John Barth - Letters

But we are not done. Item: Among the American friends of the emperor’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte was the King family of “Beverly,” in nearby Somerset County; and among the several plans to rescue Napoleon from St Helena, one of the more serious was that of Mayor Girod of New Orleans, who built a fast ship in Charleston to run the emperor across the Atlantic and into the trackless Maryland marshes, where he would hide in a secret room in the Beverly estate until the coast was clear enough for him to remove to New Orleans. Only the news of Bonaparte’s death in 1821 kept the Séraphine from sailing. And who are these Kings of Somerset if not the ancestors of Ambrose’s mother Andrea King, from whom he had both this story as a child and his adult nom de plume?

Pooh, said I, that’s a game anyone can play who knows a tad of history: the game of Portentous Coincidences, or Arresting But Meaningless Patterns. And I volunteered a couple of items of my own, gratis: That the British man-of-war that accepted Napoleon’s surrender and fetched him from Rochefort to England was named after Perseus’s cousin Bellerophon; that the officer who then transported him to exile in St Helena instead of to America was the same Admiral Cockburn who had raped Hampton, burnt Washington, and bombarded Fort McHenry in Baltimore in previous summers; that my late husband’s ancestor William Pitt, Earl Amherst (a nephew of Lord Jeffrey), stopped at St Helena to converse with Napoleon in 1816, after the wreck of his ship Alceste in Korean waters; that my other famous forebears Mme de Staël and Lord Byron first met at just about this time, and among their connexions was surely their strong shared interest in the exiled emperor (Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte dates from 1815; the “Ode to St Helena” in Canto III of Childe Harold from 1816). And one of B.‘s cousins, Captain Sir Peter Parker of H.M.S. Menelaus, was killed in a diversionary action on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during Cockburn’s assault on Washington and Baltimore, the news whereof inspired Byron to add to his Hebrew Melodies an ode “On the Death of Sir Peter Parker.” And the ship which carried Napoleon III to his American exile in 1837 was named for Perseus’s wife, Andromède; and it was the same Louis Napoleon’s grotesque replay of his uncle’s career that prompted Marx’s essay On the 18th Brumaire etc., in which he made his celebrated, usually misquoted observation of History’s farcical recyclings. And none of this, in my opinion, meant anything more than that the world is richer in associations than in meanings, and that it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two.

“Thou’rt a very prig and pedant,” said my lover, not unkindly, and kissed my forehead, and repeated his hope that our connexion would survive the hard weather he foresaw, our 5th Stage.

Two things worthy of note occurred that same day, Thursday the 3rd, both reported to me by Magda when she called on me in the evening (Ambrose was Out). One was that the general migration of Strange Birds down the flyway from the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake had fetched to Dorchester County not only Bea Golden and Jerome Bray but, that very afternoon, the former Mrs Ambrose Mensch, née Marsha Blank, a.k.a. Pocahontas of the Remobilisation Farm: she had telephoned that morning from across the Bay (Chautaugua, surely) to announce that she was en route to Bloodsworth Island on business for her “employer” and, as she would be passing through town, wished to take her daughter to dinner. Magda was distressed: the woman’s infrequent, imperious visits never failed to disturb poor Angela’s fragile tranquillity, the more precarious lately anyroad on account of her grandmother’s condition. Ambrose too was always distracted by fury for days after, she said, even when things were serene on other fronts: given Andrea’s dying, the Marshyhope incident, the new crisis at Mensch Masonry, and what she gathered was the less than blissful state of affairs at 24 L, she feared for him as well as for Angela when he should learn of Marsha’s presence on the scene.

New crisis?

About the foundation work for the Marshyhope Tower, which was already showing such unexpected, impermissible signs of settling that there was real doubt whether construction could continue. Bankruptcy loomed, larger than usual. Peter was at a loss to account for the phenomenon: it appeared that the analyses of his test borings had actually been falsified to give optimistic results, on the basis of which he had made the winning low bid! He had already, at his own cost, exceeded the specifications of his contract when actual excavation had revealed a ground situation at variance with his predictions; someone had bribed the building inspectors not to disclose the truth earlier; to correct the problem now, with the superstructure so far along, he had not the resources.

What was more — and this alarmed l’Abruzzesa more than any threat of poverty or the disagreeable reappearance of Marsha Blank — Peter himself was not well. He had lately had difficulty walking; had developed a positive limp in his left leg, which he’d been as loath to acknowledge to her as he’d been to acknowledge that it was his own late father who, almost certainly, had falsified those core samples from Redmans Neck. But their family doctor had confided to her privately that X rays had been made and Tests taken; that, though Peter had sworn him to silence, he felt it a disservice to his patient and to her not to tell her that her husband had cancer of the bone in his lower left leg. Inasmuch as Peter would not consent, whilst his mother lay dying, to the prompt surgery his own condition called for, the doctor had to hope that his elder and terminal patient would get on with it before his younger became terminal too.

Well! Having been down that horrid road with my Jeffrey, I was able genuinely to sympathise, if not to help. We had our Good Cry. The ice broken and Magda so obviously harbouring me no ill will, I acknowledged that things were indeed less than blissful between Ambrose and me. Further, I candidly apprised her of the Pattern business: how, starting from that play upon the opening letters of the New England Primer in his first love letter to me, Ambrose had come to fancy a rough correspondence between the “stages” of our affair and the sequence of his major prior connexions with women. How this correspondence had so got hold of his imagination that he could no longer say, concerning the subsequent course of our love, what was cause and what effect.

Magda was sharply interested; I reviewed for her the four “stages” thus far, as I understood them, (a) The period of our first acquaintance, in the fall semester of 1968, through Ambrose’s unexpected declaration after Harrison’s funeral, to his mad overtures of March and our first coition in the ad hoc committee room — which-all he compared to his youthful admiration of Magda as rendered in his abandoned novel, The Amateur. The ardour then (I wistfully recalled) had been altogether his, merely tolerated and at length yielded to by its object, (b) That month of frenetic copulation, with no great love on either side, from early April to early May, which put him in mind of his late-teen fucking bouts with the Messalina of the Chesapeake, Jeannine Mack, (c) Our odd and gentle sexless first fortnight of May, when we both had felt stirrings of real love, and Ambrose had flabbergasted me with intimations of his wish to make a baby. In his mind this was not unlike the period of his second, innocent “connexion” with Magda, by then Mrs Peter Mensch; the resemblance is not obvious to me. (d) That disagreeable “husbandly” period just ended, during which, alas for me, my ardor exceeded his, and our physical connexion was sedulously procreative in intent, if not in issue. All I could say of this interval was that, if it really did resemble Ambrose’s marriage, I’m surprised the thing lasted fifteen months, not to mention fifteen years; and unless I was confusing cause and effect, I quite sympathised with Marsha’s busy infidelities. But I could not imagine that chilly individual’s permitting for a fortnight the highhandedness I’d indulged for a month already. Those ridiculous costumes! His insulting attentions to Bea Golden! What’s more (and more’s the pity for me), I loved him despite that degrading nonsense; loved him still and deeply, damn it. I could not imagine Ms. Blank’s entertaining that emotion for anyone.