John Barth - Letters

Separate cars to the Farm. Did Prinz “set us up,” Ambrose wonders, for that shot? Perhaps even fabricate the “Monsieur Casteene bit” for that purpose? He offers to return me to the motel; but of course I must investigate for myself. On the farther, downriver (up-map) side of the town of Fort Erie, past the old fortification and the Peace Bridge, I recognise the Victorian white frame, half nursing home, half hippie sanctuary, the freaks and geriatrics rocking in their separate fashions on the porch. No suspension points. I hold my friend’s arm, as I hold now onto my syntax and, less certainly, my reason. The Baratarians have preceded us; we are “shot,” en passant, coming up the walk, mounting to the porch — not so unremittingly as to make clear that we are the stars of the scene, but the angry set of Ambrose’s mouth is not missed, nor are my too bared legs, Ambrose wonders What the Hell; makes to let Prinz know he’s going too far. But here to greet us comes “Bibi,” drawn and severe-looking (and more attractive, alas) without makeup, and wearing a simple shift, her “Rennie Morgan” getup. Lights. Here is lean “Jacob Horner,” nondescript in clean white shirt, straight-leg chinos, and saddle oxfords: clearly caught in an early-Eisenhower time warp but for his lined face and graying hair. Cameras. Then come in fast succession three more explosions, not bursting in air but whumping deep like depth charges or, better, underground tests.

“Joe Morgan,” played by… Joe Morgan! To be sure, “much changed,” as our correspondent A.C. IV would say — the careful, conservatively dressed ex-college president now a benignly grizzled guru, beaded, bearded, bedenimed, barberless — but unquestionably Joe Morgan! He smiles at us in quiet unsurprise, greets us both by name from his rocker, and believes we “both know Monsieur Casteene, the Doctor.”

Boom. Whir of camera. “I am the Doctor only when we rehearse,” intones with the faintest accent (bit of a zed on ze definite article; emphasis evened out over ze sýl-á-blés) no dash no suspension points some cordial amalgamation, much changed, of the Maryland Laureate and my André. Then, in flawless Canadian French: “Le Médecin malgré moi, eh? But just now we are not acting.”

He takes our hands; makes the slightest bow. André’s bald spot; A. B. Cook’s salt-and-pepper hair. Moustache rather like André’s, but no beard. André’s dentures, possibly, but no eyeglasses. Contact lenses, I believe, can be tinted? Ambrose squeezes my arm. No action, no reaction; what a slow movie it’s going to be! I begin to mumble something like Thanks for the nice letters and My but isn’t Guy Fawkes Day early this year when Boom comes the third explosion, so deep and quiet I don’t even hear it. A plain-faced sharp-jawed firm-voiced (trim-figured) middle-thirtied woman stands nearby: Horner’s? Casteene’s (she could be the sister of that blank-phizzed unreceptionist chez Cook at Chautaugua)? Morgan’s perhaps, if her incongruous Indian headband means anything (otherwise she looks about as Indian as the woman on the Land O Lakes butter box)? No: plainly her own woman, this “Pocahontas”—so “Casteene” introduces her, with the smiling flourish of a magician introducing his assistant — though from the particularly disagreeable smirk with which she appraises me, and from Ambrose’s sudden lividity, his appalled, exasperated “Jesus Christ,” I begin to infer that she once was

Bang bang bang. Observe that I do not whimper; I merely report the news from across the Peace Bridge. It is now three days later, Saturday morning, 14 June, today. My inseminator scratches away at his tale of Perseus and Andromeda’s failed marriage, the problem of addressing the “Second Cycle” of one’s life. My Toronto newspaper reports Nixon’s claim to broad new “bugging privileges” against political radicals; also that the sinking of the U.S. destroyer Evans by collision with an Australian aircraft carrier was not the Australian skipper’s fault, and that Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is still seaworthy despite an unexpected waterlogging to starboard. What are you up to over there this mild muggy morning, I wonder, and where are you up to it? It is “Jacob Horner,” no doubt, from whom I have this almaniacal reflex: he has apprised me that the steamy St Barnabas evening aforereported — Kamehameha holiday in Hawaii, birthday of John Constable, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Strauss, and Mrs Humphry Ward — when I re-met Messieurs Morgan and Casteene, and my would-be impregnator re-met his ex-wife Marsha Blank, was the 198th anniversary of the day when Goethe’s young Werther first met his Charlotte at the hunting lodge in Wahlheim.

The debris from those three explosions is still falling; Damage Control has yet to complete the assessment of our condition, but all the evidence is that we are sinking fast. On Thursday 12th, John L. Lewis died and the Niagara Falls shutoff was completed; convinced though he is that Reg Prinz knew in advance “Pocahontas’s” identity and “set him up” for that dismaying surprise (duly filmed, of course), Ambrose “kept his cool”: one would never have guessed, from his energetic flirtations with “Bibi” as the Baratarians filmed the unfailing Falls (at whose base one well-rinsed human skeleton has been discovered), that he had spent the night pounding the mattress in his rage at “them”—Mr Prinz, Ms Blank — and at his incomprehension of their motives and connexions. No good my advising him, from my rich experience of Them, that there is no They, only a He: André/Andrew Burlingame/Cook/Castine, whose motive, while doubtless unknowable, certainly looked a lot like plain old sadism, wouldn’t he say? It was too much, he exploded (the last detonation of that day): all those people in one place! Horner (A. knew him in graduate school days, hadn’t seen him since)! Morgan (What in the world had flipped him out so?)! Castine (I really couldn’t tell? A third half-brother, maybe?)! And Marsha (Jee- sus )! Put it in a novel, your editor would throw the script back over the transom! Where was Giles the Goat-Boy, whilst They were at it? Where were my long-lost son and Ambrose’s old high school English teacher, if Prinz was going to play This Is Your Life?

All this in fury in the Erie Motel on the Wednesday and again on the Thursday night, Ambrose having in between played Cotten to Bea Golden’s Monroe all over Goat Island (we looked: no Giles) and the sprinklered escarpment of the Falls (having turned the rapids off, the engineers must keep a spray of water on the Rochester shale, lest it dry and crumble even faster). Freud observes that the sound of falling water is aphrodisiac: rain on the roof of the gamekeeper’s cottage; Dido and Aeneas in their cozy cave. Ambrose had earlier invoked Freud’s observation to explain the attraction of Niagara Falls to honeymooners. I submit that the sound of the Falls not falling has an even more powerful effect upon our friend, though not upon the writer of these lines. Too, Ms Blank’s disconcerting smirk at her ex-husband’s new Old Lady, together with “Bibi’s” Rennie Morgan look of exhausted strength, inspires him to ever more ardent pursuit of Bea (Prinz doesn’t seem to mind; photographs it all), ever more humiliation of myself. Every day I’m screwed, both ways, and whilst I leak his stuff into my scanties, he chases after her.

The news, the news. Our “Jacob Horner” is a spook, a vacuum, an ontological black hole. In his presence (the word is perfectly inapposite) I feel my hold on myself, my sense of me, going the way of my sanity. “Are you actually the original of the Jacob Horner in the novel?” I ask him, and he answers, seriously: “In a sense.” Marsha Blank, on the other hand, seems no blank at all, but a cold-souled, calculating — okay, empty-hearted — embodiment of small-minded WASP vindictiveness who — whoa there: that’s Jealousy talking, and Desperation chiming in with modifiers. But what on earth did Ambrose once see in her? In their reenactment of The End of the Road she will take the role of your sexually exploited high school English teacher, Peggy Rankin (a role better suited to myself, I should think; no one would get away with exploiting Ms Blank a second time!). That Prinz himself seems fascinated by her is no surprise: she flirts with him in the full sly ignorance of an insurance company clerk-typist flirting with, say, Andy Warhol — no doubt in part to make Ambrose jealous — and Prinz indulges her, with as it were an anthropological curiosity. Between her and Ambrose the vibrations are murderous (Peggy Rancour, he has dubbed her): nothing in my own experience compares with it. And Bea Golden, stung (sorry; let’s say miffed) by Prinz’s sufferance of Blank’s rude overtures, responds now, out of spite, to Ambrose’s. God help me!