John Barth - Letters

He liked that: put a great load in me directly we got back to 24 L, another this morning early before he took off for the hospital. But last night it was Bea, Bea, Bea. The Original Floating Theatre II is in Cambridge for the weekend; B.G. was to have flown down yesterday to open in their revival of The Parachute Girl, but stayed behind to do her “Minstrel Show” at the Remobilisation Farm. She’ll arrive today, worse luck, if Mr Bray hasn’t flown away with her; the rest of the Baratarians too, to recommence the movie after Marshyhope’s commencement. Big things are planned for the 4th of July, but Ambrose hopes to Make His Next Move even before then.

Andrea King Mensch is indeed terminal. Ambrose is taking it hard. La Giulianova is Right There, of course and thank God, ministering to her and being very real and strong and Mediterranean about last things. I must hope — and a slender hope it is — that the Litt.D. business this afternoon will put my friend in mind of our old connexion, in better days, on the Ad Hoc Committee for Honorary Doctoral Nominations.

Time now to robe for the ritual consummation of that committee’s work, which I approach with considerable misgivings — indeed, in a flat-out funk that I’ve tried in vain to smother under these many pages. I haven’t even mentioned that John Schott and Shirley Stickles, when I stopped at my office yesterday, were thick as thieves in hers, and saluted me stiffly indeed, very stiffly.

Hm!

Must run. Jee- sus!

G.

T: Lady Amherst to the Author.The Marshyhope commencement debacle, and its consequences.

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Saturday, 28 June 1969

John:

Total disgrace!

I’m in this office for the last time, Where it All Began with that wretch of an Ambrose, that beast of an Ambrose. Cleaning out the desk he once laid me on. Packing up my personals.

I have been fired, John. Sacked! Cashiered! Not only as acting provost, but from the Faculty of Letters altogether! I am unemployed; when my visa expires I shall have to leave or be deported! John Schott has appointed Harry Carter as provost. Marshyhope’s Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English next September will be A. B. Cook VI —whose punitive doing, for all I know, this may well be.

Fired!

The commencement ceremonies? A debacle. Drew Mack’s “pink-necks” rioted after all: the last American campus demonstration of the season. They caught “us” completely off “our” guard, lulled by their earlier shows of reasonable apathy. A well-planned caper, assisted surprisingly by Merope Bernstein and her crew, who came all the way down from Fort Erie to spray stolen Vietnam defoliants on the elms and ivy of Redmans Neck.

Ambrose was in on it. Seems to have been, anyroad; we don’t talk much. His (unscheduled, unexpected, out-of-order) “acceptance statement” upon receipt of his honorary doctorate appears to have been the demonstrators’ cue. Whilst Prinz’s cameras rolled, and — as provost of his faculty — I cited his “provocative contributions to the life and health of the classical avant-garde tradition in 20th-century letters,” Ambrose appropriated the microphone and launched into a distracted discourse on the mythical-etymological connexions of the alphabet with the calendar and of writing with trees: how “the original twelve consonants” each represented a lunar month, the five vowels the equinoxes and solstices (A and I representing the winter solstice in its aspects of birth and death respectively); how therefore the Moon is the mother of Letters (the man’s mother’s dying is his only excuse); how spelling is related to magic, as in spellbound, and author to augur, and pencil to penis; how book > M.E. boke > O.E. bok meaning “beech tree,” and codex > L. caudex meaning “tree-trunk,” and a leaf is a leaf in both cases…

“Right on!” cried Merry B. and her Remobilisers, and let go with their herbicides, the others with their raised fists and Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh’s, before the state police could nab them.

On what grounds does G. get sacked for A.‘s misconduct? (Ambrose was arrested too, but no charges placed; his part-time connexion with MSU is of course terminated; the board of regents will doubtless revoke his degree at their next meeting.) Schott needed no grounds: I was nontenured; my contract was renewable year by year. Even so, there are protocols of due notice; the American Association of University Professors has its rules and guidelines, I don’t have to tell you. Was I inclined to invoke them, Schott wanted to know on the Sunday, when he got ’round to ringing me up? I jolly was! Why then, says he, our grounds will be either Moral Turpitude or Academic Incompetence Stemming from Mental Instability, depending. Depending on bloody what? Why, depending just for one example on whether my behaviour as confessed in my letter to you of 7 June, of which they had the carbon, was real or fantasized: e.g., my Living in Sin with Ambrose (Schott actually used that term), my use of illegal drugs, my generally immoral and profligate course of life. If I did not repudiate my letter, Moral Turpitude; if I did, Mental Instability, which my sudden change of manner and costume frankly inclined him to favour. Even the fact that I would type out such a document in my office, to a man I did not know personally, and make a carbon, argued the latter. To be sure, the 18-page document was unsigned; but there were emendations in my hand. No one could deny me my day in court, if I was determined to Hang It All Out; but…

I hung it all up. God damn writing! This bloody farking scribbler’s itch that you (most recently) seduced me into scratching! (Write > M.E. writen > O.E. writan: to tear or scratch. Ditto scribe, and pace Ambrose.) Yes, yes, yes: that one time — when, like this, I was in the office, and for a change not longhanding it — I made a carbon, such a relief it was to feel businesslike when Ambrose had begun to make a public arse of me with such a vengeance. It gave my weekly confession at once a more official and (what have I to lose now?) a more fictitious aspect: as if I were a writer writing first-person fiction, an epistolary novelist composing — and editing, alas, in holograph — instead of a stateless 50-year-old widow, failed mother, failed writer, and scholar of no consequence, tyrannised and humiliated by a younger “lover” as she enters her menopause with little to look back upon except abortive liaisons with a number of prominent novelists, and nothing to look forward to.

And of course it took me no time at all to feel a greater fool yet for making that carbon, for editing it, for writing to you in the first place; and I “destroyed” the copy (i.e., wadded and wastecanned it) but posted the letter; and Shirley Stickles got to the wastecan before the custodian did, unless that worthy was in on the plot too; and it was too late to undo the award to Ambrose, they’d just have to hope, but once they were safely past 21 June they’d cut off the pair of us, using my letter as their trump card…

Et voilà!

Well: I am at the end of my forties, and the rest. I have been carrying on like a madwoman, and madly confessing it by the ream. The crowning irony now occurs to me: that perhaps you too believe, at least suspect, that I’m making all this up! Fantasizing! Writing fiction!