn’t quite recall where. “Fortune magazine, most likely,” Jane asserted; “they ran a feature on us ten years ago, when we first got into freeze-dried foods, and of course they looked around for anything to liven up the story. We thought of suing, but Todd advised against it.” The “we,” we note, is corporate, not familial—and while I feel, in this place among these people, more like an “extra” from your early fiction than the protagonist of my own life story, she has repressed your novelisation of her youth as completely as her middle-aged amour with my Jeffrey! Freud, Ferenczi, you are right: our choice of vocations may be symptomatic as any other of our choices. That chilling woman is your proof, her beauty as frostily preserved as her late husband’s excreta; who rejects from her Deepfreeze of a memory all “unwholesome” items (you may be sure she remembered the volume and number of that magazine, whose publicity had been good for business) as systematically as her quality-control inspectors purge poor peas from prime in her frozen-food factory. Even when the Tidewater Foundation was debating the subsidy of the Original Floating Theatre II, Todd tells me, she batted not an eye at either the paradox or the allusion, which latter made even the proponents of the showboat uncomfortable. Au contraire: she froze them all with embarrassment by merrily demanding of Todd Andrews whether he remembered the fine old times they’d all had back in the thirties on Captain Adams’s floating theatre—and then got briskly down to cost accounting!

  So Andrews told me shortly after, amused but still impressed, at the bar set up on the cabin roof of his converted oyster-dredging boat. But remarkable as may be such expurgation, it is not our Second Miracle, no. Neither is the gloss supplied by Ambrose (over breakfast this morning) to his oral memorandum last evening (over martinis on Andrews’s foredeck) when I’d asked sweetly what all this stage-of-the-affair claptrap was about: that in the second postscript of his initial letter to me—a declaration of love with no fewer than seven postscripts—he had remarked that they corresponded not only to the stages of his love for me thence far, but to the predecessors of that love, five in number. At the time of that P.P.S., he declared (This is still the memorandum, not the gloss, and most decidedly not the miracle. We are on said freshly scrubbed and painted foredeck, “wet martinis” in hand—Ambrose and I share a fondness for good vermouth—admiring the balmy evening, the spiffy restoration and conversion of our host’s old skipjack, the dashingly turned-out film contingent among the guests, and each other, whom we have not seen since early in the week. My lover is tanned already from his new medium, which has kept him largely out of the Lighthouse and in the daylight of Ocean City and “Barataria,” the set being built down near Bloodsworth Island. He wears a light-blue denim jacket and trousers over an open-necked madras shirt; he looks boyish, healthy, handsome, American. He is in good spirits. I desire him, can scarcely keep myself from touching his sleeve, his hair), these correspondences were but a glancing whim: he had felt Ad-mi-ra-ti-on for me; he’d found our conversation Be-ne-fi-ci-al; after Harrison’s funeral he had offered me Con-so-la-ti-on and made that surprising Dec-la-ra-ti-on of his feelings for me; followed with an Ex-hor-ta-ti-on to me to reciprocate them and get on to For-ni-ca-ti-on, just as he had admired, benefited from, consoled, etc., other lovers in the past. Not till the coincidence of my recentest menstruation (which had divided Stages Two and Three, as the one just prior had divided One and Two) and certain other happenstances had he recognised a deeper pattern in our progress. Having recognised it, he could no longer honestly distinguish cause and effect: whether the pattern was determining his feelings and thus the “story of our affair,” or our affair innocently rehearsing the pattern. For this reason, among others, he was inclined just now to trust my feelings above his own, and he put me this question, to be responded to at dinner: Having come, in fish-cold March, to making love, and humped all over horny April, and chastely stopped for breath into sweet mid-May… what ought we now? Whither our connexion, if it were my “say-so” and if our inclinations (he knew his own) should agree?

  Prinz was aboard in his displaced-person getup, Jane Mack’s daughter in what I believe the children call a “grannie” dress: the former glassless, the latter taking on gin and tonic by the imperial pint as she traded “wisecracks” with the barkeep. Indeed, but for the presence of a few film extras, and the absence of John Schott and A. B. Cook… and his son… we were February’s mourners reconvened in May: a fair season here indeed, when the mosquitoes have yet to hatch, the stinging sea-nettles yet to foul the estuaries, the heat and damp of summer yet to pressure-cook the peninsula. Everywhere flowering dogwoods, tulips, crab apples, lilacs, japonicas, and brilliant azaleas, the bougainvillaea of middle latitudes. But if there was tension among the gathered then, it was between Jane and me on the one hand, and within myself with respect to my “son” on the other: now it was visibly between the Macks mère et fils, who (rumour had it) were about to litigate over Harrison’s estate. Where “Bea Golden” stands in the matter I don’t know, unless the family’s disposition on deck was a bit of symbolical choreography: Drew and Yvonne Mack stood as far forward as one could without climbing out upon the bowsprit, Jane was on the extreme afterdeck with a little group of Tidewater Foundation trustees (and the steering wheel), and Ms Golden square amidships. There too, of course, was the bar, crossed by neither mother nor son; and thither strayed from time to time my lover’s eyes, not necessarily in search of drink.

  This much I remarked, with a small pang like the Wednesday’s on first hearing l’Abruzzesa’s voice. But I did not remark much more, for Ambrose’s query and h
is portentous Deeper Pattern, together with the tale of his week’s adventures with the film crew, quite preempted my attention. What ought we now? With spring so gorgeously exploding in every bush, the very air a scented kiss, the intemperate sap full-risen to green the temperate zone, what ought we now? The only question was, Why had he put it as a question, if not that to him the answer was not obvious? And if it wasn’t… had Bea Golden of Marshyhope Productions (Prinz’s paper corporation for receiving Tidewater Foundation subsidies) turned his head? Or was his erstwhile leading lady, Magda Giulianova Mensch (whose initials just now roar out at me from this page), making a comeback for “Arthur Morton King’s” sake?

  What was clear to me after all, then, was merely what I would, not what I ought. I ought… never to have left Castines Hundred and my baby in 1940; never to have gone to Paris in ’39 to sit at the feet of Stein and Joyce; I ought never to have been begot by those dreadful fuddling dears my parents, thanks to whom the very enterprise of letters will ever in my memory’s nostrils redole of green tea, stale tobacco, book dust, and damp woollens in untidy flats. Ambrose—sweeper-away of all this, together with Yours Truly—I love you! God help me—and God knows what we ought!

  Presently we disembarked from cocktails and motored over the creek bridge and the “New Bridge” to reembark at our restaurant: a large ferryboat lately beached on the river’s north shore and converted for dining. I remarked upon the American passion for conversion wondering whether it stemmed from the missionary energies of the early Puritans and later revivalists or the settlers’ need, born of poverty and dearth of goods, to find new uses for things worn out or obsolete—a need become mere paradoxical reflex in a people notorious for waste. Ambrose pleasantly replied that while the practice was in his opinion not particularly American—Orientals were even more ingenious about it, for example, and the Spanish, Greeks, and Germans were no slouches either—the inclination to see in it a national trait, especially one to be criticised, was American indeed. He pretended to fear for my cultural identity; he reminded me (taking my hand across the table) that it was in my “full Britannic aspect” he had come to love me…