John Barth - Letters

Amazing, this A.M.‘s business on the beach! To have wrestled all night with Prinz’s damned scenario; to have found after all the words that might make the wordless happen; then to be shown —so roughly, publicly, instantly, and incontrovertibly! — their irrelevance… We’ve lost a battle, Ma’am or Sir, in what till now I’d not understood to be a war. That P. is a genius (at improvisation, at least: a master of the situational moment) merely surprises me: I’d thought him able at his trade; now I believe him to be a genuine virtuoso. What shocks is the revelation of his absolute enmity: the man contemns, the man despises me!

Is it less or more distressing that his contempt is not even particularly personal? I ought to find it amusing that he’s out to get, not Ambrose-Mensch-the-oddball-in-the-tower, but “Arthur Morton King,” whom in his antiliteracy he mistakes for an embodiment of the written word as against the visual image; of Letters versus Pictures! Does he not see that what he’s acting out is a travesty of my own running warfare against the province of Literature? That we are comrades, allies, brothers?

Of course he sees — with the wrongheaded clear-sightedness of Drew Mack, who lumps stock liberals like Todd Andrews with reactionaries like A. B. Cook. And it “proves” P.’s point, I suppose, that in the face of his blank hostility I see my own dispute with letters to have been a lovers’ quarrel. Sweet Short Story! Noble Novel! Precious squiggles on the pristine page! Dear Germaine.

Your old letter, then, Ms. or Mr. Truly — that blank space which in my apprenticeship I toiled to fill, and toward which like a collapsing star I’d felt my latter work returning — was it after all a call to arms? Left to right, left, right, like files of troops the little heroes march: lead-footed L; twin top-heavy T’s flanked by eager E’s, arms ever ready; rear-facing R; sinuous S — valiant fellows, so few and yet so many, with whose aid we can say the unseeable! That green house is brown. Sun so hot I froze to death. History is a code which, laboriously and at ruinous cost, deciphers into etc. Little comrades, we will have our revenge! Good Yours, I have never been more concerned!

Bea Golden. Aye, Bea, I see still in my dark camera the honey image of your flesh. Your beach-towel twitches: there are the breasts Barry Singer sang, the buttocks Mel Bernstein bared, Louis Golden’s glowing gluteus, Prinz’s pudenda! A little shopworn, sure; a little overexposed. Prinz’s cold judgment, as you report it, is surely right: that you will never be an actress unless in the role of yourself-without-illusions, a washed-out small-timer, wasted prematurely by an incoherent, silly, expensive life: the role he would have you play in “our” film. (When did he string so many words together? Or was his message in some tongueless tongue?) But Bea, Bea, battered Aphrodite, how I am redrawn to you, to my own dismay! Not to “Jeannine Mack,” the little tart who frigged me to a frazzle in my freshman year, no; there’s a passion I’ve already reenacted, and have nor wind nor sap to re-re-run. It’s Reg Prinz’s played-out-prize perversely I would prong: the Bea you have become: unmobled quean of bedroom, bar, B movie. Why in the world, Y.T., do I itch for Bea? Not just that she’s Prinz’s, surely? And surely not for want of other blanks to fill?

Au contraire: the scent seems to be on me since crazy April, and will not leave me be in abstemious May. Young “Mary Jane” in the beach hotel this weekend: a ringer for Jeannine Mack 20 years ago except less well washed and high on grass instead of bourbon; hoping His Nibs the Director would notice her, but settling in the woozy meanwhile for the worn-down nib of her ex-Freshman-English prof. Nothing wrong with shagging a former student, Mister Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents: anyhow she was C+ in class, high B in bed (my curve is lower than in yestersemester); I was tired, my mind was elsewhere (hi, Bea), and I don’t dig sex with the inarticulate, though those 21-year-old bodies are, as the children say, Something Else — not even conceived yet, Y.T., when I was first laid.

Which fetches us to the other anniversary we celebrate on this date, fortunately unbeknownst to Prinz: the loss of my virginity in 1947. And to my second Remarkable Reenactment of the day. Home from the sea I drive at sundown: beaten, wordless, Mary Jane’s juices drying on me and mine on her, the Bea-Prinz image beprinted on my ego like a cattle brand. I stand her to dinner, drop her off at her dorm (C you later, Allgelehrte), and head for mine. I pause to consider a pause at 24 L St., Dorset Heights, and decide against it: I have begun to love milady A., but it isn’t she I wish to see in this particular distraction. I reflect that we have not coupled, she and I, since May Day, near two weeks gone. This reflection, itself coupled with the scents and images of Bea-Plus, not surprisingly reminds me of that time in my life when I was chastely loving Magda while humping Jeannine around the yacht-club circuit. Harry Truman days. And that reminds me…

The Lighthouse is dark but for the driveway light. Peter’s pickup advises me that the closer I get the less. Angie is abed but waiting to say good night: I bring her saltwater taffy and a coin with her name lettered round it so:

We speak awhile in the dark of angels, stars, and Ocean City. As I kiss her good night I think of her mother and other bad news. She mortifies me with the giggled observation that my mustache smells like “Bibi” (her pet name for her vulva, Truly, derived in baby days from pee-pee, to make water). My not very inspiring private history seizes me by the throat. Dear menstruating, masturbating, certainly motherless, uncertainly fathered child: what is to become of you? Peter, Magda: why do you put up with us, and what on earth would we do if you didn’t? Dear Mother, dying next door: Am I legit, prithee, and does terminal cancer hurt awfully? Marsha Blank, chucker of responsibilities, exacter of two eyes for an eye and whole dentitions for a tooth: let him look to’s balls, whoever fills you now! Germaine, Germaine: why am I taken with the crazy craving, even as I write these words, to do it over again, and specifically with you? Why not get a child on Magda, tat for tit for tat?

Et cetera. Nighty-night, Ange. Not a little shaken, I go downstairs for a nightcap. No ale in the kitchen: since Peter and the twins, great do-it-themselfers, finished the basement into a Family Room (in which our old camera obscura stands like an improbable TV), all alcohol is stowed belowstairs, in the fridge behind the “wet bar.” It is nearly midnight. I pour a Labatt’s India Pale, turn down the rheostated lights, and contemplate an actual Choptank lighthouse winking from the c.o. screen every 2½ seconds, off to westward. It does not suggest what I am to do with the second half of my life.

Familiar female footsteps overhead: Magda, in her slopping slippers. She pauses in the kitchen — Ambrose? Mm hm — then pads on down. Can’t seem to get to sleep. Cotton nightgown, demure. How was Ocean City? Don’t ask. Pours herself one. We almost drove down to watch the shooting. Glad you didn’t. Did you really do the water-message thing? Yup. Peter says if they’re hiring you to be Ambrose in the picture, they ought to hire me to be Magda. Your ass is too big, Mag. Happy anniversary.

She said it first, raising her mug, and when I asked, neutrally, Which one, she replied, cheerfully, Who cares about that stupid note in a bottle? I mean your 22nd year of prickhood. Ah. We sipped to it. I couldn’t assess her tone, quite. How are you, dear Magda?