Letters

by John Barth

  Barataria will be dealt with tomorrow. I shall not—as “my father” hoped I would—be there.

  About “Comrade Bray” and “Comrade Mack,” not to mention Mr Todd Andrews, I am unconcerned. I know who they are, where they are, what they “stand for,” what they intend, and what will come to pass: at Barataria Lodge tomorrow; on the campus of Marshyhope State University a week from Friday.

  The “Second Revolution” shall be accomplished on schedule. Do not be misled by those who claim that it has already taken place, or by those others who childishly expect to “RIZE” in overt rebellion. Little will (most) Americans dream, when they celebrate the Bicentennial of the “U. States,” what there is in fact to celebrate; what a certain few of us will be grimly cheering. The tyrannosaurus blunders on, his slow mind not yet having registered that he is dead. We shall be standing clear of his death throes, patient and watchful, our work done.

  H.B. VII

  Bloodsworth Island 15.9.69

  O: Jerome Bray to his grandmother. His business finished, he prepares to ascend to her.

  Comalot, R.D. 2

  Lily Dale, N.Y., U.S.A. 14752

  9/23/69

  TO:

  Kyuhaha Bray (“Unfinished Business”), Princess of the Tuscaroras & Consort of C. J. Bonaparte (Grananephew of Napoleon, U.S. Indian Commissioner, Secretary of the Navy, Attorney General, Suppressor of Vice in Baltimore, & Fearless Investigator of Corruption in the U.S. Post Office)

  FROM:

  Rex Numerator a.k.a. your granason Jerry

  Dear Granama,

  O see, kin, “G. III’s” bottled dumps—oily shite!—which he squalidly hauled from his toilet’s last gleanings. 5 broads stripped and, bride-starred, screwed their pearly ass right on our ram-part! You watched? Heard our growls and their screamings? Now Bea Golden (“G’s” heir)’s Honey-Dusted 4-square: grave food for her bright hatch of maggots next year! Our females are all seeded; our enemies are not alive: so, dear Granama, take me to the hum of your hive!

  1. 9/23/4004 B.C.: World began, 9:00 A.M. EDST. LILYVAC II’s LANG & PUNCT circuitry entirely regenerated; we can even sing now like Katy did. Excuse our conjunctions. O LIL! O Granama! O see RESET Quel artison! ANCIENT PLANETS & ALCHEMICAL BODIES: (1) Moon/silver, (2) Mars/iron, (3) Mercury/quicksilver, (4) Jupiter/tin, (5) Venus/copper, (6) Saturn/lead, (7) Sun/gold. MOHAMMEDAN HEAVENS & THEIR INHABITANTS: (1) silver/Adam & Eve, (2) gold/ John the Baptist, (3) pearl/Joseph & Azrael, (4) white gold/Enoch & Angel of Tears, (5) silver/Aaron & Avenging Angel, (6) ruby & garnet/ Moses & Guardian Angel, (7) divine light/Abraham, etc.

  2. 9/23/480 B.C.: Euripides born. A less tragical writer by ½ than F. Kafka, author of Die Verwandlung, or J. P. Sartre, author of Les Mouches, or your granason, author of NUMBERS and other coded epistles to his granama. Re-pre-programming of LILYVAC II with 7’s now all but completed. STAGES OF DRAMATIC ACTION: (1) exposition, (2) establishment of conflict, (3) 1st complication, (4) 2nd ditto, (5) 3rd RESET (6) climax & peripety, (7) dénouement & wrap-up. O Granama, it has been a long and lonely flight. STRINGS OF APOLLO’S LYRE & THEIR SEVERAL PROVINCES: (1) Alpha/music, (2) Eta/poetry, (3) Iota/philosophy, (4) Omicron/astronomy, (5) Upsilon/mathematics, (6) Epsilon/medicine, (7) Omega/science.

  3. 9/23/1779: J. P. Jones in Bonhomme Richard defeats Serapis. A less crafty water-skipper by ½ than your granason, ex-pilot of Chautauqua excursion boat Gadfly III (now LILYVAC can call a spade a springtail), ex-ditto of ex-yacht Baratarian a.k.a. Surprize, ha ha, whose crew and cargo (Honey-Dust Ingredient #7) not the U.S.N. and U.S.C.G. together will ever find. Finished business! STAGES OF MOON: (1) new crescent, (2) 1st ¼, (3) waxing gibbous, (4) full, (5) waning gibbous, (6) 3rd ¼, (7) old crescent. MONTHS BETWEEN EQUINOXES, INCLUSIVE, WITH CORRESPONDING ZODIACAL SIGNS ADJUSTED FOR PRECESSION: (1) March/Pisces, (2) April/Aries, (3) May/Taurus, (4) June/Gemini, (5) July/Cancer, (6) August/Leo, (7) September/Virgo.

  4. 9/23/1780: B. Arnold betrays West Point to Major André; incriminating papers discovered in André’s socks at Tarrytown, N.J. LILYVAC’s hair-trigger Reset-function still a thorn in our crown. Flew to Fort McHenry 9/13 to monitor Resetting of Margana le Fay a.k.a. Merope Bernstein, i.e. her penitential denunciation of those anti-Bonapartists who took her from us back at Passover. They have paid. Also, in disguises not even she could penetrate, we followed up our ultimatum of 8/26 to Ma and Pa: i.e. R.S.V.P. etc. No reply = bye bye. Business finished. Ha. NOACHIAN LAWS (contra): (1) idolatry, (2) adultery, (3) murder, (4) robbery, (5) eating of limbs severed from wild animals, (6) emasculation of animals, (7) breeding of monstrosities. SENSES & SPIRITS: (1) animation/fire, (2) touch/earth, (3) speech/water, (4) taste/air, (5) sight/mist, (6) hearing/flowers, (7) smell/south wind.

  5(a). 9/23/1806: Lewis & Clark Expedition finished. Ha. Our business RESET 5 females (variously) fecundated; all prenatal arrangements made. Presume 5 will do, Granama, inasmuch as back in Mating Season you had not yet shifted us to Base 7. The loyal drone finishes his business ha ha and goes to his reward. 1, preserved like a bee in amber, immortal 1st heroine of Numerature, will feed her larvae on the 6th ingredient of Honey Dust: the royal jelly of herself. Another, the Bernstein of the Bea, so to speak (O LIL!), will have a 6½-year pregnancy and give birth 4/5/77 to the new Napoleon and Grand Tutor: no Goat-Boy this time, but—in your honor, Granama—a Bee-Girl! Queen Kyuhaha II! PLEIADES: (1) Alcyone, (2) Asterope, (3) Electra, (4) Celaeno, (5) Maia, (6) Taygete, (7) Merope (1 always invisible: either [a] Electra, mourning for Troy, or [b] Merope, ashamed of bedding mere mortal Sisyphus). 5(b). 9/23/1949: Truman announces U.S.S.R. A-bomb. Score 1 for A. B. Cook VI, who betrayed his own and our (foster) father, good Ranger Burlingame, now avenged, and who meant to ditto his own son, now RESET Merope back in charge at Comalot, no longer invisible (cf. Pleiad 7b, above), her Resetting completely completed. AGAINST THEBES: (1) Adrastus, (2) Polynices, (3) Tydeus, (4) Amphiaraus, (5) Capaneus, (6) Hippomedon, (7) Parthenopaeus.

  6. 9/23/1962: Our visitation in Fredonia, N.Y., Seed Capital of U.S.A., by Stoker Giles or Giles Stoker, descendant and emissary of the Grand Tutor my archancestor Harold Bray, who finished his business on the Campus of this world and went up the Shaft to his reward, ha, just as the loyal drone RESET The past recaptured: 7th anniversary thereof and therefore fit date for inauguration of Revised New 7-Year Plan, see below, whose execution can be left to LILYVAC and Margana. NOVELS OF M. PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU: (1) Du côté de chez Swann, (2) A l’ombre des jeunes filles enfleurs, (3) Le côté de Guermantes, (4) Sodome et Gommorhe, (5) La prisonnière, (6) Albertine disparue, (7) Le temps retrouvé.

  Upon return from Maryland to Comalot found ingestion by LILYVAC II of Regina de Nominatrix a.k.a. B.C. finished, ha, plus burp-out of Base-7 title of 1st work of revolutionary new medium Numerature: i.e. 14 21 13 2 5 18 19 a.k.a. NUMBERS. Thank you, LIL! Plus nice surprise Bellerophonic Letter from you, dear Granama (“Bellerophonic”?). JAPANESE GODS OF FORTUNE & THEIR SEVERAL PROVINCES: (1) Benten/love, (2) Bishamon/war, (3) Daikoku/wealth, (4) Ebisu/self-effacement, (5) Fukurokujin/longevity, (6) Jurojin/ ditto, (7) Hstei/generosity.

  7. 9/23/1969: Israeli jets raid Suez. Sun enters Libra. Fall begins, also Revised New RESET See below. Bellerophon’s a phony; the true hero is immortal Gadfly, stinger of Pegasus under the crupper, who then bucked at the very gate of heaven and threw his merely mortal rider into the marsh below. As at Ft. McH. & B’wth I. we stung and threw Rodriguez, Thelma, Irving, Prinz, and (former foster frère) M. Casteene, and will sting and throw 2 more per your directive, Granama. As the royal drone RESET YEARS OF PLAN: (1) 1969/70 (N): Completion of Base-7 Re-pre-programming of LILYVAC II. (2) 1970/71 (U): Mathematical analysis of recurrent historical phenomena e.g. revolutions & of complex verbal structures e.g. novels, to detect, describe, & predict isomorphies. (3) 1971/72 (M): Trial printouts of hypothetical new isomorphs on basis of findings from U. (4) 1972/73 (B): Auto-adjustment of program on basis of auto-analysis of M printouts; construction of perfect formal mode
ls for Numerature & Revolution. (5) 1973/74 (E): Phi-point of Plan: Trial printout of NUMBERS model & model revolution. (6) 1974/75 (R): Final auto-analysis of model printouts & auto-adjustment of program. (7) 1975/76 (S): Final printout of complete, perfect, & final opus NUMBERS. 2nd American Revolution immediately to ensue, spawning isomorphs everywhere. All existing stocks of insecticides to be destroyed, their manufacture outlawed forever. New Golden Age to begin officially with birth of Queen Bee-Girl 4/5/77. Your B-Letter aforementioned (why “Bellerophonic,” Granama?) received via LILYVAC as aforeRESET Granama your will be done. The key to the anagram is ANAGRAM. Casteene was right: it has not been our parents who all along watched over us: they abandoned us in the bulrushes to expire instead of hatch, and only your floating us to Ranger B. saved our life and brought us to our 2nd revolution. MARGANAYFAEL be your leafy anagram dearest Granama A. Flye a.k.a. Kyuhaha Bray, Princess of the RESET To whom, leaving Margana here with LILYVAC’s leafy RESET We will now come per your Bellerophonic RESET Like Napoleon after rescue from St. Helena and abandonment in Maryland marshes; like fallen Bellerophon wandering far from paths of men, devouring own soul, we will descend from Comalot to Marshyhope with this letter to the future, and at dawn on American Indian Day will like our ancestor ascend to our ancestors; deliver ourself up Truth’s rosy-fingered finger to our Granama! INGREDIENTS OF HONEY DUST: (1) poisoned entrails, (2) boiled toad that under cold stone days & nights has 31 sweltered venom sleeping got, (3) boiled & baked fillet of a fenny snake, (4) boiled & bubbled eye of newt, (5) boiled & RESET toe of frog, (6) royal jelly of Queen Bea, (7) freeze-dried feces of G. III. Mao not ill, China claims.

  M: Ambrose Mensch to Arthur Morton King (and Lady Amherst). Proposing marriage to Lady Amherst. She accepts.

  The Lighthouse, Erdmann’s Cornlot, etc.

  Monday, 1 September 1969

  TO:

  The late Arthur Morton King, wherever he may float

  FROM:

  Ambrose M., (Hon.) Member, Human Race

  Dear (dead) Art:

  My friend Germaine Pitt will be transcribing this (and editing it to her pleasure, and interpolating the odd parenthesis of her own) from a tape I’m taping this torrid forenoon on the beach below Mensch’s Castle, where once I took delivery of a water message from Yours Truly. Out of that bottle, genielike, you sprang: Arthur Morton King, filler-in of blanks, whom I recorked at last last month and sent over Niagara Falls. (Then why this?)

  How we shall address and mail the transcription I don’t know. Where do noms de guerre go in peacetime? Noms de plume when their bearers cannot bear a pen? My right hand’s in cast and sling, thanks to Reggie’s work last week with the palm of Fame. But today is both Labour and St Giles’ Day, patron of cripples—Hire the Handicapped!—with which saint’s blessing we salvaged this dictaphone from the wreck of Mensch Masonry, Inc. May we suppose that “Arthur Morton King” has gone to dwell with “Yours Truly,” to whom I addressed the whole First Cycle of my life? Then perhaps, to inaugurate the Second, we shall bottle this up, Germaine and I, on our wedding day a fortnight hence (!) and post it into the Patapsco from Fort McHenry. (No! You’re supposed to have done with this sort of thing, love…)

  Meanwhile, we enjoy in the Menschhaus a tranquil apocalypse between those Cycles: an entr’acte of calm calamity. Monday noon last we returned from the grand set-to on Bloodsworth Island and went straight next door to have my wrist X-rayed and set (no assault charges brought; the score was even) and to learn how things stood with Peter. What we learned is that my brother will not likely stand again. He is scheduled for “ablative operative therapy” later this week: the left leg off for sure, almost to the hip; the right probably as well, to the knee. And even that but a sop to the Crab that has him in its manifold pincers. Peter is a dead man.

  Magda was (and remains) as we’d left her: serenely wiped out. The twins, with their boy- and girlfriends, are in the house always, laying on the filial support, keeping things high-spirited, even (we suspect) making covert financial contributions to the sinking ship. Stout Carl’s a working stonemason now, riding high on the school-construction boom and not in business for himself; pert Connie is a clerk-typist at the Maryland State Hospital (we no longer call it the asylum) where her grandpa was once interned. Their fiancé(e)s, high-school steadies of long standing, are also busily careered: he a feed-corn and soybean farmer, she a dietician’s assistant in the county school system. The lot of them sublimely unlettered and unconcerned about the world: patriotic, mildly Methodist, innocent of Culture, full of sunny goodwill and good humour, strong-charactered, large-hearted, intensely familial and utterly dependable, God bless them! The household has never run so smoothly. Angie still clutches the egg at night, but basks in all that love; Germaine and I can find little to do that hasn’t already been done.

  Despite all which, Art, things are grim. M. M. Co. is irretrievable: all assets attached; no hope of limping on without Peter; state litigation still pending on our contribution to the Tower of Truth. The only bright notes are that the Menschhaus (through nice legal-eagling by Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews) has been rescued from its parlous inclusion in our corporate assets, and that not even John Schott’s D.C. lawyers (counsel for the state university) can litigate blood from a stone.

  Peter’s chief wish is that the tower were undone: it is, in his view, a monumental reproach to the whole family. One does not remind him that the reproach is merited—certainly not upon his honest head, but upon our father’s, our uncle’s, our grandfather’s, back to the seawall buried under this sand whereon I sit. Upon my head, too, though I had no hand in the tower: its flaws are of a piece with those of our settling house and our stuck camera obscura. In vain I invoke, for Peter, the Pisan campanile, the fine skewed towers of San Gimignano; I quote him Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty”: “All things counter, original, spare, strange… / He fathers-forth. …” Need Truth, I ask rhetorically, be plumb as a surveyor’s bob?

  Pained, he replies: “I just wish the durn thing was down.”

  We are about broke. Ambrose Mensch, in propria persona, has taken your place as “author” of what remains of the FRAMES screenplay, authorised to authorship, not by Reg Prinz, but by his regents (Bruce & Brice), who seem to us to be being directed now by A. B. Cook. The two remaining scenes, “resolution” and “wrap-up,” are the Fort McHenry & Wedding scene, for which I have ideas, and The Destruction of Barataria, for which I gather they have ideas. Beyond that (i.e., 16 September, when in 1814 the U.S. Navy drove the frères Lafitte off Grande-Terre Island) I have no plans nor any project—save my (honorary) membership in the race aforecited, which pays no wage.

  Nor is Milady gainfully employed (Though she has not one but two new projects in the works, Arthur old chap: (a) a study—suggested to her by of all people A. B. Cook VI!—of “The Bonapartes in Fiction and the Fictions of the Bonapartes.” Right up her alley, what? For which she is hopeful of Tidewater Foundation support, via her friends Jane Mack and Todd Andrews. And (b) the grand, the resplendent, the overarching, the unremunerative but tip-top-priority project on-going—dare we yet believe?—in her half-century-old womb. Ah, Art! Ah, Ambrose! Ah, humanity! But why this letter?) Magda, preparing straightforwardly for widowhood, begins work this month in the hospital kitchens, the most convenient job she can find. In her absence, at least during Peter’s terminality, Germaine and I shall look after Angie and the patient. It is Magda’s hope that we shall stay on in the Menschhaus “even afterwards”: that Germaine will be reinstated at Marshyhope (there’s talk of that) and I find a fit and local enterprise for the Second Half of my Life. Though she will of course understand if we etc.

  But Art! All this is not what all this is about! (What, then, Ambrose?) Between his late diagnosis and his pending amputation, Peter has been, is, at home in a ménage too apocalyptic for normal inhibition. We, uh, love one another, we four. The only literal coupling—N.B., Germaine—has been quasi-connubial, between us betrotheds, who in our fourth week of Mutuality
have gently reenacted the Fourth Phase of our affair (that’s 16 May—4 July, Art: the “marriage” phase), itself an echo of my nineteen years with you-know-whom, of whom more anon. But these “marital” couplings are as it were the bouquet garni in a more general cassoulet: a strong ambience of loving permission among the four of us. Dear Peter, though impotent, sick, scared, and shy, hungers rather desperately for physical affection, and is fed. His love for Magda is what it always was, absolute, only fiercer; his love for me, never earned, is scarcely less strong; his love for Germaine (now her Englishness and the rest have ceased to frighten him) is a marvel to behold. In turn, my fiancée’s love (Say it again, Ambrose: your fiancée’s love) comprehends the household. And Magda—beneath our calm catastrophe powerfully sexed, a stirring Vesuvia—Magda, devoted to us all, does not go wholly unconsoled.

  Entendu? Quietly and without fuss, by all hands, everyone’s needs and wants have been being more or less attended. Now: today begins, for G. & me, Week 5 of our affair-within-our-affair, duly echoing Phase 5 (July) of the original, itself an echo of sweet painful 1967/68, when, here in the Menschhaus…

  (Entendu. But this letter…)

  With all this circumambient love—and let’s speak no more of it—has gone a sort of reticent candour, wherewith certain sore history has been resurrected (by Peter) in order to be laid to final rest before he is: Magda’s old “infidelities” to him, with me, in the excavation of this house; Peter’s single adultery years later, with score-settling Marsha; Magda’s mighty extramarital but intramural passion of ’67/68. Matters all of them quietly broached, quickly acknowledged entre nous quatre, and dismissed forever with a touch, a kiss.

  Then why rementioned here? (Art’s very question.) Why, in order to explain the fizzle of what we take to have been meant to be a bombshell, in the post of Saturday last. Germaine and I were hosting a family cook-in (too sultry outdoors to leave the air conditioning)—steamed hard crabs and champagne to celebrate Peter’s furlough from hospital and the passage of another full moon (the Sturgeon, 27 August, penumbrally eclipsed) without Milady’s menses—when there arrived, amid the bills and ads and medical-insurance matters, a first-class to me from Fort Erie, Ontario, in a hand I knew. My heart winced in the old way, equal parts resentment and apprehension, at sight of that stenographic penmanship, still recognisable though as strung out from its erstwhile tightness as was the penwoman at our last encounter (Fort Erie Assault & 2nd Conception scene). Why would Marsha not leave off, that indefatigable exacter of penalties? I fished her letter from the pile and pocketed it, not to becloud the feast; but Magda had recognised it too, and smiled at my exasperation (even G. sensed something was up, luv), and my feast was beclouded anyhow. I stepped down into the camera obscura room—the party was upstairs—and read it. Germaine followed promptly; Magda soon after; no way for Peter to manage the stairs, or he’d’ve been there too.