John Barth - Letters

P.P.S.: Our last to you. An end to letters! ZZZZZZZ!

C: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly.A lull on Bloodsworth Island.

Barataria

Bloodsworth Island

July 7, 1969

FROM:

A.M., in early P.M.

TO:

Y.T.

RE:

Your message to me of May 12, 1940

Truly, Yours,

Cancer is the reigning sign; petrifaction the prevailing state. A lull’s laid on like that that descends on novels in their third quarter: everything’s suspended, held, arrested, as if Time had declared time out.

I write you on a steaming, breathless just-past-noon: siesta-time in barren Barataria. Slick calm yonder in Hooper Straits, where when the tide turns I’ll post this in a crabber’s Clorox-bottle buoy. Turkey buzzards hang overhead as if still-photo’d; blue herons stand like lawn ornaments in the shallows where yesterday Bea and I went wading after soft-shell crabs — and netted only hard.

Dorchester County’s shaped like a pelvis: Blackwater and Transquaking rivers are its fallopian tubes; Fishing Bay is its busy womb. Three days ago Bea and I came down through its southmost marshes here to Bloodsworth Island, which hangs under it on the map like a thing discharged.

Now Bea’s gone, after this A.M.‘s little flurry. Our wake-up fuck, one of the few (Too bad, she told me yesterday, your Medusa couldn’t’ve petrified just that part), was interrupted by Casteene’s phone call from Fort Erie: Doctor missing since July 4th storm; presumed drowned in Lake Erie, where he’d been whitefishing. Remobilization Farm at a standstill. Memorial service tonight; perhaps Mlle Bibi should return for it?

Phone and phallus are that woman’s natural instruments. Ever less firmly pegged atop me, she set the former on my chest for ease of dialing and never let the latter slip (nor paused in her special slide-and-squeeze) even after I was long come, till she’d checked flights, made air reservations from Washington to Buffalo, arranged for Morgan to meet her plane and fetch her thence to Fort Erie and the Farm, dispatched a cab to drive the thirty miles from Cambridge down to Bishops Head (just across the straits, Y.T., at the county’s labia, whither I would ferry her in A. B. Cook’s runabout) and the hundred more back to Washington National, relayed instructions to me from Casteene for closing up Cook’s cottage (kindly proffered her for our half-assed tryst)— and brought herself to perfectly malicious orgasm smack in the middle of apprising Reg Prinz in New York of all the foregoing plus her intention to be back on location for the next shooting plus exactly where and with whom she was as she spoke and exactly what doing: i.e., Ay! Eee! Ai! Oh! Ooo!

Reggie would have her ass for that, she chirped after, hanging up and swinging off me in one easy motion. But she couldn’t resist; anyhow, when one came one came. Come on, said I: you’re here because he let me have one inning, to justify his retaliation. It’s my ass he’s after; yours he’s got. It’s a dandy, Jeannine.

You think so? she said, apropos of I don’t know which assertion. She was throwing things into a suitcase, smoking and smiling all at once, livelier than she’d been in three days. What she’d meant, she said, was calling him collect; he hated that. But it was Cook’s phone; she had run up the bill enough already. Anyhow, she’d liked what I’d written her there on the boat, right at the peak of the party. We really had given old Reggie a jolt. I was wrong: he didn’t own her, not any part of her; she’d loved being with me again after so many years — especially the soft-crabbing, even if we hadn’t got any! And so what if I hadn’t come on like a sex machine? There were enough of those in the world. Would I be a doll and make coffee now and come back and close up the place when she’d left? The connections were tight, but she really owed it to Casteene and the Doctor to give it a try.

Bea’s breasts were bare, and tanned from three days of toplessness; as she chattered she slipped into her slacks with a tomboyish snap and snug I’d forgotten since I’d last seen her do it twenty years ago. I was smitten by time and tenderness; had to bestir myself kitchenwards, not to let her see my eyes run. Once at nineteen I’d stood bone-hard for her five times in a single night (it remains my record); but entering our lives’ third quarter she’d been bored stiff with me, and I bored limp with her, by the end of our first Baratarian day. We’d stayed on — I don’t know why: to purge entirely our curiosity, perhaps; to play through some subscene in The Script. To complete my mistreatment of Germaine. Or out of mere inertia, in a place and weather where even lotus-eating is too much effort.

What relief she’s gone! Cook’s cottage is tidied, stowed, secured; I’m to return his boat to Bishops Head, forward his keys back to M. Casteene-from-whom-they-oddly-came (a key in itself, that, no doubt, but not to any door I pine to pass through), and return myself through the sluggish marsh to the paused world and my exasperated Lady. But there’s no rush, no rush. Petrifaction’s too hard a term: Time’s congealed; things are stuck hereabout like shrimps in aspic.

I make these sentences, Y.T., in default of the ones I want. My Perseus is stuck in his spiral temple like Andromeda to the cliff, because his author is not Perseus enough to rescue him. Language fails me like my phallus: shall I simply send you the diagrams? Magda’s not menstruated since that anniversary coupling of May 12, two months and two letters since: no other signs of pregnancy, thank God, and she’d been off and on for a year before she pulled that fast one. Refuses, of course, to check it out medically; wants to savor the improbable possibility while she can… Has she told Peter, one wonders? On whose obdurate mind something heavy surely is, over and above Mensch Masonry’s final bust-up, which scarcely now seems to bother him, and Mother’s long dying, which decidedly does. There truly, Truly, is your cancer petrified, more so than in our hard crabs’ case: Death itself dozes off; Terminality takes siesta.

Magda, my Medusa, femme fataliste: Zeus make this pause your menopause! And Germaine…

No doubt it is the lull before some further storm. No doubt Mother’s terminality will recommence, the Tower of Truth resume our ruin, Magda’s womb (for one) do this or that, the Perseus story sink or swim, and Reg’s return unfreeze our frame, re-move the unmoving Movie. Meanwhile, in Suspense’s welcome lieu, this strange suspension.

Tide’s turning: the Hooper Straits buoys begin to lean towards Sharkfin Shoal; time to bottle this and begone. Henry Burlingame III, we are told, was launched in his infancy from this island, to which in middle manhood he returned for better or worse. Do you likewise, letter, if return you must; not to the sender, who, something tells him, shan’t.

L: The Author to Jerome Bray.Admonition and invitation.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14212

July 6, 1969

Jerome B. Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, New York 14752

Mr. Bray:

Let’s get things straight.

I did indeed spend the first half of the 1960’s writing a long novel which was published in August 1966, under the title Giles Goat-Boy. It is the story of a child sired by an advanced computer upon a virgin lady and raised by kindly goats on the experimental livestock farms of a nameless university which encompasses and replicates the world. In young “manhood” my goat-boy learns from his tutor that the extraordinary circumstances of his birth and youth correspond to those of the wandering heroes of myth. With this actuarial pattern as his map and script, he adventures to the heart and through the bowels of the campus, twice fails at the accomplishment of certain ambiguous labors, and the third time succeeds — though in a fashion equivocal as the tasks themselves — to the status of “Grand Tutor.”