by John Barth
Ma y Da: Mayday! Mayday! We are back where we began. How to recycle? Every RESET Now they swarm to Chautauqua for the kill, operatives of the false T.F., under pretext of making an anti-Bonapartist film: perfidious Prinz, his ally Mensch, their beautiful captive Bea Golden (whose mind they have drugged with C2H6O; whose name they are not worthy to RESET Tomorrow, we daresay, they will celebrate the 154th of Waterloo; tonight they have chartered the Gadblank III (ah, Da) for a party cruise around the lake. We are not fooled: They know we are its pilot; they think by this crude stratagem to snare us in their web.
And we shall go, Ma, though counterstratagem we have none. We shall set out from the institute dock, Da, making false merry. Numbly we shall steer around the familiar circuits: 1st the lower lake, then up through the narrows where the bag of Chautauqua is tied in the middle. There, no doubt, as we round the buoys to begin the upper lake, or 2nd circuit, they will swap their gins-and-tonics for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, and it will be finished. Pfft, forgotten, we shall RESET Unless dot dot dot
Lost Mother, old articifrix, key to the key: R.S.V.P.!
J.B.B.
I: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. Anniversary of the bees’ descent. Encounters with Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank. He identifies his condition with Perseus’s, and despairs.
Athenaeum Hotel
Chautauqua, New York 14722
Monday, June 16, 1969
FROM:
Ambrose Mensch, Concerned
TO:
Yours Truly
CONCERNING:
Your message to me of May 12, 1940
Old messenger:
It’s another anniversary (Jacob Horner has got us all doing it): of the birth of Joshua Reynolds in 1723, King Gustaf of Sweden in 1858, Stan Laurel in 1890; of the capture by Boston soldiers of French forts in Nova Scotia in Year 2 of the Seven Years’ War; of young Werther’s letter in 1771 reporting his having first met Charlotte several days earlier; of the lifting in 1812 of the British blockade of European ports to American shipping (but the news won’t reach Congress in time to forestall a declaration of war two days from now); of the invention of the squeeze play in baseball in 1894; of Leopold Bloom’s odyssey through James Joyce’s Dublin in 1904. And of the descent upon me 39 years ago, in 1930, at Andrea King Mensch’s breast as we dozed in a hammock near the hollyhocks in the backyard of the old Menschhaus on a flawless forenoon, of a swarm of golden bees.
Eloquence, Uncle Konrad predicted: the boy will grow up to be a Sophocles, a Plato. But it’s silence I’m stung into, zapped by history. Tides! The past is a holding tank from which time’s wastes recirculate. Nothing lost, alas; all spirals back, recycled. Once-straight Joe Morgan, freaked out on psychedelics, sweetly promises to kill Jake Horner unless history can be redreamed, his dead wife reborn. Horner himself, that black hole in the human universe, that fossil from the early 1950’s, has not altered since he dropped out of giaduate school eighteen years ago: a penman after my own heart, he claims to have “published” his first book by leaving the typescript behind in a rooming house for others to discover, or for the Allegheny Reservoir to drown. His “writing” since, I gather, has been the therapeutic compilation of what he calls his Hornbook: a catalogue of notable cuckolds of myth, literature, and history arranged alphabetically from Agamemnon to Zeus.
May I? I asked him yesterday, turning to the M’s. Horner shrugged, thinly smiled, assured me he knew no more than what was inferrable from “the fiction.” But there we all were, between Menelaus and Minos of Crete (and before Morgan, Joseph), followed left to right by columns headed Wife, Lover(s), Remarks. Not only
Cuckold Wife Lover(s) Remarks
Mensch, Hector King, Andrea a.Erdmann, Willy (?)
b.Mensch, Karl(?)
c.Mensch, Konrad (?)
issue: Mensch, Peter (?) &/or Ambrose
but also, after Hector,
Mensch, Peter
Giulianova, Magda
Mensch, Ambrose
a. May 12, 1947
b. 1967-69
no issue
How had Horner come by that information, written nowhere but in my jettisoned Amateur manuscript? Did the tides of the Choptank circulate somehow through Lake Erie? The answer was plain, of course, in the entry just prior to Hector’s. Cuckold: Mensch, Ambrose. Wife: Blank, Marsha, followed in the third column by a very long list of names including Mensch, Peter, and in the fourth, after that name, by the remark: issue: Mensch, Angela Blank. Sorry, says Horner: Pocahontas insisted, and we try to be therapeutic. She’d wanted him to list as well her more recent conquests at the Remobilization Farm, he declared—from Casteene, M. through Joseph, Saint to X, Tombo—but he’d stoutly refused, therapy or no therapy, on the grounds that divorce exempts the cuckold from further horns.
Some of those names, Yours, I didn’t even know! The dates might have stung more if my memory were better—So that’s what you were doing in Philadelphia that weekend, etc.—and I could perhaps have made use of the list when Marsha’s lawyers were working me over. But now I neither despised nor pitied the woman, only tisked my tongue, resolved to stay clear of her, and sighed at the regurgitative habit of History that had brought her up in my life again.
In this instance, however, the dramaturge was in all likelihood not Clio but Reg Prinz, who seems as bent on redreaming my history as “St. Joseph” his own. The man wants some sort of showdown, clearly, and not only for his show. I expected to discover he’d photographed my tête-à-tête with Horner yesterday; indeed, lest there be hidden cameras in the Progress and Advice Room of the Remobilization Farm, I showed even less emotion than I felt at sight of those entries in Horner’s Hornbook: I simply fetched forth my Mightier-Than-Etc. and, in the interest of accuracy, put a (?) after Angie’s name.
Marsha, for pity’s sake! Well hear this, Y.T.; you too, Clio—and you, R.P., if your cameras are even now peeking over my shoulder: there is a limit to what I’ll swallow the second time around! As of my last to you I’d rescrewed Magda (Peter & Germaine forgive us), on the 12th anniversary of my virgin connection with her and the 19th of your water message. Very possibly I shall be in “Bibi’s” bibi ere our tale is told: Prinz seems to be setting us up, and Bea looks more golden in her glitterless “Rennie Morgan” role than she’s looked since we tumbled in her rumble seat back in the forties. My treatment of Milady A. has been unspeakable; I do not speak of it. Que sera etc. But I will not reenact my marriage! Salty Marsha, you shall not fuck me over over! Closed-circuit history is for compulsives; Perseus and I are into spirals, presumably outbound.
The question of the plot is clear: How transcend mere reenactment? Perseus, in his life’s first half, “calls his enemy to his aid,” petrifying his adversaries with Medusa’s severed head. In its second half—his marriage to Andromeda broken, his career at an impasse—he must search wrongheadedly for rejuvenation by reenactment, and some version of Medusa (transformed, Germaine: recapitated, beautiful!) must aid him in a different way: together they must attain “escape velocity”; open the circle into a spiral that unwinds forever, as if a chambered nautilus kept right on until it grew into a galaxy. The story must unwind likewise, chambered but unbroken, its outer cycles echoing its inner. Behind, the young triumphant Perseus of Cellini’s statue; ahead, the golden constellations from which meteors shower every August; between, on the cusp, nonplussed middle Perseus, stopped in his reiterative tracks, yet to discover what alchemy can turn stones into stars.
The planning, Yours, goes well; the writing is another matter. When I discover Perseus’s secret for him, I think you’ll hear from me no more; until I do, I pursue these ghosts in circles, beastly, buffaloed, and in these circles am by them pursued.
Beset, too, by metaphors, as by geriatric furies: the dry Falls; this tideless lake; old Chautauqua fallen out of time; this antique, improbable hotel, named after the place named after the city named after the gray-eyed goddess, Perseus’s wise half sister. The elders rock on the porches; bats flitte
r through the Protestant twilight; the water does not ebb and flow.
Waiting our arrival here this afternoon, a note from Magda: Mother’s condition grave. Will call if it grows critical. Angle sends love. Drop her a postcard from the Falls. M
No period, I note, after the initial. Mere inadvertence: coded signals are not Magda’s way of messaging. Even so, given History’s heavy hand with portents, I’m dismayed: there’s another scene must never be replayed.
Thirty-nine. With luck, about halfway through. Nothing to show for it but a pickup job, a screwy bibliography, a sore divorce, a short string of hedged liaisons, a cracked tower, a brain-damaged daughter. My heart smarts. My birthmark itches. Milady is properly fed up. This letter goes into Chautauqua Lake: the first one guaranteed not to return to sender.
Eloquence, redescend upon me. I despair.
E: The Author to A. B. Cook VI. A request for information and an invitation to participate in the work in progress.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
Sunday, June 15, 1969
A. B. Cook, Poet Laureate
Chautaugua, Maryland 2114?
Dear Mr. Cook:
Eventually, I hope, this letter will reach you. I learned only recently that you live in a place called Chautaugua, Maryland; my zip code directory lists no such post office, but while I was down your way on business two weeks ago, I noticed a road sign for Chautaugua along the Governor Ritchie Highway between Baltimore and Annapolis—it caught my eye because I live on Chautaugua Lake in west New York—and my map of Anne Arundel County confirms that there is indeed a Chautaugua Road not far from the mainland end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I must hope that four-fifths of a zip code plus your title will do the trick.
I have been told that you are descended from Ebenezer Cooke, poet laureate of late-17th/early-18th-Century Maryland, and from Henry Burlingame of Virginia, who is listed among those accompanying Capt. John Smith in his exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608. Fictionalized versions of both gentlemen play a role (indeed, Cooke plays the leading role) in my 1960 novel called, after Cooke’s satirical poem, The Sot-Weed Factor. I am forwarding you a copy, and trust you’ll indulge the liberties I’ve taken with your forebears.
My work in progress, which is of a different character, accounts for this letter. It is itself to be composed of letters, in both senses of the word: an epistolary novel, the epistles to be arranged in an order yet to be devised (I’m just past half through the planning of it). I’m also past half through my biblical threescore-and-ten, which detail no doubt accounts for my second notion about the story: that it should echo its predecessors in my bibliography, while at the same time extending that bibliography and living its independent life. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in the womb, but the delivered child must breathe for itself; one’s forties are the “product” of one’s thirties, twenties, etc., as the present century is the product of those before it—but not merely the product. You see my point.
Thus I am hazarding, for various reasons, the famous limitations both of the Novel-in-Letters and of the Sequel, most fallible of genres. The letters will be from seven correspondents: one from each of my previous books (or their present-day descendants or counterparts, in the case of the historical or fabulous works), plus one invented specifically for this work, plus—I blush to report, it goes so contrary to my literary principles—the Author, who had better be telling stories than chattering about them.
These seven correspondents I imagine contributing severally not only the letters that comprise the story but the elements of its theme and form. The main character, for example—a remarkable middle-aged English gentlewoman and scholar in reduced circumstances—by inviting the Author to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from the small American college where she’s presently teaching, suggests to him, even as he declines her invitation, the general conceit of “doctored letters.” From “Todd Andrews” (the lawyer-hero of my first novel, The Floating Opera) came both the notion of free-standing sequelae and the Tragic View of history, to which in fact I subscribe. From “Jacob Horner” (novel #2, The End of the Road) comes what might be called an Anniversary View of history, together with certain alphabetical preoccupations and the challenge of “redreaming” the past, an enterprise still not very clear to me. Et cetera.
#3 was The Sot-Weed Factor. While I don’t conceive the work in hand to be a historical novel, and have no intention of resurrecting Henry Burlingame and Ebenezer Cooke, I evidently do have capital-H History on my mind. You are, in a sense, the “sequel” to the laureate poet, possibly self-denominated, of Lord Baltimore’s palatinate. This letter is to solicit from you, as one author to another, (a) any information you’re willing to provide me, or direct me to, concerning the activities of the Cooke and Burlingame lines from the 18th Century to yourself, beyond what’s available in the standard local histories; and (b) your sentiments about reincarnating, as it were, your admirable progenitor. Might I presume so far as to include, mutatis mutandis, some version of yourself among my seven correspondents?
Cordially,
P.S.: What do you suppose accounts for the coincidence of your Indian place-name and mine, 450 miles apart?
L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Despair at Ambrose’s infidelity. Their Fifth Stage.
24 L Street, Dorset Heights
Saturday, 12 July 1969
John,
Lost, aye, I’m lost right enough, and not in any funhouse.
Three nights and days he spent with her down there in deserted “Barataria,” where except in goose-shooting season there is nothing to do but copulate and swat mosquitoes. They did both, did my A. and his Bea—more determinedly, I gather, than successfully—in A. B. Cook’s air-conditioned hunting lodge on the north end of the island, where the only dry ground is and where Reg Prinz’s movie set was and will be. (It’s to be rebuilt in August for redestroying in September: an example yours truly may be doomed to follow.)
Three nights and days! The whole long holiday weekend, whilst I steamed and stewed and reached new lows in Dorset Heights! Late on the Monday (7/7) he returned to me, covered with welts and cross as a bear. Confessed straight off, he did—announced, rather—that his philandering idyll had been no idyll: Couldn’t get it up for her (I’m glad, says I) about half the time (Ah, that hurt, and damn me for crying then and there). Would’ve called it quits even if Bea hadn’t got urgent word from “Monsieur Casteene” about the Doctor’s death.
You will have heard, no doubt: among the 200 pleasure-boaters feared lost in the big Lake Erie storm of 4 July—whilst we-all were making cinematical merry here on the Choptank aboard the O.F.T. II—was the dark proprietor of the Remobilisation Farm. No details yet.
Who cares? Who cares?
Well, Bea, it seems, for one. Anyroad she took the occasion to beat it out of Barataria and back to Fort Erie, leaving crestfallen Ambrose to scratch his own itches.
I gather further (And who cares? I do, God help me!) my prodigal has scrapped his Perseus piece, and there’s a pity. Indeed, while I still don’t know what he wrote to Bea Golden in that famous Unfilmable Sequence of Independence Day, I learn now that what he wrote it on was the verso of his manuscript, which then—like the legendary poet Gunadhya in The Ocean of Story (or Rodolfo in Act I of La Bohème)—he destroyed page by page, giving each to B.G. to read and chuck overboard. That hurts, John: it was… our story, if you know what I mean: Ambrose’s and mine. His notion that Medusa the petrifying Gorgon, Perseus’s snake-haired adversary, might actually have loved him and longed for destruction at his hands; that in the “2nd Cycle” of their connexion, recapitated and restored to her original beauty, she would teach him to love instead of to accomplish by heroical destruction; that by some magic physics of the heart they could become, not stones, but stars, rehearsing endlessly the narrative of their affair—I loved that; I had presumed to see in it the emblem of my tri
als thus far and a future hope.
Nope. The plan, he acknowledges, is dandy; he has preserved his graphs and charts, may attempt to publish them as is. But he will not after all, at this hour of the world, write…
So. I ought to’ve shown him the door, and did not. We languish here in air-conditioned desperation whilst the peninsula swelters: an odd, dull lull after all the recent action, but hardly a respite, certainly no vacation. Tender and tyrannical at once, vulnerable and volatile, my friend is burdened with something beyond his mother’s dying (which proceeds all too slowly, alas for her), the abandonment of his story, the impending return of Reg Prinz and the resumption (Monday next) of their rivalry—beyond even the set-down of his sexual ego on Bloodsworth Island. I don’t know what it is. My clear feeling—very possibly a desperate delusion—is that his “conquest” of and failure with Bea Golden really did have more to do with me (I mean with us, our unsuccess in the conception way) than with her. But I don’t know. He is a raw nerve now; sore as my heart is, I love and oddly pity him.
Too, we are back to’t. Impotent with her, he is a standing bone with me. And who cares? Well, the pair of us; God knows exactly wherefore. A touch more frequently in this “5th Stage” than in our fanatical 4th (but nothing like our sexy 2nd), we go to’t, to’t, to the crazy end—but not just—of July engenderment. Now I know the pattern, I cannot drop knickers for him without thinking of poor three-timed Magda: with mixed feelings as I fancy Ambrose thinking likewise. Once only I remarked as much: his eyes filled up; I shan’t again.