John Barth - Letters

Magda.

But you were so selfish yourself, completely selfish. I’m not blaming you. You can’t make a person love another person. You can only pray for it…

Mag?

And I won’t bother you, Ambrose. I love you, always will, and I wish you well. I even know you love me, in your way. But I want that baby. So tonight I cheated. I wasn’t even going to tell you.

I closed my eyes. You know I’m practically sterile.

Not absolutely. When was your last ejaculation?

Hum. Not counting this one? This morning.

That hurts a bit. But you filled me up. And I’m ovulating; I can tell.

Not a Chinaman’s chance, Mag.

I’ve never understood that saying, she said. There are so many Chinese. Anyhow, we Catholics believe in miracles. Don’t be angry. If nothing comes of it I’ll settle for grandchildren, like you said. I’m going up to bed now, so it won’t all run out.

And having come, with a smile and a little tossed kiss she went.

Truly, Yours, I am back not where I started but where I stopped: restranded on the beach of Erdmann’s Cornlot, reading your water message; relost in the funhouse — as if Dante, in the middle of life’s road, had made his way out of the dark wood, gone down through Hell and up Mount Purgatory and on through the choirs of Heaven, only to find himself back in the dark wood, the right way as lost and gone as ever.

Jeannine. Germaine. Magda. Longest May 12 on record. No copy of this one to milady. What would it spell, deciphered?

Ambrose His Story.

S: The Author to Jacob Horner.The story of a story called What I Did Until the Doctor Came.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

U.S.A.

Sunday, May 11, 1969

Jacob Horner

c/o Remobilization Farm

Fort Erie, Ontario

CANADA

Dear Mr. Horner:

Some years ago — fourteen, when I was a young college instructor in Pennsylvania — I wrote a small novel called The End of the Road. Its “hero,” an ontological vacuum who shares your name, suffers from attacks of futility manifested as literal paralysis, to cure which he submits to the irrational therapies of a nameless doctor at an establishment (on the Eastern Shore of Maryland) called the Remobilization Farm. In the course of his treatment, which includes teaching prescriptive grammar at a nearby state teachers college, Horner becomes involved in and precipitates the destruction of the marriage of one of his colleagues, a morally intense young historian named Joe Morgan. Mrs. Morgan, “caught” between her hyperrationalist husband, whom she loves, and her antirationalist “lover,” whom she abhors, finds herself pregnant, submits to an illegal abortion at the hands of the Doctor, and dies on the operating table. Her husband, in a state of calm shock, is quietly dismissed from his post. Jacob Horner, contrite and reparalyzed, abdicates from personality and, with the Doctor and other patients, removes to an unspecified location in the wilds of Pennsylvania. The narrative conceit is that he writes the story some years later, from the relocated Farm, as a first-person exercise in “Scriptotherapy.”

If I were obliged to reimagine the beginnings of The End of the Road, I might say that in the fall of 1955, having completed but not yet published my first novel, I began making notes toward its companion piece: a little “nihilist tragedy” to complement the “nihilist comedy” of The Floating Opera. At twenty-five I was married, had three young children, was getting by on the four thousand a year I was paid for grading one hundred freshman themes a week, and moonlighting in local dance bands on the weekends. As there was seldom money in those years for an evening’s baby-sitter, much less a genuine vacation from responsibility, I now invent and grant myself retroactively this modest holiday:

It is the last week of the calendar year. A live-in baby-sitter, unprecedented luxury, has been engaged to care for the children for the weekend, so that their parents can drive with another couple up into the Allegheny National Forest for two days of skiing. We have never skied before, never seen a ski slope. The expense will be dizzying, by our standards, even though we’ve borrowed and improvised appropriate clothing and plan to cook camp dinners on a hot plate smuggled into our room: equipment must be rented, lodging also, the sitter paid, car expenses split, lift tickets purchased. We are intimidated by the novelty of such adventure, much as we enjoy the long drive with our friends up into the bleak mountains, Iroquois country, where natural gas and oil rigs bob like giant bugs in the rocky clearings, and black bears are still hunted among the laurels and rhododendron. Skiing has not yet become popular in these parts; metal and fiberglass skis, stretch pants, plastic boots with buckles, snow-making machines — all have yet to be invented. We have never been to New England, much less to the Rockies or to Europe; the whole enterprise, with its international vocabulary and Alpine ambiance — chalets, stem christies, wedeln, Glüwein, après-ski — is outlandish, heady, alarming. We make nervous jokes about broken legs and Nazi ski instructors.

The facilities are primitive: at the slopes (a modest 400-foot vertical drop, but to us tidewater folk even the beginners’ hill rises like the face of a building), rope tows and Poma lifts; at the lodge — but there is no lodge, only a dirt-floored warming hut at the base of the mountain, with picnic tables, toilets, and vending machines. We rent our equipment — wooden skis with cable bindings, double-laced leather boots — not there but at a cheaper place near our Gasthaus, also chosen for economy: a rude board-and-batten farmhouse just purchased (the proprietor’s wife tells us crossly) from “a bunch of crazies” who in her opinion had used the place for dark unspecified goings-on. She refers to her husband as “he,” without further identification: “He had to go ahead and buy it. We’re still clearing out the junk. He says it was some kind of a rest home, but there’s an awful lot goes on, if a person knew. He’s crazy himself, you ask me.” She is a Seneca woman in her fifties with the odd name of Jimmie Barefoot.

The place is overheated but drafty, clean but cluttered, as if the former occupants have moved out hastily, taking only their necessaries, and the new have tidied up but not removed the leavings. In our room there are a pile of boardinghouse Victorian furniture in dark oak, sentimental 19th-century engravings of moon-faced children and pet animals, a glass-fronted bookcase with the complete works of Walter Scott, and the 92 volumes of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine in cheap turn-of-the-century editions with matched green bindings.

I shall later become an enthusiast of skiing, but this first attempt is merely clumsy and a little frightening: I am relieved when, at the end of the afternoon, I injure my shoulder enough to be honorably hors de combat for the rest of the weekend. While the others advance from the bunny hill to the novice runs, I follow Lucien de Rubempré from the provinces to Paris and through the loss of his several illusions, and sip the homemade beer I’ve brought along to reduce our expenses. I am not a great fan of either Balzac or Walter Scott. Not having expected to spend our holiday reading, I’ve brought only one book with me, a half-read Machado de Assis, soon finished and reread. I yearn for my notes and manuscript from home, especially as my shoulder stiffens and makes sleep impossible. I spend most of the night reading Balzac in a hard ugly rocker and deciding to write no more realistic fictions.