Letters

by John Barth

  Well, I say, and begin to clear the table. The president of Mack Enterprises takes my arm and purrs a directive: Let ’em soak.

  That is how our Author works: having put us exquisitely out of sorts, he then brings to pass our dearest fantasy. Bitterness smote me; Jane’s extraordinary body (zip-zip, Dad: there it was) was a positive affront. I was surly; I was glum—and, of course, absolutely, almost belligerently impotent. Jane Patterson Paulsen Mack: Jane, Jane! So altogether, so impersonally self-willed and -centered, you could not only be “unfaithful” without a qualm, perhaps without even acknowledging to yourself that Infidelity was what was transpiring; you could (I realized to the bowels) even “love” a man and somehow be untouched by your own emotions! Cold as that Appalachian Chablis, I seized the hands that tried to rouse me; my voice came clotted, furious. Did she remember, God damn it? That this was the bedroom she’d strode naked into on the afternoon of August 13, 1932, Virginia Dare’s birthday, to fuck me while Harrison went for ice? Did she remember that we’d been lovers from that day till March of the following year, and again from July 31, 1935 (Pony-Penning Day in Assateague, Va.), till the Dark Night of June 21 or 22, 1937? God damn it, did she not recall that Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden was very possibly my daughter? Had she never understood that—together with certain other, itemizable causes—it was love of her that had brought me, on that last-mentioned calendar date, to an impotence and despair not unlike those I was currently entertaining, thence to a resolve to blow up myself, her, Harrison, Jeannine, and the entire Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera? Finally, finally, did she not bloody understand, as I had come since the spring of this year to understand, that I still loved her desperately—there was the exact adverb—that I still loved her desperately desperately desperately?

  Even as I spoke I saw that of course she didn’t, couldn’t so remember, recall, understand. Jane was properly alarmed at my outburst (and offended by my coarse language); I saw her consider how to deal with me. I released her, apologized, told her I’d wait on the porch till she was ready and then drive her home. Her self-possession was at once restored. I wasn’t to be silly: it was late, she was tired; it had been an unfortunate evening, her fault; she should be the one apologizing. Et cetera. Come on, now. As for All That Stuff: of course she remembered, most of it anyhow, at least now I’d reminded her. Really, though, some of it she thought I’d made up over the years, or got from That Novel. I was such a romantic! Most men were, she supposed: certainly Harrison had been, Jeffrey had been, André was. Come on, now. The thing was, not to make a big thing out of it.

  Absolutely unironically, Dad, she held my 69-year-old penis in her hand—the penultimate time that instrument shall ever be thus held—as she urged the above.

  No sex? Why then, we’d sleep. Wouldn’t be the first time! She winked, Dad; used the bathroom; soon returned in one of my old cotton shirts; voiced her gratification that we weren’t air-conditioned, she much preferred the old-fashioned electric fan; bid me good night.

  Our Author’s proclivities notwithstanding, my life’s recycling has not been slavishly mechanical. There was no Polly Lake to fart on PLF Day, 11 R. My previous Dark Night occurred in the Dorset Hotel, not the Todds Point cottage, and my impotence then was as sustained as my despair. A rather worse thing happened now. Under the glass of my desk here in the Dorset is a 69th-birthday card given me last March by Polly: a reproduction of a 1921 advertisement for Arrow shirts. Against a beige background are painted, in the handsome style of such advertisements in that period, a young couple in the cockpit of a sailboat. The vessel itself is invisible but for the highly varnished coaming over which the seated young woman negligently rests her elbows (and against which her companion stands facing her) and the attractively molded tiller on which he leans. Her auburn hair is piled Gibson-girl fashion and bound with a saffron scarf; she wears a beige middy blouse, sleeves rolled above her forearms; she fingers the end of its black neckerchief and smiles at something off their starboard quarter. He regards it too, benignly but more reservedly (her lips are parted; his are not, but his dark hair is, on the left); his black-belted trousers and (Arrow) shirt match her blouse, except for his starched white collar and green figured necktie, and like hers his sleeves are neatly rolled to the elbow. If the craft is under way, it is gently running before the wind, which lifts the forepart of his tie toward her face; but considering the hard angle of the tiller against which he casually leans, I judge it more probable that they’re in a slip (not moored or anchored, given the aft breeze): no sheets, spars, or sails can be seen—neither can any dock lines—and it is unlikely he’d be looking so placidly astern, with neither helmsman nor crew minding any sheets, while coming about. Quite possibly of course the artist was no sailor, or chose not to clutter his illustration with lines, blocks, and cleats, just as he chose not to paint in a background or, for that matter, a deck and topsides. The couple are the thing (particularly, to be sure, their shirts), and he has got them right: they are young, privileged, well-bred and -dressed, easy in the world, sunny, beautiful. They are Jane Mack and Todd Andrews once upon a time.

  It is, by the way, a fairly erotic advertisement, Dad: “Jane” wears no bra, and the spread of her elbows thrusts her breasts at me under the middy; the slip of her fingers down that scarf is inches from my trouser fly, plainly pouched in her direction; our legs, out of sight beneath the rounded coaming, must surely be touching, if not intertwined. No wonder the knobbed tiller thrusts up at her from behind me at just hip-height and must be put hard over; no wonder even my necktie will not stay down! It is after all an Arrow shirt, and she its willing target. But there is no vulgar urgency. We have everything, including time; we mildly look away, perhaps at Harrison returning noisily down the dock with extra ice.

  Polly sent me that card unmeaningly, I believe, beyond the obvious evocation of my sailing habits. But it was on the date of its receipt, a month after Harrison’s funeral, that Jane stopped by the office and, in a sense, commenced my recycling: indeed, our Author did not scruple to have me literally considering Polly’s card when Jane came in! Now (I mean then, this fateful Friday, out at the cottage) her reappearance from the bathroom in my old tan shirt—with, yes, a contrasting white collar, made fashionable again by the last Roaring Twenties revival—her unbelievably youthful figure even more attractive half-clothed than naked, put me irresistibly in mind of that card. Impotence might have been easier, more soporific: a fit end to a misfired evening, to be slept off. Instead, “Oh, changed his mind, did he?” she said when she noticed me, and briskly lay back, parted her lips, and steered me into her (there’s the final fingering). Half-erect, I ejaculated instantly; tried to keep going for her sake, but slipped out and couldn’t reenter. Anyhow, she wasn’t interested in an orgasm. Her eyes were closed, no doubt from fatigue, it had been a long day; she half smiled, whispered nighty-night, rolled over, and quickly fell asleep.

  She slept busily as a child till morning, sometimes snoring. Not so I, on whom now, in the dark, 12 R came blackly down. As unbearably as in 1937—oh, more so, there were 32 more years of it—my emptiness, my unconnection, my grotesqueness came meticulously home, Then, though, I had thought Life devoid of meaning: luxurious, vain projection! Now it was my life, merely—how the boy in that sunny advertisement had misspent his mortal time. The world was what it was, and unbearable. Already by 1921 the first installment of Armageddon was astern. Farther aft lay, for example, the Napoleonic catastrophe, the genocide of native Americans, the wars of religion, the unimaginable great plagues—horror after horror, like dreadful buoys marking a channel to nowhere. Too much! The cottage creaked; the world rolled on, to no purpose. I was old, spent, silly. I was done with.

  Towards first light I dozed enough to have a limpid, shattering dream. I was perhaps thirty, leaving “home” for “the office” on a luminous May morning, dressed in the manner of National Geographic advertisements of the time. There was the new electric refrigerator with coils on to
p; there were the glass quarts of unhomogenized milk on the steps. My black La Salle waited at the curb; my young wife Jane, still in her robe, held our son Drew, two years old at most, rosy and slumbrous in his blue Dr. Dentons. She wanted him to wave good-bye to me, but he was too drowsy: his fingers were in his mouth; his other arm lay loosely behind her neck; he laid his cheek against hers. I kissed them both: Drew smelled of milk and toast; Jane of soap and sleep. The light, the air, were unspeakably tender.

  “Bye-bye to Daddy, now. Bye-bye? Bye-bye.”

  I awoke a truly old man: shaky, achey, fuddled. Did not at first know where I was, why, with whom. Then I knew, and groaned aloud without intending to. The sound roused Jane, fresh and ready though puffy-faced from her hard sleep. She was shocked: told me I looked like death warmed over; wondered whether I was ill. I could scarcely manage breakfast for shaking; slopped my coffee, cut myself shaving, could barely tie my tie. Head hurt; heart fluttered.

  “You must’ve had a bad night!” Jane cried, uncertainly breezy. I started up the car to take us to town and realized I couldn’t drive; Jane had to chauffeur me to the Dorset and call John from there. Marian the desk clerk was visibly startled too: both women urged me to call a doctor and forget about the commencement program that afternoon. I declared a nap was all I needed.

  Good-bye then, Jane said. She’d be out of town again for a while. I’d better take care of myself; sleeping pill, maybe. Good-bye, then.

  I got up the 28 steps to my room as toilsomely as Captain Osborn Jones used to, lay down fully clothed, and slept till noon. Not a whole lot better. My head was woozy; my face in the mirror astonished me. I looked exhumed; Jane must have felt she was delivering an ancient derelict to the flophouse. I redressed and took a cab out to Redmans Neck to join the foundation trustees on the platform. Drew was missing; everyone else was there, and they all Noticed, asked me jokingly had I been ill. I don’t know what I replied.

  As I ought to have foreseen from Drew’s absences, the ceremony was of course disrupted after all. Ambrose Mensch, our first honorary doctor of letters, had evidently conspired with Drew and a number of non-students, as well as the Marshyhope radicals, to stop the show. I don’t believe Germaine Pitt had anything to do with it: she seemed more alarmed than I was, and indignant to the point of tears (she’s been sacked anyhow). I myself was too “strung out,” as the students say, to realize at once what was taking place. His citation read and degree conferred, Mensch launched into an unscheduled, Kurt Schwitters-ish sort of nonsense harangue, not at all scandalous I thought: a rather appropriate sort of inappropriateness, a properly nostalgic impropriety, evocative (to me) of the Dadaists and others who didn’t wear Arrow shirts and sail elegant sailboats back in 1921. Even when Drew and the youngsters began Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minhing and spraying the air with spray guns (to suggest our herbicidal campaigns in Southeast Asia, I presume), I thought them part of the entertainment. Granted, my wits were not quite about me; even so I was surprised to see so lively and harmless a stunt stop the show—and thus, I suppose, deny Drew the best part of his triumph. He himself hardly got into the act; he was still a hundred feet from the microphone when the campus cops nailed him.

  And nailed the kids. And Mensch. And even Lady Amherst, at John Schott’s insistence, though I was able to persuade them to let her go before they got hit with a false-arrest suit. I was not able to persuade Schott to resume the ceremonies: he was as certain the Commies had further tricks up their sleeves as I was that they hadn’t, and I suppose he understood (his sort would) that terminating the exercises would magnify the gravity of the disruption and thus justify whatever reprisals he chose to indulge in. I got myself together enough to hitch a ride back into town in a state police car (Patrolman Jimmy Harris, our friend from the New Bridge Incident, q.v., scolded Drew all the way to the courthouse: an educated fellow carrying on like a nutty kid!) to see that everybody got decent bail and that the sheriffs people didn’t rough them up. My excuse to Schott would be that mishandling the arrests or the arrested would blow the college’s prosecution.

  Anyhow, the police had learned a few things since the civil-rights years: the shouted obscenities offended but didn’t anger them; they brought charges but cracked no heads. Drew said I looked awful and recommended a macrobiotic diet. Beyond that we had no conversation; he did not thank me for arranging bail (Mensch did, cheerily). I learned that one of the nonlocal demonstrators, by odd coincidence, was Jeannine’s ex-stepdaughter, her second husband’s child. I telephoned Schott’s office to urge him not to take action until we could confer; no one answered. I was too exhausted to trek back out to Redmans Neck. The kids all said thanks and ’bye.

  The Message, so long and repeatedly telegraphed, was buzzing at my ears, but not yet intelligibly. I crossed the park to the hotel, thinking vaguely I’d catch another nap and see Jeannine that evening on the O.F.T. II. As it turned out, I slept from four in the afternoon till five the next morning.

  For all that, I felt no younger on the Sunday, nor looked less wasted. I seem truly and irrevocably to have moved overnight from middle to old age. I got through to Schott: he’d terminated both Mensch and Pitt, and was determined to revoke Mensch’s doctorate. Three days earlier, I believe, I could have talked him out of those actions; clearly I’d lost authority! I telephoned my sympathy to Lady Amherst, who undeniably was on some wrong track with that Ambrose Mensch (why didn’t she dress her age?), but was surely blameless in this affair. Miserable, she nonetheless thanked me—and hoped I was feeling better! To my surprise, Drew stopped by the room to make sure I was all right; an extraordinary gesture on his part, which at any time in the past many years, until three days since, I’d have tried with my utmost tact and gratitude to make the most of. As it was, I could scarcely register his confession of disillusionment with petty disruption, his shaken but not yet shattered faith in the Second Revolution. The 1960’s were about done with; he himself would soon be 31. It was time, I believe he asserted, for the Movement to escalate from “trashing” to serious demolition; for himself to escalate his struggle against a real pull in him toward Centrism or worse, the gravitation of his age and ancestry. A surprising admission! At once embarrassed to have made it, Drew went on more surlily to predict that if he lived long enough he’d turn into me at best, his father at worst, and that he’d rather die.

  Where in the world was I? At least, in my geriatric stupor, I didn’t turn him off with Judicious Sympathy. He fidgeted awhile—a large, handsome, ineluctably wealthy-looking young man no matter what he wore—and then courteously bid me good-bye. Buzz buzz went the Message, no more clear.

  Though I daily expected they would, things did not get better. Everyone at the office was concerned; at their insistence, and because I truly was not clearheaded enough to work, I took a week’s leave, then another, thinking that perhaps a bit of a cruise on Osborn Jones would restore me to myself. But I was too dispirited to provision and cast off. What was the point of sailing, of anything, except in 1921, with a beige Arrow shirt and the girl in that middy blouse? I languished out at the cottage with gin, tonic, and aspirin. Jane did not inquire. Others did—even Drew and Yvonne again!—but I didn’t pick up on the opportunity to work something out, somehow, between us, after so many years. That tender, devastating Dark Night dream remained as fresh in my imagination as the morning I’d dreamed of; nothing interested me any longer.

  Last Friday, July 4, I bestirred myself enough to drive into town. Jeannine had joined the list of Inquirers After My Welfare and invited me to view the evening’s fireworks from aboard the O.F.T. II, which Reg Prinz had chartered for some sort of combination cast party and filming session. I thought, vaguely, to sound her out on her mother’s proposal to settle the estate contest out of hand and out of court; and I felt more than ever—but vaguely, dully—on the verge of seeing belatedly something obvious to our Author but not to me.

  It was a peculiar voyage—I’m not sure whether even my former self would’ve quite comprehended what
Prinz and Mensch and Company were up to!—but not a voyage of discovery. I condoled Peter Mensch and wife (he’s bankrupt and unwell, and his mother’s dying, an old flirt I’ve known all my life and even courted briefly in the Nineteen-Teens, before she made a bad marriage to Hector Mensch). I chided his brother—mildly, as it was after all none of my business—for having so inconsiderately embarrassed his good friend Lady Amherst, whose reinstatement I was by no means confident I could effect. He told me, more or less, it was All Right, without telling me how so. I do not greatly like nor much comprehend that fellow! Germaine herself was not there—just as well for her self-respect, since Dr. Mensch seemed in ardent pursuit of Jeannine; whether in earnest or in connection with their experimental movie, I cannot say.

  I did not see Jane, either. I apologized to Jeannine for having missed her opening two weeks earlier; she to me for having missed it too, that first night. She wondered politely if I was feeling better; said I looked as if I needed a vacation. There was no opportunity to bring up the will; anyhow it was hard to remain interested. Neither the literal fireworks from Long Wharf nor the figurative ones aboardship (too complicated and obscure a business for me to recount, Dad) illuminated the Message. It thrummed in my head again when Jeannine, at the party’s end—she appeared to be running off somewhere with Ambrose Mensch!—bid me good night in an odd tone that seemed to me to have nothing to do with her promiscuous behavior. But I didn’t quite catch it.

  Then today—three Fridays and three dozen pages since 12 R!—the message of that Dark Night dawned on me. John Schott convened a morning meeting of what amounted to an ad hoc executive committee of the college: himself, his new provost Harry Carter, sundry deans, and (for reasons not at all clear and never explained) A. B. Cook the poet, who is to replace Germaine Pitt in September as Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English but who presently has no official connection with the institution. I was there as counsel to the college, and in clearer days would routinely if cordially have challenged the chap’s credentials; but I didn’t care. He inquired, solicitously, Had I been ill? We were met, Schott announced, to review the events of June 22, their implications and consequences. We did so: the disruption, the arrests, his cashiering of Adjunct Professor Mensch, his dropping of criminal charges against Acting Provost Pitt in return for her resignation, his intention to press them against Drew Mack and “the hippies,” and his recommendation to the board of regents of the state university that Mensch’s honorary degree be revoked.