John Barth - Letters

Ambrose writes. Bea reads, silently, altogether engrossed, and discards each page overboard as she finishes it. Half an hour later — the cameras have long since turned to the fireworks — the pair go off together hand in hand, somewhere inside. Prinz confers gravely with his cameraman, then stalks off after them. When the O.F.T. II docks, Ambrose appears for a moment to say good night to Angela and announce to Magda that he’ll be down in Barataria for a few days. With Bea. That Prinz is furious, has suspended shooting, may even scrap the film. That Magda needn’t bother getting in touch with me; that was his problem. But she should ring him up at once if his mother either revived from her coma (of three days’ duration now) or actively resumed her dying.

So. Happy Birthday, America! And bugger off, Germaine!

I think I know enough of my ex-lover’s preoccupations with the medium of fiction to guess what he might have attempted in those pages: not only (instead of a blank sheet) a full and gorgeous love letter from Whom It Concerned to Yours Truly — much too full for the camera to follow its inditing or a Voice-over to intone — but a text whose language is preponderantly nonvisual, even nonsensory in its reference. How many postcoital apostrophes I heard from him, in June, whilst I up-ended for his low-motile swarmers, upon the peculiarly noncinematic properties of written fiction! Composed in private, to be read in private, at least in silence and virtual immobility, author and reader one to one like lovers — his letter would ideally have been a sort of story, told instead of shown, exploiting such anticinematical characteristics as, say, authorial omniscience and interpretation, perhaps some built-in ironic “discount” in the narrative viewpoint, interior monologue, reflexion. Its language would be its sine qua non: heightened, strange, highly figurative — and speculative, analytical, as often abstract as concrete. It would summarise, consider, adjudicate; it would interrupt, contradict itself, refer its Dear Reader to before and behind the sentence in progress. It would say the unseeable, declare the impossible. I have even argued with Ambrose, warmly, that such defining of his medium, however understandable the impulse among writers who feel their ancient dominion usurped by film, is strictly unnecessary: that the words It is raining are as essentially different from motion pictures of falling rain as are either from the actual experience of precipitation…

O Elysian June, when I was miserable with instead of without him!

Oh and who knows whether he wrote anything of the sort! I cannot imagine Bea Golden sitting still for It was the best of times and the worst of times, not to mention It is raining; it is not raining! Indeed I cannot account at all for her enthrallment by any sort of text. Did Ambrose offer her the female lead in his next novel? Did Prinz arrange his own “defeat,” and only pretend chagrin, to chuck a Dido of his own? Is Bea — dear God, the notion just occurs to me, 40 pages late! Is she now playing the only woman I know to have been literally deflowered by a (capped) fountain pen, and seduced thereafter time and again by aging wielders of that instrument? Has she taken the role as well as the lover of

Yours truly?!

E: Todd Andrews to his father.Further evidence that his life is recycling: 11 R.

Todds Point, Maryland

Friday, June 20, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear dead Dad,

Even as declared beneath the old Mack Enterprises trademark (about to be retired by majority vote of the directors), Praeteritas Futuras Fecundant. If I am no longer interested in your ancient suicide, I’m presently more involved than ever in the recapitulation of my past. My Todays, since Jane Mack reseduced me five weeks ago today, are spent in watchful anticipation of Tomorrow’s reenactment of Yesterday. What praeteritas will be fecundated next? So my interminable Inquiry sleeps (inconclusive but, I think, done with) while my Letter to you flourishes as never since I commenced it in 1920: three installments already since Groundhog Day, and the year’s calendar but half turned!

I’m at my cottage, Dad, out on my point, at sixes and sevens. It is earlier than I’d thought. I’ve been fretting and fussing about here all day, getting the house ready, getting the grounds ready, getting the boat ready Just In Case, not answering the phone (even though it might be Jane calling off our “date”!) because I’m supposed to be over in Baltimore on business. I am surprised at myself: an emotion I thought I had lost the capacity for.

I, I, I: such self-absorption!

Tomorrow Now is the new Mack Enterprises slogan, beneath a streamlined logo devised by Jane’s PR folk. No more hands across the years from things past to things to come; no more sailing ships, airliners, smokestacks, hay fields, tractors. Within a circular field, white above and gules below, the company’s initials azure in a loopy script which also forms the field’s perimeter, so:

Each loop carrying into one moiety the other’s color. The whole resembling, from any distance, a Yang/Yin done by a patriotic Italo-American spaghetti bender and, closer up, evocative of U.S. imperialism and isolationism at once: US become me and inflated to a global insularity.

So objected Drew, who, though not a director of Mack Enterprises, made plain his sentiments to the board of the Tidewater Foundation, of which he is a member, at our last meeting. He also denounced the firm’s co-opting, and perverting to its capitalist ends, such trendy counter-culturalisms as the Yang/Yin, the call for Revolution Now, and the ignoring of the past (Drew himself is more anti- than ahistorical). This last objection I shared, as the only dissenting director of — ugh! — me. Where was that gentle fogey Old Man Praeteritas, father of us all, the Yesterday that will fertilize Tomorrow Today? And of course I deplored the self-circumscribed me, the objectified subject, the I gestating within that O —too close to home for Yours Truly to want it blazoned ’round the world!

But I concede that for Madam President it is not inapt. Her one objection was to the lowercase initials, not as dated Modernist kitsch, but as unsuited to a corporate entity agglomerating like cancer. She yielded, however, to the tactful pitch of her young PR chief: that a subdued but ubiquitous logo better suited the firm’s magnitudinous future than some splashy arriviste hyperbole (he used other language); and that, per slogan, what was right for Tomorrow was right for Now. New logo — and attendant ad campaign — adopted, 11-1.

A week ago, that vote. Just after it, Jane declined, neutrally, my invitation to another sail on Osborn Jones. It was Friday 13th, 50 years to the day since another Friday when, upon my discharge from the U.S. Army, I was told of my precarious heart condition — of which you may have heard, Dad? I had thought Jane might be amused by that bit of praeteritas. Oh, and I’d thought, if things sailed smoothly, to apprise her of my new heart condition, by then four Fridays old; of my growing conviction that our lives are recycling; of my consequent anticipation of #11 R, June 17, Polly Lake’s Fart Day (I grant that the connection is not obvious; I shall come to it), and the unexpected turn its approach had taken only that same morning; of the disorienting revelation that I am in love with Jane Patterson Paulsen Mack, and have been ever since she came to me in this cottage on the afternoon of August 13, 1932. What did I expect to happen next (I’d thought to ask her somewhere out there if the wind was right), after our astonishing shipboard tryst of May, #10 R in last letter’s accounting, Dad? That she would abandon “Lord Baltimore” (or confess him to be the half-fantasized afterimage of some brief adventure with a London gigolo)? That she would marry, this late in the afternoon, a cranky, fussy small-town lawyer, part-time celibate and full-time bachelor, who has not been out of the U.S.A. since 1919 and seldom ventures even beyond the margins of Nautical Chart 77: United States — East Coast — Maryland and Virginia — Chesapeake Bay — Northern Part?