John Barth - Letters

We wound through tacky lanes of spiritualists’ cottages, each with its shingle advertising “readings,” to a little farm overlooking Cassadaga Lake, just below a Catholic retreat house on the hilltop. Goats grazed in the meadow: footage. Bea thought the kids just darling, how they cavorted and banged heads. Ambrose cavorted with them to amuse her, till the nannies moved him off. Footage.

Ex-Captain Bray came out to greet us, at once obsequious and somehow menacing. I don’t like him! Now that the conspiracy had turned Drew Mack and the Tidewater Foundation against him (for which, he muttered ominously, They Shall Pay), and his services were no longer desired by the Gadfly company, his sole support must be the modest income generated by those dairy goats: their milk he sold to a commercial fudge maker in Fredonia, their hides to artisans on the nearby Seneca Indian reservation, who turned them into “Spanish” wineskins for sale at Allegheny ski resorts. Upon such shifts did the Revolution wait! And it must break our hearts to see to what pass LILYVAC II had come, sabotaged by Her whom he had judged of all humans the least corruptible. Et cetera. We exchanged surreptitious glances. He took us to the computer facility, at one end of the milking shed. Footage. Absolutely crackers.

Ambrose presumed, innocently, that our host was acquainted with the fictional George Giles, Goat-Boy and Grand Tutor, if not with the author of his adventures on “West Campus.” Dear me, sir, you are not held in universal admiration! First M. Casteene’s casual report of his offer to arrange your assassination for Joe Morgan, and now such a diatribe as should have warmed my heart if I truly bore you a grudge for not acknowledging these confessions written at your own solicitation. But surprising, yea alarming, as was the vehemence of Bray’s fulmination (you may thank us for not telling him you live within daily sight of the Gadfly; he believes you a Buffalonian tout court), it was upstaged by yet one more Uncanny Coincidence that came to light in course of it. To summarise — for why should I write? — it very much appears that Bray’s trusted “assistant” (she seems to’ve been his sort-of-lover too, repugnant as that notion is) in his woozy radical-political-literary-mathematical-ecological enterprises, who he came to feel was seduced by “anti-Bonapartist” elements into sabotaging his computer, and whom I gather he then assaulted in some fashion, was a certain hippie-yippie young woman from California by way of Brandeis U. named Merope Bernstein. Not only does our Bea Golden, with a Thrill of Horror, now understand her to be the same girl fetched hysterical to the Remobilisation Farm in May by her far-out friends (who thought she was “freaking out” on an overdose of something ingested back at their Chautauqua pad), but… ready? Brandeis, he said? Bernstein, Merope? From California originally? Omigod, cries Bea (and staggers for support, not to her Reg Prinz, but to my Ambrose): It’s Merry! I didn’t even recognise her! What did he do to her? Why didn’t she tell me who she was? I haven’t seen her in six years, since she was fifteen!

At length we got it sorted out: In an earlier incarnation, Bea Golden was Jeannine Bernstein, wife of a minor Hollywood character actor, himself much married and divorced. Bray’s allegedly perfidious assistant (but now he was calling her Morgan le Fay — altogether bonkers!) was this chap’s daughter by a prior mating. Hence…

Jee- sus! Ambrose exclaims.

Your wicked stepdaughter ha ha! Mr Bray cries feverishly to the recoiling Bea, with whom he is clearly smitten and whom he fears he has alienated. Footage. He didn’t hurt Ms Bernstein, he swears now; he only sort of spanked her for ruining his life’s work; put a bit of a scare into her, don’t you know. After all, she did save his life once; no doubt she was led astray in good faith; oh, they shall pay! He shall not rest till he has made it up to her — to Bea, for whom now he openly declares his adoration — for having chastised her ex-stepdaughter, however deservedly. They must go together, at once, to the Farm: he is a friend of Mr Horner there; he will declare to Ms Bernstein in her former stepmother’s presence that though with the best of intentions she has blighted his life and at least postponed the New Golden Age, and though he durst never trust her again with the LILYVAC programme, he harbours her no ill will and in the blessed name of her (ex-)stepmother forgives her his irreparable betrayal.

I summarise. With the greatest difficulty we got out of there — never did see the famous “printout” Bray claims to have been spoilt by Ms B. — back to Chautauqua; thence, Ambrose and I on the Friday, back Home. I do not envy Bea Golden her new admirer! Bray declares he will Put Things Right for her sake; that he will follow her to Fort Erie, to Maryland, anywhere she goes, let the goats fend for themselves; that with her aid and inspiration he may yet solve the Riddle of LILYVAC II and get the 5-Year Plan back on schedule before the “Phi-Point” of his life…

Ambrose finds him both frightening and fascinating: the Phi-Point, did he say? Point six one eight etc.? Bea finds him merely frightening, and threatens legal action if he attempts to follow her across either Peace Bridge or Bay Bridge. She was never close to Mel Bernstein’s daughter, she tells us now, whose mother of course had the custody; she thinks it possible Merry doesn’t even recognise her with her new name, any more than she Bea recognised her; but she cannot account for the coincidence. Ambrose cannot either, and worries for the ladies’ safety.

Castine, Castine, I assure him: there is the very god of Coincidence. Bea has but to place herself under his ubiquitous protection, as “Pocahontas” has evidently placed herself under “M. Casteene’s.”

He will thank me, says Ambrose, not to speak of his own prior incarnation. Jee- sus , what a week! And though it included that dismaying reencounter with Marsha (Did I see what he’d meant? Those thin-plucked eyebrows; the cold eyes under them; the mean turn of her jaw; the featureless regularity of those features he’d once thought attractive, then come to find empty of character, and now saw as the very stage mask of Vindictiveness… I said nothing), not to mention the grave tidings from Magda re his mother — despite all, it had been a long while since he’d felt so potent…

Oh really.

Yes, well, he meant that way too, and we’d see, we’d see. But what he really meant was Musewise: the Perseus story was clipping along in first draft; he was delighted with the conceit, equally with the execution; it made him feel Writer enough to more than hold his own with Reg Prinz, whose movie he thought he now quite understood and rather relished. He took my arm (we were on the United flight down from Buffalo to Baltimore): no doubt it had been a rough week for me, on more than one front. Aye, said I. He daresaid there would be rougher weeks ahead. O joy, said I. What he meant was that his new “ascendancy,” whether real or set up by Prinz, would doubtless provoke an escalated retaliation. He told me frankly then what was pretty obvious anyroad: that while he regarded our connexion as Central, and central to it his desire not only to impregnate but to wed me straightway thereupon, he was determined by the way to make conquest of Bea Golden if he could. It was a kind of craziness, no doubt (Yup, says I), a playing of Prinz’s game. Just for that reason he meant to do it; beat the man at his own game; out-Prinz him.

Hum, says I. You could help, you know, says he. Forget it, says I: I’m sorry your mum’s dying; I’m happy you’ve done with that Marsha Blank, and happier yet your muse is singing along. If that gives you a leg up on Prinz and his nutty movie, well and good. But I shan’t pat you on the head for making a fool of me, with Bea Golden or generally; and to suggest I pander to your billygoatery is bloody sick if you ask me.