by John Barth
Near the Erie Motel is a dull Chinese-Canadian restaurant. There we dined, joined towards the end of our Moo Shoo pork by Prinz, who managed to say as I opened my fortune cookie…
Oh God, enough of this writing! It is all insane, and for all I know you may be quite apprised of, may even be party to, the madness. We inspected Old Fort Erie, Prinz framing views with his fingers and murmuring things about the light. On 4 July 1814, 38th birthday of your republic, an American general with your initials recaptured the fort first captured in May of the year before. Six weeks later the place exploded as the Canadians attempted to retake it (“Takes and retakes,” Prinz murmurs happily), either accidentally or because a U.S. lieutenant fired the magazine, blowing himself and two dozen others to kingdom come and repulsing the assault. “We” are to replicate that explosion on 15 August, its 155th anniversary. Indeed, it seems there is to be a series, a montage of bombardments, fires, explosions from the period: red rockets will glare and bombs burst in air this season, not only here but at Fort McHenry in Baltimore and at Washington, all which got theirs in the busy summer of 1814. The last big bang at Fort Erie—indeed, the last on the Niagara Frontier—came in November of that same year, when General Izard, withdrawing his American garrison back to Buffalo, blew up what was left standing after the August explosion.
As we dutifully reviewed this noisy history, Ambrose took my elbow and informed me that Prinz had just that day informed him that the “patients” at the Remobilisation Farm, apparently under the direction of Bea Golden (one of their number, you know, from time to time, when under the nom de guerre Bibi she dries out between failed marriages), were involved in some sort of ongoing recapitulation of your End of the Road novel, which either inspired or was inspired by the original farm for remobilising the immobile, down in Maryland. Thus there is a black doctor in chief known simply as the Doctor, and a half-patient, half-administrator who goes by the name of Jacob Horner and is even thought by some to be the original of your soulless anti-hero. A patient known as “St Joseph” plays or lives the role of poor Joseph Morgan; “Bibi” herself has assumed the part of Rennie Morgan (Sexual Therapy, no doubt), caught between her rationalist husband and antirationalist “lover”… All very convenient for “our” film, of course, as I would soon see, in keeping with Ambrose’s (and presumably Prinz’s) notion of echoes and reenactments significant in themselves, without necessary reference to their originals. (Did you know that Reg Prinz has “kept his imagination pure” by not even reading your books, any of them, so that viewers of his film won’t have had to either? How I wish, in my ever rarer moments of relative calm, that I were outside this madness enough to savour its paradoxical aesthetics!) What was more—and what Prinz had evidently told Ambrose only over the fortune cookies, as I braved the stares of proper Ontarians to make my way to the Ladies’—the Doctor having declined for one reason or another to play himself in this psychodramatical masquerade, his role had been assumed by a patient known as “Monsieur Casteene.”
I do not reenact, here in this letter, my reactions to this news there on the twilit, Buffalo-facing rampart of Fort Erie. I do not even call to my aid my trusty suspension points, that have got me out of many an epistolary paragraph heretofore. I merely report to you this initial detonation. Still holding my arm, Ambrose regarded me. We turned to a nearby whir: Prinz with his “hand-held,” photographing my reaction, Ambrose’s indignation.
Separate cars to the Farm. Did Prinz “set us up,” Ambrose wonders, for that shot? Perhaps even fabricate the “Monsieur Casteene bit” for that purpose? He offers to return me to the motel; but of course I must investigate for myself. On the farther, downriver (up-map) side of the town of Fort Erie, past the old fortification and the Peace Bridge, I recognise the Victorian white frame, half nursing home, half hippie sanctuary, the freaks and geriatrics rocking in their separate fashions on the porch. No suspension points. I hold my friend’s arm, as I hold now onto my syntax and, less certainly, my reason. The Baratarians have preceded us; we are “shot,” en passant, coming up the walk, mounting to the porch—not so unremittingly as to make clear that we are the stars of the scene, but the angry set of Ambrose’s mouth is not missed, nor are my too bared legs, Ambrose wonders What the Hell; makes to let Prinz know he’s going too far. But here to greet us comes “Bibi,” drawn and severe-looking (and more attractive, alas) without makeup, and wearing a simple shift, her “Rennie Morgan” getup. Lights. Here is lean “Jacob Horner,” nondescript in clean white shirt, straight-leg chinos, and saddle oxfords: clearly caught in an early-Eisenhower time warp but for his lined face and graying hair. Cameras. Then come in fast succession three more explosions, not bursting in air but whumping deep like depth charges or, better, underground tests.
“Joe Morgan,” played by… Joe Morgan! To be sure, “much changed,” as our correspondent A.C. IV would say—the careful, conservatively dressed ex-college president now a benignly grizzled guru, beaded, bearded, bedenimed, barberless—but unquestionably Joe Morgan! He smiles at us in quiet unsurprise, greets us both by name from his rocker, and believes we “both know Monsieur Casteene, the Doctor.”
Boom. Whir of camera. “I am the Doctor only when we rehearse,” intones with the faintest accent (bit of a zed on ze definite article; emphasis evened out over ze sýl-á-blés) no dash no suspension points some cordial amalgamation, much changed, of the Maryland Laureate and my André. Then, in flawless Canadian French: “Le Médecin malgré moi, eh? But just now we are not acting.”
He takes our hands; makes the slightest bow. André’s bald spot; A. B. Cook’s salt-and-pepper hair. Moustache rather like André’s, but no beard. André’s dentures, possibly, but no eyeglasses. Contact lenses, I believe, can be tinted? Ambrose squeezes my arm. No action, no reaction; what a slow movie it’s going to be! I begin to mumble something like Thanks for the nice letters and My but isn’t Guy Fawkes Day early this year when Boom comes the third explosion, so deep and quiet I don’t even hear it. A plain-faced sharp-jawed firm-voiced (trim-figured) middle-thirtied woman stands nearby: Horner’s? Casteene’s (she could be the sister of that blank-phizzed unreceptionist chez Cook at Chautaugua)? Morgan’s perhaps, if her incongruous Indian headband means anything (otherwise she looks about as Indian as the woman on the Land O Lakes butter box)? No: plainly her own woman, this “Pocahontas”—so “Casteene” introduces her, with the smiling flourish of a magician introducing his assistant—though from the particularly disagreeable smirk with which she appraises me, and from Ambrose’s sudden lividity, his appalled, exasperated “Jesus Christ,” I begin to infer that she once was
Bang bang bang. Observe that I do not whimper; I merely report the news from across the Peace Bridge. It is now three days later, Saturday morning, 14 June, today. My inseminator scratches away at his tale of Perseus and Andromeda’s failed marriage, the problem of addressing the “Second Cycle” of one’s life. My Toronto newspaper reports Nixon’s claim to broad new “bugging privileges” against political radicals; also that the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Evans by collision with an Australian aircraft carrier was not the Australian skipper’s fault, and that Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is still seaworthy despite an unexpected waterlogging to starboard. What are you up to over there this mild muggy morning, I wonder, and where are you up to it? It is “Jacob Horner,” no doubt, from whom I have this almaniacal reflex: he has apprised me that the steamy St Barnabas evening aforereported—Kamehameha holiday in Hawaii, birthday of John Constable, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Strauss, and Mrs Humphry Ward—when I re-met Messieurs Morgan and Casteene, and my would-be impregnator re-met his ex-wife Marsha Blank, was the 198th anniversary of the day when Goethe’s young Werther first met his Charlotte at the hunting lodge in Wahlheim.
The debris from those three explosions is still falling; Damage Control has yet to complete the assessment of our condition, but all the evidence is that we are sinking fast. On Thursday 12th, John L. Lewis died and the Niagara Falls shutoff was completed; convin
ced though he is that Reg Prinz knew in advance “Pocahontas’s” identity and “set him up” for that dismaying surprise (duly filmed, of course), Ambrose “kept his cool”: one would never have guessed, from his energetic flirtations with “Bibi” as the Baratarians filmed the unfailing Falls (at whose base one well-rinsed human skeleton has been discovered), that he had spent the night pounding the mattress in his rage at “them”—Mr Prinz, Ms Blank—and at his incomprehension of their motives and connexions. No good my advising him, from my rich experience of Them, that there is no They, only a He: André/Andrew Burlingame/Cook/Castine, whose motive, while doubtless unknowable, certainly looked a lot like plain old sadism, wouldn’t he say? It was too much, he exploded (the last detonation of that day): all those people in one place! Horner (A. knew him in graduate school days, hadn’t seen him since)! Morgan (What in the world had flipped him out so?)! Castine (I really couldn’t tell? A third half-brother, maybe?)! And Marsha (Jee-sus)! Put it in a novel, your editor would throw the script back over the transom! Where was Giles the Goat-Boy, whilst They were at it? Where were my long-lost son and Ambrose’s old high school English teacher, if Prinz was going to play This Is Your Life?
All this in fury in the Erie Motel on the Wednesday and again on the Thursday night, Ambrose having in between played Cotten to Bea Golden’s Monroe all over Goat Island (we looked: no Giles) and the sprinklered escarpment of the Falls (having turned the rapids off, the engineers must keep a spray of water on the Rochester shale, lest it dry and crumble even faster). Freud observes that the sound of falling water is aphrodisiac: rain on the roof of the gamekeeper’s cottage; Dido and Aeneas in their cozy cave. Ambrose had earlier invoked Freud’s observation to explain the attraction of Niagara Falls to honeymooners. I submit that the sound of the Falls not falling has an even more powerful effect upon our friend, though not upon the writer of these lines. Too, Ms Blank’s disconcerting smirk at her ex-husband’s new Old Lady, together with “Bibi’s” Rennie Morgan look of exhausted strength, inspires him to ever more ardent pursuit of Bea (Prinz doesn’t seem to mind; photographs it all), ever more humiliation of myself. Every day I’m screwed, both ways, and whilst I leak his stuff into my scanties, he chases after her.
The news, the news. Our “Jacob Horner” is a spook, a vacuum, an ontological black hole. In his presence (the word is perfectly inapposite) I feel my hold on myself, my sense of me, going the way of my sanity. “Are you actually the original of the Jacob Horner in the novel?” I ask him, and he answers, seriously: “In a sense.” Marsha Blank, on the other hand, seems no blank at all, but a cold-souled, calculating—okay, empty-hearted—embodiment of small-minded WASP vindictiveness who—whoa there: that’s Jealousy talking, and Desperation chiming in with modifiers. But what on earth did Ambrose once see in her? In their reenactment of The End of the Road she will take the role of your sexually exploited high school English teacher, Peggy Rankin (a role better suited to myself, I should think; no one would get away with exploiting Ms Blank a second time!). That Prinz himself seems fascinated by her is no surprise: she flirts with him in the full sly ignorance of an insurance company clerk-typist flirting with, say, Andy Warhol—no doubt in part to make Ambrose jealous—and Prinz indulges her, with as it were an anthropological curiosity. Between her and Ambrose the vibrations are murderous (Peggy Rancour, he has dubbed her): nothing in my own experience compares with it. And Bea Golden, stung (sorry; let’s say miffed) by Prinz’s sufferance of Blank’s rude overtures, responds now, out of spite, to Ambrose’s. God help me!
Upon this tawdry diagram of forces, “M. Casteene” and “Saint Joseph” smile benignly, though with different interests. What Casteene’s are I shall not even speculate (I cannot call him André; he is not A. B. Cook; he is to both what Marsha Blank is to the doorlady of Chautaugua, an imperfect clone; yet he alludes knowledgeably to the letters of 1812 and hopes to discuss their publication with me “fully,” together with “our larger strategy,” tomorrow, when the Baratarians are on holiday! John, John!). He is the courtly master of ceremonies, the Spielman; the low-keyed but high-geared tummler of the Remobilisation Farm, and director of the Wiedertraum (his term, I gather) that is The End of the Road Continued.
On that little psychodrama, too, I shall not speculate, except to say that it seems to me potentially as explosive as the Old Fort Erie powder magazine. And that, as it is being reenacted on a sort of anniversary schedule, with your novel as the basis of their script, the next episode will not occur until 20 and 21 July, when Horner (having been instructed by the Doctor on 1 June to take up grammar teaching as an antidote to his paralytical tendency) is to be interviewed by “Dr Schott” (also played by Casteene) and “Joe Morgan,” played by:
Joe Morgan. Oh, John: much changed! And yet, plus ça change… Whether he is “your” Joe Morgan is not for me to say—my sense is that it were dangerous, not to mention tactless, to press that question; nobody here does, either with “St Joe” or with any of the others—but he is most certainly “mine,” under howsoever altered a complexion: the courteous, intense, scholarly, boyish intellectual historian (in both senses) who so aided my researches at the Maryland Historical Society and later hired me at Marshyhope. Then, his simplicity, lucidity, and energetic gentleness covered (as we thought) a complexity, a mystery, perhaps even a violence: a darkness obscured by light, for which your tale of adultery, abortion, and death provided at least a fictive explanation. Now things seem reversed: the gentleness is still there, but it seems fierce; the mystery, irrationality, even mysticism, are on the surface; he has “done” the heavy psychedelics; his mind is “bent,” by his own admission (but not “blown”)—yet his account of his motives, his “reappreciation of the secret life of objects,” his “delinearisation of history,” all seem (at least when he’s speaking of them) as pellucid as William James’s rational chapter on the mystical experience, or Morgan’s own essay on Cheerful American Nihilism. His defeat last year by John Schott at Marshyhope must have been the penultimate straw; I gather something snapped at Amherst, and his friend “Casteene” arranged his coming to the Farm. I would not care to be in Jacob Horner’s saddle oxfords.
Being in my sneakers and penny loafers is no picnic, either. So many words, so many pages (Werther’s longest letter, that one of 16 June 1771 describing his introduction to Charlotte on the 11th, is a mere nine pages), and even so I’ve not mentioned “U.U.,” the Underground University of Senior Citizens and draft evaders organised at the Farm by Morgan and Casteene, in which Jacob Horner will presumably teach when the time comes. Or the minstrel show (based dimly on your Floating Opera!) rehearsing under “Bibi’s” direction for performance a week hence—by when, God willing, Ambrose and I will be out of this madhouse, with whatever scars; away from this eerie powder keg of cross-purposes and unsettled scores; back home (so it seems already; I would never have supposed!) to dear damp Marshyhope and our late commencement exercises.
But next Saturday’s Doctor of Letters has just put down his pen for the day. I must therefore put down mine: close my letter, open my legs: then out to the Fort, the Farm, the Falls, and whatever further setups and put-downs the afternoon holds for your
Germaine
P.S.: Prinz and Ambrose be damned, I intend of course to seek you out whilst we’re filming at Chautauqua and Lily Dale next week, if the post office will tell me where on that rural delivery route your cottage is. I promise not to be a nuisance—you’re not the first writer I ever met!—but we really should talk, don’t you think?
S: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her conversation with “Monsieur Casteene.” A fiasco on Chautauqua Lake. A Visit to Lily Dale, N.Y., Spiritualist Capital of America.
24 L St, Dorset Heights
Saturday, 21 June 1969
John,
So: back in Maryland, on the morning of the year’s longest day, and thoroughly alarmed, confused, distressed. I shan’t degrade myself further by enlarging for you upon my week, since clearly you do not wait for these
reports with bated breath—perhaps not even with tempered curiosity. From Monday through Thursday last I was on and about your Chautauqua Lake, in weather as gray and chill as northern Europe’s: not like our proper Maryland Junes! On the Sunday prior, at Fort Erie, I’d had my remarkable conversation with “Monsieur Casteene,” in course of which he retailed to me such an astonishing and unexpected history of his connexions with yourself that on the Monday, when Ambrose and I were installed in Chautauqua’s old Athenaeum, I got your number from the operator and straightway rang you up. No answer, then or later. On the Tuesday—whilst Ambrose scribbled at his Perseus story and counterplotted against Reg Prinz within the ad libitum plot of their screenplay—I drove our hired car around the lake to your cottage, aided by directions from the rural postman. It was Chautaugua all over again, minus Mr Cook’s blank receptionist: the modest cottage, the tidy grounds, the seawall and dock, boats tethered at their moorings—and no one at home.
I took the liberty of asking your neighbours; they said you “came and went.” I waited an hour; strolled out on your dock in the crisp breeze from Canada (Monday and Tuesday were the only clear days all week, and both cool as March); the lake too seemed abandoned, but for a few muskellunge fishermen standing and drifting in their skiffs. As I left, much frustrated (there are things you don’t know about “Casteene”!), I caught sight of your postbox in a row of others and took the further liberty of peeking in, simply to assure myself that mail was indeed being delivered to you there. And I found… mine of Saturday last, postmarked Ft Erie, Out., 14 June 1969!