John Barth - Letters

Look who here, said Thelma: it old Numbers. I can explain, Jer, said Margana. What’s to explain? Rodriguez asked rhetorically: Everybody must make the revolution in his/her et cetera heh heh. We’re like practicing up for the Mating Flight, joshed Irving; pull up some smoke and join us. He not joining me, declared Thelma; he give me the heeb-jeebs. Jerome, Margana said, it’s time I told you. Tell shmell, sniffed Rodriguez; he’s got eyes. What big ones, Irving chaffed. Cool it, hombres, urged Margana; remember what I said. Now look here, Jer, these spray guns aren’t what you think, okay? she went on (for while numbly regarding them we had not failed to notice the hideous weapons deployed about their quarters); we ripped off some herbicide from the county agent’s office, right? Our plan is to defoliate the Ivy League during their commencement exercises. Think what you please, Jerry; it’s the truth. And Roddy and I, well, we’re lovers: true revolutionary RESET Quick Henry, cried Thelma as we angrily opened our cape, the Flit! Jesus H. Keerist, expostulated Irv, put that thing away, man!

They flew for the exits: perfidious Margana alone stood her ground, spray gun in hand. Wicked, beautiful le Fay! Abdomen we so prized, that was to have taken our seed come August to hatch a brood of Conquerors! We hefted our barb; her courage failed, with a squeal she flung the spray gun at us and turned to flee, that’s F-L-E- RESET She deserved to die, Da, but we but numbed her: little shot in the tail to teach her a lesson and keep Rodriguez out of there till after mating season. Her friends abandoned her as she’d abandoned us, afraid either to come to her aid or to call the police lest they be burst for Illegal Possession. We ourself telephoned the Chautauqua Infirmary, gave the St. Elret number, reported a young female apparently O.D.‘d on some narcotic.

Faithless Merope! Margana y Blank! We kissed her numb face; we covered her numb and swiftly swelling shame; we retracted our number, rearranged ourself, waited with her till we heard the ambulance before slipping out through the screen and making a blankline home. All the way weeping and wondering, Now who’ll unscramble things? Who’ll feed the goats for fudge and slaughter? Who’ll take delivery in the rear, as wanton Merope was wont, come mating season? Perfidious M y F, would thou wert a blank preserved in amber! Yet never return to Lily Dale: we will not so spare you a 2nd time.

That was last month. Alone since with these senseless numbers, as Maimonides says that YHWH RESET We see now the scale of our betrayal. Agents of you-know-whom, the lot of them, and Merope Bernstein was their tool! The foundation was their creature; they supported us only to learn and steal and neutralize our plans; they put the blanks in LILYVAC’s program, saw to it our spring work period was wasted in vain unscrambling. This is no leafy anagram at all!

Ma y Da: Mayday! Mayday! We are back where we began. How to recycle? Every RESET Now they swarm to Chautauqua for the kill, operatives of the false T.F., under pretext of making an anti-Bonapartist film: perfidious Prinz, his ally Mensch, their beautiful captive Bea Golden (whose mind they have drugged with C 2H 6O; whose name they are not worthy to RESET Tomorrow, we daresay, they will celebrate the 154th of Waterloo; tonight they have chartered the Gadblank III (ah, Da) for a party cruise around the lake. We are not fooled: They know we are its pilot; they think by this crude stratagem to snare us in their web.

And we shall go, Ma, though counterstratagem we have none. We shall set out from the institute dock, Da, making false merry. Numbly we shall steer around the familiar circuits: 1st the lower lake, then up through the narrows where the bag of Chautauqua is tied in the middle. There, no doubt, as we round the buoys to begin the upper lake, or 2nd circuit, they will swap their gins-and-tonics for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, and it will be finished. Pfft, forgotten, we shall RESET Unless dot dot dot

Lost Mother, old articifrix, key to the key: R.S.V.P.!

J.B.B.

I: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly.Anniversary of the bees’ descent. Encounters with Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank. He identifies his condition with Perseus’s, and despairs.

Athenaeum Hotel

Chautauqua, New York 14722

Monday, June 16, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Concerned

TO:

Yours Truly

CONCERNING:

Your message to me of May 12, 1940

Old messenger:

It’s another anniversary (Jacob Horner has got us all doing it): of the birth of Joshua Reynolds in 1723, King Gustaf of Sweden in 1858, Stan Laurel in 1890; of the capture by Boston soldiers of French forts in Nova Scotia in Year 2 of the Seven Years’ War; of young Werther’s letter in 1771 reporting his having first met Charlotte several days earlier; of the lifting in 1812 of the British blockade of European ports to American shipping (but the news won’t reach Congress in time to forestall a declaration of war two days from now); of the invention of the squeeze play in baseball in 1894; of Leopold Bloom’s odyssey through James Joyce’s Dublin in 1904. And of the descent upon me 39 years ago, in 1930, at Andrea King Mensch’s breast as we dozed in a hammock near the hollyhocks in the backyard of the old Menschhaus on a flawless forenoon, of a swarm of golden bees.

Eloquence, Uncle Konrad predicted: the boy will grow up to be a Sophocles, a Plato. But it’s silence I’m stung into, zapped by history. Tides! The past is a holding tank from which time’s wastes recirculate. Nothing lost, alas; all spirals back, recycled. Once-straight Joe Morgan, freaked out on psychedelics, sweetly promises to kill Jake Horner unless history can be redreamed, his dead wife reborn. Horner himself, that black hole in the human universe, that fossil from the early 1950’s, has not altered since he dropped out of giaduate school eighteen years ago: a penman after my own heart, he claims to have “published” his first book by leaving the typescript behind in a rooming house for others to discover, or for the Allegheny Reservoir to drown. His “writing” since, I gather, has been the therapeutic compilation of what he calls his Hornbook: a catalogue of notable cuckolds of myth, literature, and history arranged alphabetically from Agamemnon to Zeus.

May I? I asked him yesterday, turning to the M’s. Horner shrugged, thinly smiled, assured me he knew no more than what was inferrable from “the fiction.” But there we all were, between Menelaus and Minos of Crete (and before Morgan, Joseph), followed left to right by columns headed Wife, Lover(s), Remarks. Not only

Cuckold

Wife

Lover(s)

Remarks

Mensch, Hector

King, Andrea

a. Erdmann, Willy (?)

b. Mensch, Karl(?)

c. Mensch, Konrad (?)

issue: Mensch, Peter (?) &/or Ambrose

but also, after Hector,

Mensch, Peter

Giulianova, Magda

Mensch, Ambrose

a. May 12, 1947

b. 1967-69

no issue

How had Horner come by that information, written nowhere but in my jettisoned Amateur manuscript? Did the tides of the Choptank circulate somehow through Lake Erie? The answer was plain, of course, in the entry just prior to Hector’s. Cuckold: Mensch, Ambrose. Wife: Blank, Marsha, followed in the third column by a very long list of names including Mensch, Peter, and in the fourth, after that name, by the remark: issue: Mensch, Angela Blank. Sorry, says Horner: Pocahontas insisted, and we try to be therapeutic. She’d wanted him to list as well her more recent conquests at the Remobilization Farm, he declared — from Casteene, M. through Joseph, Saint to X, Tombo —but he’d stoutly refused, therapy or no therapy, on the grounds that divorce exempts the cuckold from further horns.