John Barth - Letters

When Ambrose and Bea — separately — joined us, the talk turned to gossip. My lover had been dancing with, of all people, Ms. Merope Bernstein — remember? — who, her bum apparently mended, had come over from the Farm with Morgan and their polyglot comrades: a large black girl, a somewhat sinister-looking Latin, and an echt Manhattan greaser of indeterminate ethnicity. Her quondam stepmother had been dancing with this last, looking alas neither unattractive nor out of place in a boutique redskin outfit — Tuscarora mod? — and came to our table clearly to flirt with Morgan in demonstration of her indifference to us. I paid her no mind. Ambrose merely smiled. Joe indulged her lap-perching and osculatory effusions with mild indifference. Bea soon went off to find her Reggie.

Ms. Bernstein, Ambrose reported, was relieved to find her erstwhile protector Bray nowhere in evidence. She and her colleagues had come armed with unspecified weapons against possible menace from him, whom they regard as a dangerous lunatic and counterrevolutionary. Their attitude gave Ambrose to wonder, temperately, about the physical welfare of his ex-wife, last seen (we recall) on 4 July in Bray’s company aboard the O.F.T. II. Thereby, it turns out, hung a little tale, which discreet Saint Joseph had been going not to tell, as not particularly our business, but now judged it best to:

Seems your ex-protagonist (and Morgan’s old antagonist), creepy Jacob Horner, has conceived some sort of— love? — for Marsha Blank (we laughed at once, derisively; Morgan did not), and in his way was Much Concerned at her failure to reappear at the Farm after Independence Day. Especially when Bea Golden came back from Maryland with the glib report that “Pocahontas” had gone off with Bray to his Lily Dale goat ranch, presumably as Merope Bernstein’s successor, Horner grew distressed.

Ambrose and I are grinning guiltily; the whole business is bizarre! But Bray is a lunatic. Ambrose takes my hand; heart-stirred (yet still resentful) I squeeze his. Now: in the Doctor’s absence, and as part of some larger, ongoing project of his own, Joe Morgan has assumed the role of Jacob Horner’s therapist and spiritual advisor: the Director, as he put it, of a sort of personal “remake.” In this capacity, fast and loose with their text as Reg Prinz with his, he cancelled whatever had been Horner’s therapeutic programme and prescribed instead that he sally forth from the Farm, make his way to Lily Dale, determine whether Marsha is there with Bray and if so whether voluntarily, take whatever action seemed appropriate to that determination, and report back to his therapist.

This Rx, mind, for a chap who has seldom ventured from that peripatetic commune in fifteen years! But — with every hesitation and apprehension in the world, I gather — Horner managed not only to fulfill his quest, but to fetch back the empty Grail herself. Bray wasn’t home (we know he was in Cambridge again by this time, at the Dorchester Tercentenary); Marsha was, in a condition of some dishevelment and mild derangement, but not apparently against her will. She actually returned to Fort Erie with Horner — they expect Bray will be furious to find her gone — and is now (ready, John?) Horner’s woman, so Morgan neutrally declared. She is, however, mysteriously obliged, to Horner’s further distress, to go back to Bray temporarily in mid-August, to finish, in her words, some unfinished business.

You may be sure we are mightily intrigued by this bit of gossip; but Morgan, characteristically, would not deal in details. If Ambrose was curious about his ex, he was free to visit the couple (!) at the Farm. Insofar as anything on those premises is normal, they cohabit and receive guests like any normal couple. Joe himself had been their “dinner guest” only a few nights since, in the common dining hall. They are contemplating marriage!

He would not say more; visibly disapproved of Ambrose’s raucous whoops. “Pocahontas” and Jacob Horner: movable object meets resistible force! Morgan turned the conversation back to “our” film, its apparent theme of echoes and reenactments. 1812 was obviously something of a reenactment of 1776, and he Morgan was more and more inclined to oscillatory hypotheses, both historical and cosmological. But he hoped we all understood that redreaming history, reenacting the past, is a deadly serious, sometimes a seriously deadly business. (He would not elaborate; his eyes got That Look again, that I never saw before he left Marshyhope, vanished from Amherst, and surfaced among the crazies at Fort Erie.) As for our other theme, which “Bibi” Golden had told him of on her return from “Barataria”—the mano a mano between Author and Director, Fiction and Film — Morgan gently scoffed at it, and was supported in his deprecation by the young media types in our conversational vicinity. In their opinion, that was a quarrel between a dinosaur and a dead horse: television, especially the embryonic technology of coaxial-cable television, was the medium that promised to dominate and revolutionise the last quarter of the century.

These young people — Morgan too — were discreetly smoking marijuana laced with hashish, as were numbers of the artsy faculty crowd; at Morgan’s invitation Ambrose and I shared their smoke. In some spirit compounded of dope, curiosity, the residual grudge mentioned above, and who knows what else, I asked “Saint Joe” in Ambrose’s hearing (apropos of Eternal Recurrences), how fared my protean friend “Monsieur Casteene.” Was he still at the Farm now the Doctor was dead, or had he moved the hot center of the Second Revolution back to Castines Hundred, where I had once been party to no trifling reenactment of my own?

Why, declared Morgan (and his eyes were the penetrating sympathetic blue now of my friend’s and employer’s at Marshyhope, not the wigged-out middlescent casualty’s), the chap was somewhere about the pavilion; fact is, he had gone up to his baronial digs for most of July, but was back now at the Remobilisation Farm and had come over to the party with Merry B. and the others. Should we look for him outside?

I would look for him myself, I said, declining also Ambrose’s carefully put offer to assist me. What I really wanted, I declared, was to clear my head. My ex-master considered this declaration for a grave half second, smiled, bade me take care on the stairs (we were in the open upper storey of the pavilion, overlooking the park lake to the front and an extensive rose garden to the rear, towards the floodlit museum). As I left, they were back to the Movie again, Morgan asking what exactly was this Mating Flight sequence Bea had mentioned, and how it related to the skirmish at Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek. I was tempted to stay for a reply to that one, but I made my way out and down through silky night air to the paved, lamplit, leaf-shadowed lake edge — where, on the first bench under a streetlamp hard by the pavilion, as in a crudely plotted dream, I promptly espied my André!

Not A. B. Cook VI, John. Not any of the various “M. Casteenes” of Fort Erie. André: the André who’d last materialised between acts at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1967, rendezvoused with me après-theatrically at the Wolpert Hotel, fetched me thence home with him to Castines Hundred, and there — a mating flight indeed — impregnated me with his unerring sperm. It could be no other; it could be… no other. André!

He saw me too, perhaps had done before I saw him, and stood to greet me with two hushed baritone syllables: “Germaine.”

Pipe dream? Then repass the hookah, please! So fine, so gentle, this man; so truly masterful, in the way that made me feel so easily my own again: Germaine Gordon the aspiring writer; familiar of Hesse, Huxley, Mann; acquaintance of Joyce and Stein; scholar; woman! He took my hand. It was the most natural thing in the world to stroll with him along the little lake, out of range of the loudspeakers, and say easily to each other the things one felt to say. E.g., that life goes by, most of it vanity and vexation of spirit; that we understand too late what is truly precious, how we ought to have lived. Yet after all one has survived in this monstrous century, and not fared so ill. The Six Million are dead, the dozens of millions of others; the Second Revolution has not come to pass, any more than the Second Coming. Yet here we walk among the lights and roses, well dressed and fed, fit still and handsome, much vigorous life left in us. Forgive us then our trespasses, as we etc., and never mind all the vast unanswered questions. Surely it was André!