John Barth - Letters

Magda, Peter, her twin elder cousins — nowhere in sight. What on earth was Angie doing there, with that person? Ambrose literally ran to snatch his daughter away, once I pointed out to him their tête-à-tête. The pair were passing under Prinz’s mike booms as he overtook them, manned by one of those chaps who’d come to their director’s rescue in the tower. Just as Ambrose collared Angie by her T-shirt top (MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS, with a red claw pinching each prominent nipple) and Bray by his — well, cloak — the boom swept ’round and down and caught him a terrific clout upside the head as aforespecified, dropping him cold as a mackerel to the blacktop.

Bray vanished (no mean trick, you’d think, in that drag, but he manages it); Angie set up a caterwaul; the mike boy was all apologies. One of the twins appeared after all, a husky young replica of Peter who’d only gone for ices; Bea Golden broke off her interview but kept a little distance; the Rescue Fire Co. ambulance crew, standing by, came to our rescue, even giving Carl and Angie a lift home via the hospital emergency room. Magda hurried down from the cancer ward upstairs, Peter over from the Lighthouse next door; it was a regular homecoming.

Ambrose was up by then, but groggy: mild concussion, no detectable fracture of the skull. We were instructed to keep an eye out for nausea and vertigo, barring which, sleep and aspirin ought to do the job; we weren’t to be alarmed at (what now pretty scarily began to manifest itself) his temporary circuit-failure. He was discharged. I overrode P. & M.‘s desire to fetch him chez lui for recuperation, but accepted Magda’s help in getting us back to 24 L (Peter’s leg is worse; he no longer drives).

Here we yet abide, sir, still Getting It Together whilst Apollo-11 and Luna-15 zip ’round their moon orbits, and Thor Heyerdahl’s crippled Ra limps on toward Barbados, and the strange news trickles in from Martha’s Vineyard of Senator Edward Kennedy’s (also peculiar) accident. It was that fucker Prinz, right? enquires my woozy master. I daresay, luv, say I. And I do dare so say, though I never saw him and though the mike boom lad (not the light boom, luv) has rung us up twice, in fear of lawsuit no doubt, to ask after his victim’s condition and to swear it was All Accidental.

Bea Golden has phoned too. Somewhat timidly, I am pleased to imagine. No mention, of course, of their Mating Season Sequence down on Bloodsworth Island. Magda reports that Angela reports that the Funny-Looking Man only wanted to read her T-shirt and warn her that insect repellents cause cancer.

Well, John! As the Chappaquiddick people put it, much is yet unclear. Marvellous though Coincidence can be, in life as in Uncle Sam Richardson’s novels, we strongly incline to our Ambrose’s view that it was that fucker Prinz’s doing. With the mike boom, dear. Which gives us to worry that on this front too, once he recollects himself, what my Dorchester darling hath begun, he may resolve to finish.

We pray not: I mean my friend Magda and her pro-tem Doppelgänger, yr faithful

G.

R: Lady Amherst to the Author.The Battle of Niagara. Surgery for Magda. Lady Amherst desperate.

24 L Street

26 July 1969

John,

Ra’s in Bridgetown Harbour, the moon men are back on earth and quarantined aboard the Hornet, young Mary Jo Kopechne’s in her grave, and Teddy Kennedy’s on probation with a suspended driver’s license. Today’s St Anne’s Day, mother of the Virgin, and — Mother of God! — Dorchester County Day, the windup of “our” tercentenary. “Floats,” high school marching bands (the musicians outnumbered by troupes of strange-looking girls twirling batons), volunteer firemen in procession with their shiny machines, the dénouement of “The Dorchester Story” at the municipal baseball park, and the planting there of a time capsule to be opened in 2069: a sort of letter to the future containing all this news. Whose sender, like myself, may not hope for a reply from the addressee.

Today’s also the 194th anniversary of the inauguration of the U.S. Postal Service. Happy birthday, U.S. Mail! The commencement of dog days. The end (as the full Buck Moon approacheth, and with it no doubt my monthly monthlies) of our unfilmed Mating Season Sequence at 24 L. And, 155 years ago, the day after the Battle of Niagara in 1814, also known as the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, our topic for this week’s letter.

That battle (on the Canadian shore of the Niagara River, just below the Falls) was bloody and inconclusive, a sort of stand-off, as was “our” “reenactment” of it yesterday before the cameras. General Jacob Brown’s Americans had crossed the Niagara from Buffalo earlier in the month and captured Fort Erie on 3 July; two days later, led by Winfield Scott, they managed a considerable psychological victory at Chippewa, just above the Falls, by driving back the British regulars with heavy casualties. On 25 July, they sallied forth to Lundy’s Lane and met a regrouped and reinforced British army. From 7 to 11 P.M. the fighting was close and sharp, including hand-to-hand bayonet engagements in the dark; each side suffered nearly 900 casualties, about 30 % of their actively engaged troops! The Americans won the field, but ill-advisedly withdrew to Chippewa and thence (tomorrow) back to Fort Erie, returning the initiative to the British and abandoning their invasion campaign. Both sides claimed victory.

I rehearse all this to remind myself that I was once an historian of sorts, and to put in what perspective I can the confused, distressing events of yesterday. The “real” historian on the scene this week has been our old friend the new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope, you know whom, who appeared from Redmans Neck or Barataria, all smiles and mellifluous couplets, to volunteer his services as Reg Prinz’s historical consultant, at least until the company returns (next week) to Niagara. Cook’s idea it was — since Prinz had postponed that return in order to film the D. Co. tercentenary — to kill two birds with one stone by exploiting the “1812” episodes of “The Dorchester Story,” that ongoing nightly pageant at the ball park which tonight attains the present and projects the future. There were all the “extras” one could use, more or less in period costume (the same outfits serve for the Colonial, the Revolutionary, and the 1812 episodes), dramatising the exploits of the Marshyhope Blues versus Joseph Whaland’s Picaroons in 1776 and the depredations of the British fleet in 1813/14; more than willing to extend their props and performances gratis to The Movie. Since it is, anyroad, not the war we’re interested in but its reenactment — in which 1969 and 1812 (and 1669, 1776, and 1976) are tossed together like salad greens — the historical inaccuracies, the thinness of the sets, the amateurishness of the actors, all play into our hands.

Yup: ours again, John. Aut nunquam tentes et cetera, exactly as I feared on Saturday last. As soon as his head cleared (Sunday morning), Ambrose was furious with himself for having abandoned like General Brown the field he’d won on Independence Day: i.e. (and woe is me), B.C., that all too tangible token of his “victory” over Reg Prinz on the O.F.T. II. Bea is, I am to understand, only the Symbol of What’s Being Fought Over (a flesh-and-blood symbol, alas, which can be, which has been, reslept with): the fight is the thing now, the armature of a drama which has clearly outgrown its original subject. Your fiction is at most the occasion of the film these days; perhaps it was never more than that. One would not be surprised if the final editing removed all reference to your works entirely, which are only a sort of serial cues for Prinz and Ambrose to improvise upon and organise their hostilities around. Those hostilities — between “the Director” and “the Author”—are the subject, a filming-within-the-filming, deadly earnest for all they’re in the “script” and despite Ambrose’s being literally on Prinz’s payroll as of Thursday 24th.