John Barth - Letters

Nothing doing.

We attained the top: dusty concrete floor and a sultry view of loblolly pines, parching grass, Marshyhope U., and white crab-boats on the distant creeks. A view (Ambrose declared after one perfunctory conning, and I agree) better mediated by camera obscura than viewed directly. Exam time again: Do you know Gossaert’s 16th-Century Danaë? A winsome, moon-faced teenager half wrapped in open indigo drapery, she perches on tasselled red cushions in a Renaissance campanile, ankles crossed but bare knees parted, and looks up with puckered unsurprise at the shower of gold which rains past the plump little breast that will one day suckle Perseus, onto the folds of her robe, and out of sight between her thighs. So presently perched I (changes changed) on a pair of clean 50-lb. sacks of Medusa, the only unsoiled seat thereabouts. Ambrose likewise, and fetched out… his beer and his Richardson.

It is the final tyranny of tyrants that, when on occasion they behave like decent chaps, we are inordinately grateful. Milord was merry. Roused already (and knees tentatively ajar), I was roused further by his mere friendliness for a change; further still by our rehearsal of Clarissa’s table of contents. Her mother connives at the private correspondence between her and Lovelace… Her expedient to carry on a private correspondence with Miss Howe… A letter from her brother forbidding her to appear in the presence of any of her relations without leave. Her answer. Writes to her mother. Her mother’s answer. Writes to her father. His answer… Her expostulatory letter to her brother and sister. Their answers… Copies of her letters to her two uncles, and of their characteristic answers… An insolent letter from her brother on her writing to Solmes… Observes upon the contents of her seven letters… Her closet searched for papers. All the pens and ink they find taken from her… Substance of her letter to Lovelace… Lays all to the fault of her corresponding with him at first…

Et cetera. These from the mere 99 letters of Volume 1, with yet to come the 438 of the other three volumes! But we never came to them — Clarissa’s protracted rape and even more protracted repining unto death. For if, admixed with Ambrose’s mirth, was professional envy of his great predecessor’s wind (and the stamina of readers in those days), admixed with mine was a complex sympathy for Clarissa Harlowe — yea even unto her employment (Vol. IV, Letter XCVI, Belford to Lovelace) of her coffin for a writing table! I recalled that Clarissa’s “elopement” with Lovelace had been a major event in Mme de Staël’s girlhood, when, as 15-year-old Germaine Necker, she had doted breathlessly upon Richardson’s novels. And now she was dead, as presently Ambrose, André, I, and all must be, the most of us having done little more, in Leonardo’s phrase, than “fill up privies.” Before I knew it I was weeping instead of laughing, there in my antic getup on my cement sacks: half a century old, childless, husbandless, wageless, surely a little cracked (as Schott unkindly alleged), and stuck on Redmans Neck with an unsuccessful writer and petty despot instead of flourishing in Paris or Florence with some Benjamin Constant…

He kissed me, God bless Ambrose for that: a proper loving and consoling buss before he touched between my legs. Then I did go a bit mad: moaned at him to take me as he’d taken Magda in Peter’s cellar a quarter-century ago. Dear God, I wanted to conceive by him, to get something beyond my worn-out self! And by God we tried, on that hard bed of Medusa Portland. Let Danaë do it her way; I’ll get my Perseus with a regular roger! If there’s connexion between the ploughing and the crop… Comes then the golden shower, not a drop wasted on the draperies; surely that should turn the trick, if we’ve one in us to turn; my joy poured out as A. poured in—

Which is why I didn’t hear what he heard. My Zeus sprang off me as if galvanised, snatched up Vol. I and winged it staircaseward with a curse. Now I heard the whirrs and clicketies over there! By the time I got my legs together and my hem pulled down, he had armed himself with the sack of Vols II, III, & IV and, bare-arsed with his spigot still adrip, was whamming in a rage at Reg Prinz, perched there with his hand-held!

Now, of course, I’m indignant at such sneakery. But at the time I was still too busy feeling Zeus’d to the Plimsoll, too surprised at my lover’s shocking leap off me, too marvellous at his fury to muster a proper indignation. How Ambrose did go at him, cursing, swinging good weighty Sam: first at Prinz’s fuzzy head (who till the last possible frame kept the camera running), then at the instrument itself, when he saw Prinz more concerned for it than for his own cranium. Chucking Clarissa, Ambrose fought for that camera — it was strapped to Prinz’s arm — and threatened to smash it and Reggie’s head together if he didn’t expose that film then and there. By george he did it, too, Prinz shrieking like a wired-up bat the while: prised open the case, did Ambrose, clawed out the reel, and flung it like a Frisbee from the tower top before two of Prinz’s graduate-film-workshop types came to their master’s rescue.

You’re bananas, Prinz cries now (the clearest statement I’ve ever heard from him): that was footage! Shove your effing footage, Ambrose replies, I’m done with it. He comes back now for his britches; the three cinéastes withdraw, examining their precious machine for damage and smirking over their shoulders, the two younger ones, and me at my bottomless beau.

So ends the Mating Season Sequence, I presume! Which I might’ve suspected I was set up for, had Ambrose’s outrage not swept all suspicion before it.

And if Reg Prinz’s riposte today hadn’t so gravely upped the ante. Good as his word (What shall we do for money?), Ambrose cut off his connexion with the film company as of that Monday. Inspired perhaps by Richardson as well as by the Battle in the Belfry, he has vowed to commit himself absolutely to the printed word: letters and empty spaces on the page! The whole hot week since, he has rededicated his energies to Perseus, resolved to redraft that piece (and, I daresay, somehow to work Bea Golden into the plot, now he’s been in her knickers). Bastille Day’s humour passed; his obnoxious “5th Stage” behaviour reasserted itself. I spent my week daily visiting his mum in hospital, wishing they could let the poor thing die; Magda more often than not was with me, a real friend now I’m in “her” stage, urging upon me patience and Italian old wives’ advice for getting pregnant. Between sickbed and seedbed (daily follow-ups to the Shower of Gold, here at 24 L), we watched Apollo-11 & Co. lift off for the moon (Magda’s one of those who seriously wonder, to Ambrose’s delight, whether it isn’t All Faked by the Television People) and Dorchester County, with proportionate to-do, make ready for last night’s opening of its nine-day tercentenary celebration.

We imagined Prinz’s crew to be on the margins of that latter action, though what exactly he’s up to these days in the Mating Sequence way, we can’t well tell. Yesterday evening we went down to Long Wharf to witness the opening-night activities: proclamations by the mayor and the county commissioners, tugs-o’-war between such civic organisations as the Citgo Bushwhackers and the Rescue Fire Co.‘s Chimney Sweepers, calliope tapes amplified from the Original Floating Theatre II at pierside — all amiable provincial entertainment, I don’t mean to belittle it. Most especially we approved the new county flag, a buff field bearing the arms of the 4th Earl of Dorset: supported by twin pards rampant, a shield quarterly or and gules with a bend vair, topped by the earl’s coronet, a fleur-de-lys or, and an Estoile argent of eight wavy points. Under all, the charge Aut Nunquam Tentes Aut Perfice (“Finish What You’ve Started,” shall we say), which it pleaseth us to take for our own, vis-à-vis our project of engenderment, and Ambrose for a particular spur to his myth in progress. Sure enough, the filmists were there, footage, footage, though nothing in the mating way was visibly transpiring. With them, if our eyes did not deceive us, was your odd-duck neighbour Jerome Bray, looking very strange even in the costumed crowd. No sign of Bea Golden, to my continuing relief, nor of Marsha Blank, ditto. Ambrose studiously ignored them all. Prinz gave us a long, neutral look through his viewer and turned away. This morning’s program, for us and for the tercentenary, was to have been a presentation, from the stage of the showboat, called Dorchester County in Art & Literature. But we never got aboard, for as we crossed the municipal park we saw Prinz’s crew setting up their light and sound gear beside that of a mobile television news unit from Baltimore. This latter, alas, was interviewing Ms. Golden — just flown in, presumably, from the Farm, and unfortunately fetching in early-19th-century crinolines (1669 or not, the committee had tapped her to dramatise the county’s resistance to Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake foraging raids in the War of 1812, so the telly man was explaining to his microphone) — and Ambrose was inclined to Say Hello. Before we could do that, however, I luckily espied (to my true dismay) J. Bray again, on the fringes of the crowd, in earnest conference with, of all people on the planet, Angela!