Letters

by John Barth

  Having been in her position myself, I was even able then to feel a certain sympathy for Bea, as aforementioned; especially next day, when word came that filming will not be resumed until Friday next, at Fort Erie. Our Director appears to have withdrawn with Tinkerbell to New York City; Ms Golden, very distraught, to the Remobilisation Farm, whether to rejoin the company on 15 August or not, we don’t know.

  I worry about J. Bray, whose psychopathology I take seriously—Merry Bernstein’s hysterics I regard as entirely in order!—but Ambrose only shrugs and speculates, with further amusement, on Bray’s likely reaction upon returning to Lily Dale and discovering that Marsha too (per Joe Morgan’s report) has thrown him over. At Prinz’s departure some sort of payment was disbursed to all hands; Ambrose’s share, unaccountably, was generous (to me, even that seemed ominous). We decided to make a little vacation tour of the Niagara Frontier until the 15th—and here we are at Kissing Bridge: a low-rise ski-platz, August-empty, fit for lovers.

  So much for the chronicling (the good people of Buffalo are baffled as I am by the Meaning of All This, which however they found at least as diverting as the pop art at the Albright-Knox); now for the News. As you will have gathered, my menstrual period’s nearly a fortnight overdue. Surely, surely at my age this signifies nothing. I am fifty, John: fifty, fifty! I will not, I dare not hope…

  What I must acknowledge would be a real hope now, not a bitter one. Till today, Ambrose and I had not made love since Saturday morning last; yet this has been a week the reverse of loveless: reminiscent rather of our chaste May, even more so of our first courtship. We are in accord as to the probabilities—but he is all gentleness and, especially since the Battle of Conjockety, Ad-mi-ra-ti-on for my conduct on that occasion. Admiration, it would seem, for my history and character in general, and I am either vain enough or bruised enough by the season’s humiliations to find his attitude convincing as well as therapeutic. He cannot thank me sufficiently for enduring and indulging his early importunities in my office and elsewhere, his excesses and sentimentalities; his programmatical later abstinence followed by yet more programmatical inseminations; his couturial and other demands; his outrageous behaviour at the Marshyhope commencement ceremonies; his infidelities and other unkindnesses. Quite a catalogue! He declares all that to have been the purgation by reenactment (a variety of catharsis not mentioned by Aristotle) of sundry immaturities and historical hang-ups long laid on him like a spell. He declares that my love and forbearance have dispelled that spell, set him free to love me truly and properly for what I am, have been, shall be—this without regard to what’s what womb-wise, though nothing could more crown his Ad-mi-ra-ti-on than Ge-ne-ra-ti-on. Part of why we’re here, indeed (I mean why we’ll do Toronto and Stratford and, if he has his way, even Castines Hundred), is the returning of a few corners in my own intimate biography: once the Movie’s “in the can” and my Condition is established one way or the other—and his mother’s done dying, and his brother’s prognosis is clearer—he hopes we can revisit Coppet, Capri, London, Lugano, Paris, Geneva—Scenes I Have Been Knocked Up In.

  I tell him I do not particularly share his taste for reruns. Why not make it Tobago, Maui, Tahiti—scenes untouched, if not by History, at least by our several histories?

  Just as I wish. But I won’t object, surely, to an evening’s theatre at Niagara-on-the-Lake or a good meal in Toronto?

  I jolly won’t! And jolly well haven’t objected to this week’s tender knocking about west New York in our budget subcompact, from the handsome Grape Belt down your way (but giving a wide berth to Lily Dale, and not bothering to bother anyone at Chautauqua), to the scene of Commodore Perry’s prodigious accomplishment at Presque Isle, to the haunts of the Tuscaroras and Niagara Falls.

  This last by way of a revisit to ourselves, so to speak, more agreeable by far than last time ’round. The American spigot, I’m sure you know, has been fully reopened, and if still not equal to the Canadian, it at least inspired my lover and beloved (how sweet, John, at last to use those terms unironically!) to post in it, in an empty bottle of Moët & Chandon Brut, what he fancies may be the last of his replies to that famous Yours Truly who blankly messaged him in 1940. The gesture (I didn’t read the letter, but welcomed his comment as one more fatuity purged) appears to have turned his own spigot back on as well: we are now making spirited, I think reciprocal, love here at Kissing Bridge.

  There, I think, is the term. It has been a week, not really of abject and fulsome apologies, solicitudes, smarms, but of easy reciprocity: two seasoned adults renewing (you know what I mean) their mutual love, which had grown rocky and uneven to say the least.

  I like it! And should it (as I pray) persist, and should its persistence (as it may) come to make these weekly communiqués as unnecessary for me as Ambrose’s bottled epistles have become for him—why then, we shall be at our story’s end, you and I, and that will be that.

  But we are not there yet. Seven days do not a season make. You are not done with (Ambrose’s)

  Germaine

  P.S.: Rereading this, I see I left out, unaccountably—I had been going to say one detail, but it struck me even at the time as the key and climax to last Saturday’s skirmishing, perhaps to my whole connexion with Mr Ambrose Mensch. The battle done, as he and I withdrew by rental rowboat back to “Canada,” in midpond our hero shipped his oars and kissed me. More particularly, as we paused there under the windy stars (early P.M. showers having ushered in a clear cool front), he bade me look him straight in the eyes whilst he took my head in his hands, declared he loved me, and kissed my mouth. That’s it. Romantical, what? I hear you ask, indeed, So what? But Britannia here declareth herself stirred to the ovaries by that open-eyed osculation, which bridged, I felt, our every past and present difference; brought us truly for the first time to ourselves with each other; sealed some compact; inaugurated this 6th, this blissful, Stage.

  P.P.S.: Oxymoron! The shocking news now comes in (on the Kissing Bridge Motel telly) of the “ritualistic” murders of Sharon Tate & Co. in Roman Polanski’s villa. I think of our erratic Director, of my darling Author, of that madman Bray’s last words to us from the pavilion railing… Zeus preserve us!

  O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage continues. The Fort Erie Magazine Explosion and Second Conception scenes.

  Erie Motel

  Old Fort Erie

  Ontario, Canada

  16 August 1969

  Old pen pal,

  Our last day on the Niagara Frontier. We’d meant to stop one more night here in the Erie (a cozy place this second time around; you recall our troubled visit of mid-June, a hundred years ago): it’s a chapter I’d consented to review, as it were, in Ambrose’s dramatised Short History of Us, inasmuch as that story’s dénouement still appears a happy one. But when we telephoned Magda yesterday, as we’ve done periodically through our absence, we learned that Mensch mère has entered what really seems to be her terminal terminality, and that Peter is worse too. (How was I? that remarkable Italiana wanted earnestly to know. Since Ambrose and I agree that the right news would actually be some comfort to her, I confessed that I’ve not menstruated since 29 June. Magda was tearfully ecstatic.)

  So we shall return late this afternoon, our film work done till Sunday week hence, when action will resume at Bloodsworth Island, or Washington, D.C., or both.

  In short, Zeus has preserved us and our mutuality through the week, as I prayed in my last, though his solicitude has not extended through the family. It’s been a proper honeymoon of a week for Ambrose and me, the sweeter already in retrospect for our knowing what awaits us now in Maryland. As befits what I take to be an Echo of the “Jeannine Mack” or “Bea Golden” stage of our affair—an Echo of a Reenactment, God alone knows or cares how programmatical—my friend and I have fornicated up and down the frontier, from Stratford and Toronto to the Falls and Fort Erie (not including Castines Hundred; I was adamant). A copulatory binge without the urgency of April’s—it is mid-A
ugust, even in these high latitudes—but unremittingly ardent, unremittingly thorough: as fleshly an Echo as ever echo’d. Especially on the 11th and 12th, when we hired camp gear and slept out on the shore of Lake Ontario to watch the Perseid meteor shower with the aid of a star guide, an electric torch, and a manual of Positions picked up in a Yorkville skin shop, we counted meteors and ran through the carnal alphabet as if sex were going out of style.

  Which, you will be not at all surprised to hear, for the present it has done. I shall explain.

  But now it’s history-lesson time! We left the War of 1812 stalemated on the banks of the Niagara in midsummer 1814. Jacob Brown’s plucky U.S. invaders, we recall, having held against us redcoats at Chippewa and won at least a standoff at Lundy’s Lane in July, withdrew to their Fort Erie beachhead: a strategic error, most historians agree, as it returned the military initiative to Britannia. She—after the Scajaquada Scuffle of 1 August—laid siege on 7 August to the Last U.S. Stronghold on Canadian Soil, bombarded it for a week with rockets and cannon, and on the 15th (as Admiral Cochrane’s fleet entered the Chesapeake to move on Washington) attempted to take Fort Erie by main strength. Night assault parties breach the northeast bastion and advance successfully as far as the powder magazine—which, in the fashion of powder magazines throughout this war, inconveniently explodes beneath them. Whether the blast is accidental or adroitly managed by the defending garrison will be much debated, but like the navy yard explosion in Washington ten days later, it knocks the wind out of our attack, which has cost us 905 casualties to the Damned Yankees’ 84 (that epithet is coined by the British General Drummond on this occasion). The survivors withdraw; the siege is maintained for another month, but no further serious attempts are made to storm the fort, nor are massive American reinforcements sent over from Buffalo to lift the siege. After Prevost’s rout at Plattsburgh and Lake Champlain, the besiegers remove downriver (up-map) to Queenston, but the U.S. does not pursue its advantage. By October all the Canadians are back in Canada except the garrison at Fort Niagara, all the Americans back in the U.S. except the garrison at Fort Erie. On Guy Fawkes Day, General Izard blows up what’s left of Fort Erie and ferries his troops back to Buffalo. End of hostilities in this theatre of the war, and end of lesson.

  And in our little Theatre of the Preposterous? Just possibly ditto, though we are Wary. Yesterday’s sequence (so Ambrose reported on the Thursday, after a telephone conference with Reg Prinz’s assistants) bore the working title Fort Erie Assault & Explosion; 2nd Conception Scene. It was to commence Friday noon with a (filmed) story-conference luncheon in the mess hall of the Remobilisation Farm, then proceed to the enactment of whatever we saw fit to perpetrate under that title. It was hoped I would take an active role.

  I would not, I declared; nor a passive either, unless I were promised that neither “Monsieur Casteene” nor the Medium of the Future would be on hand. The latter I feared for my lover’s sake; the former—but I will not speak of that rose garden! And I was to be counted out if “Fort Erie Assault” or “2nd Conception” involved our doing on camera what we’d been so busy at off.

  Ambrose enquired (of Joe Morgan, also by telephone) and was told that Casteene had departed the Farm some days past with Merry Bernstein’s troupe of activists, presumably Remobilised for covert incitement of the Second Revolution. When or whether he would return, no one knew. That Mr Bray had not been seen since Scajaquada, but (according to Mr Jacob Horner, much distraught) had communicated by letter with Bea Golden (a.k.a. “Bibi”), who together with Marsha Mensch (née Blank, a.k.a. “Pocahontas”) had taken French leave from the Farm on Wednesday and not been heard from since. Horner was persuaded they were in Lily Dale, in Bray’s clutches, and was of course immobilised with anxiety on behalf of His Woman.

  I was anxious for them both, now neither was a threat to me. Jerome Bray! Ugh! Heartless Ambrose was more amused than alarmed, particularly as Morgan himself judged Horner’s fears premature and possibly misdirected. Both “patients” had been AWOL before, it seems; indeed “Bibi” had disappeared for the whole past weekend and showed up drunk on the Tuesday declaring she’d been down sailing on the Chesapeake with a new boyfriend. Since Marsha (alas) also has tidewater connexions, and the two women have struck up an alliance, it seemed as likely to Morgan that they were lushing it in Maryland together as that they were facing Worse Than Death in Lily Dale. In good Joseph’s view, the real ground for concern was not their whereabouts but their dissolution: “Bibi’s” aggravated alcoholism and (he now regretfully reported to Ambrose) “Pocahontas’s” recent taking to unspecified and unprescribed narcotics, which she shared with her new friend. Joe wished both of them off the Farm for good and “Bibi” in a proper therapeutic institution for alcoholics.

  At second hand, all this sounded reasonable enough, if not exactly jolly, and on the strength of Ambrose’s assurances—which he cautioned were not guarantees except in the matter of public coupling—I went along. (Here’s the place to declare that the fortnight past has truly coupled our spirits, John, as never in the five months and stages prior.)

  Face to face it was another matter, and not only because the Farm’s dining hall was rigged up with the now familiar lights, cables, microphones, and cameras. The old folks gently exercised or sat about: whatever legitimacy that queer establishment can claim must be in the nursing-home way, where it’s not half bad; the hippies for example are in principle as down on “age-ism” as on racism and sexism, and earnestly attempt not to patronise the geriatrics. Reg Prinz, his two chief assistants (that pair of curly blond thugs featured in the “1st Conception Scene” and the “Battle of Niagara,” who more and more do his talking for him), and Merry Bernstein were positioned at one end of a central table, sipping fruit juice and regarding our entry. All wore sunglasses. Prinz grows ever more pinched and intensified; Merry’s newest denims looked to me more Bloomingdale’s than Whole Earth Catalogue, and her hair was teased out in spectacular amplification of Reggie’s, as if she’d touched an even higher-voltage line. None spoke. In the center of the table, behind coffee cups, sat “St Joe” and a pale, distraught Jacob Horner, who fiddled, twitched, eyed Ambrose uneasily as if expecting him to play the Jealous Ex-Husband, and said nothing. Morgan too, though he sucked his unlit pipe and gravely buttered a croissant, appeared to me less “together” than holding together: that mad brightness of eye I’d noted from time to time in our last conversation was now his fixed aspect.

  No sign of Marsha, “Bibi,” or the other promised absentees. That black militant chap, the one who calls himself Tombo X, was at the farthest table off with a squad of Brothers and Sisters in green staff uniforms, conspicuously ignoring us. Racism, it would appear, flourishes after all in that corner of the Farm.

  Ambrose and I took the two remaining seats, at the opposite table-end from the Director, behind an array of note pads, pencils, ashtrays and matches, ham sandwiches, and, of all unexpected welcome things, Bloody Marys! No one else was so provided for. We said hello to the company and microphones, waved politely to the cameras recording our arrival, and expressed a proper mild concern for Ms Blank and Ms Golden. Morgan crisply reaffirmed that they had left the premises together, voluntarily but without authorisation, and that inasmuch as they were ambulatory adults whose stay at the Farm was also voluntary, there were no grounds for mounting a search.

  I think, thought Horner, they’re at Lily Dale.

  So go to Lily Dale, his advisor advised. Horner does not; only wipes his unperspiring brow with a clean white pocket handkerchief.

  All this filmed and watched impassively by the filmists. Clearly that ongoing rerun of your End of the Road novel is off its track, sir, and like to be abandoned for want of actors! Just as clearly, some pressure is a-building twixt protagonist and antagonist, whichever of Morgan and Horner is which.

  With uneasy briskness we took our seats and our Clearly Symbolic roles: i.e. (Ambrose declared aloud), that they were symbolic was clear, but not what they were sym
bolic of. Was this the Last Brunch, and we the only communicants? Was it Writing that was represented to be alcoholic and carnivorous, or Great Britain, or his and my generation? On the subject of national embodiments, by the way, was it not Prinz’s turn to live up to his name and play Britannia, Ambrose’s to play the Yankee Doodler, in the upcoming fracas?

  What we thought, offered Prinz’s Tweedledum, we thought we’d all meet at the Old Fort Erie magazine this evening and play it by ear. See what blows.

  Whereto adds Tweedledee: First ones to back off will be the redcoats.

  I’m eating my sandwich, I declared, and drinking my bloody Bloody Mary, symbol or no symbol. Ambrose nodded approval and followed suit.

  Joe Morgan reminded Author and Director that, if historical accuracy was to apply, the detonation of the Fort Erie magazine ought to occur in predawn darkness. Dum & Dee looked to their leader, who quietly intoned: I think evening. The light.

  And those crazy lake flies (Tweedledee): there’s a major hatch on. Millions. Joe volunteered that those clouds of insects—which hatch by the billions at summer’s end in low-lying areas around the Great Lakes, swarm about harmlessly for a few evenings, and then die—have been known since 1812 on the Ontario shore of the Niagara as American Soldiers, and on the New York shore as Canadian Soldiers.

  Far out, chorused the filmists. The black contingent exited. The old folks rocked, smiled, and nodded at each remark. Homer rocked too, though his chair was no rocker, like an Orthodox Jew at prayer. I was moved to suggest: Let’s let that fly hatch be the Second Conception, what?