John Barth - Letters

Perfectly preposterous, of course, and as aggressively unfaithful to the novel as Ambrose endeavours to be to me. I cannot make myself recount his pursuit of “Anastasia,” which, with Prinz’s obvious consent, no doubt even at his instruction, Bea permits, nay encourages, but does not (I believe, who am ready to believe the worst) yet reward. It is All Part of the Movie: but inasmuch as there is no discernible boundary between that wretched film and our lives, Ambrose’s conquest of her, when and if it occurs and whether on or off camera, will be Part of the Movie too, as is my ongoing humiliation. I hate it!

On the Tuesday evening a cast party was organised which culminated in a triumphant fiasco, enlarged the cast by at least one lunatic more, and altered the direction of the movie’s “plot.” Prinz chartered the Chautauqua excursion yacht Gadfly III; caterers provisioned it with bar and buffet; the Baratarians — augmented by musician friends from the resident theatre troupe, all there for preseason rehearsals — piled merrily aboard, and we set out from the institute dock in the last light (swallows, bats, cameras!) for a nautical carouse. Imagine Our Surprise when we discover our skipper for the evening to be Someone We’ve Met Before: no, not André-Castine-Andrew-Burlingame-Cook, at least not apparently, but a chap whom Ambrose tells me I should remember from Harrison Mack’s funeral (my mind was on other things), which Mr Bray attended as a beneficiary of the Tidewater Foundation’s misguided philanthropy.

One Jerome Bonaparte Bray of Lily Dale, N.Y., surely the original of your goat-boy’s nemesis. But your “Harold Bray” is only abstractly sinister, a sort of negative principle. The original, while of a lesser order of magnitude, is ever so much more alarming because he’s real, he’s mad as a hatter, and he is — or was— in charge of the bloody ship!

We suspected something was amiss when an old Volkswagen beetle drove erratically up to the dock a quarter-hour late (the college lad who was the crew had allowed, with a roll of the eyes, as how his skipper “went” more by the sun and stars than by the clock) and, like a little circus car disgorging a large clown, gave vent to a great lanky chap wearing sunglasses, sea boots, a Lionel Barrymore sou’wester out of Captains Courageous, and, of all the landlubberly incongruities, a cloak and kid gloves. We thought him part of the entertainment; the Baratarians cheered, whistled, and straightway dubbed him Batman. So far from replying in like humour, the man seemed particularly offended by the name; he drew his cloak ’round him as he hustled through us to the wheelhouse, then turned at its door to declare in an odd mechanical tone that his name was Captain Bray, and that while as an employee of the ship’s owners he could forbid neither our lawful presence aboard the vessel nor the evening’s debauchery we were clearly bent upon, as the ship’s master he insisted we not address him by that obscene sobriquet, attempt to enter the wheelhouse, or otherwise interfere with his management of the vessel.

We were abashed. The Baratarians assumed he was joking and applauded his speech; he slammed the wheelhouse door and started off almost before the boy could let go our lines. Bea Golden, looking slinky despite her new rôle, wondered around her drink whether he was For Real. Ambrose clapped his brow, took the opportunity to take her arm, and made the connexion: between the chap at her father’s funeral who’d claimed to be doing something revolutionary with computers; the celebrated assemblage of spiritualists at Lily Dale, home of the Fox sisters, near Chautauqua; and that ambiguous humbug villain whom George Giles, Grand Tutor and Goat-Boy, supposes in your novel to be as necessary to himself as Antithesis to Thesis. Prinz hummed, narrowed his view-finding glasses, dispatched an assistant for camera and sound gear.

And so we steam down past the state fish hatchery towards the narrows where Chautauqua —French voyageur spelling of an Indian word supposed to mean “bag tied in the middle”—is tied in the middle by the old car-ferry. Regardless of us merrymakers, our captain is delivering the routine tourist spiel on the ship’s P.A., with what sound like embellishments of his own, in a voice that seems itself pieced together by computer in the days when such artifices were still recognisable. The boat, we are informed, is named after his Iroquois father. All of this was Iroquois country, he declares, and by rights ought still to be, unpolluted by the white man’s DDT and marijuana and purple martins and bats (!)… The Baratarians whistle and turn up the rock music. Bray escalates his own amplifier to full volume: Our elevation is 2,000 feet above sea level, 700 feet higher than Lake Erie. A raindrop falling into Lake Erie, 8 miles to northwest of us, will make its way over Niagara Falls, through Lake Ontario, and up the St Lawrence Seaway to the North Atlantic; one falling into Chautauqua Lake will exit via Chadakoin Creek (a variant English spelling of the same noble Indian word) into the Conewango, the Allegheny, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, then into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, itself a great Bag Tied in the Middle by its “narrows” at the latitude of the equator, where South America once fit into Africa…

Hoots and bravos; louder music. It was to be observed that these two raindrops between them traced the boundary of New France, or Upper and Lower Canada, the latter following the route marked in 1749 by Céloron de Blainville, or Bienville, “discoverer” of Chautauqua Lake, with lead plates bearing the coat of arms of the house of Bourbon, that dynasty deposed by the Revolution to make way for the Emperor Bonaparte…

Curses, muttered Ambrose: foiled again. He had it seems posted overboard one of those bottled epistles he indites from time to time to “Yours Truly” (which in a happier season were declarations of his love for yours truly; God knows what they declare these days, and to whom) on the ebbing tide. This one, he’d believed and hoped, could nowise return to him; now he quite expected it to round Florida and run north on the Gulf Stream, work its way past the Virginia Capes and up the Chesapeake, and Return to Sender on the river shore by Mensch’s Castle.

The liquor flowed; the duel of decibels or battle of the amplifiers continued as we circuited the dusky lower lake and headed back by starlight for the upper. Prinz and Ambrose, therefore Bea, put by their partying (if not the latter two their drinking) to improvise an episode out of the situation. Ambrose briefed Prinz on the characters and plot of your Goat-Boy novel, consulting my more recent if incomplete memory thereof; the object became to lure our Bray into playing yours. For reasons unclear to me, Bea was pressed into service to pantomime a moth or butterfly in distress: to the strains of the pas de deux from Swan Lake, a tape of which fortuitously appeared and was substituted for the rock music, she fluttered fetchingly about the foredeck, in full view of the wheelhouse. Prinz went into his Batman/Count Dracula act to menace her, with much baring of teeth and flapping of arms; Ambrose into his Giles-cum-Siegfried antics, loping about in postures of attempted rescue or countermenace.

Well, the woman is not without talent; ditto Prinz. My lover’s abilities lie elsewhere than in ballet-pantomime. The Baratarians fell to, some pressing the ship’s lights into service, others manning the camera and microphones, still others miming outraged or horrified bystanders. At length the poor hapless Whatever-She-Was was caught: to no avail her pathetic wing-beats; her averted face only exposed the more her slender throat to Prinz’s fangs, which now with great rollings of his eyes to the wheelhouse he made ready to have at her with, maugre the bleats and caperings of her would-be saviour (who stands en garde with fountain-pen for foil). The music soars. We repass the car ferry, reenter the S-shaped narrows.