John Barth - Letters

Now bedraggled Bea sees what’s what on that camera crane and, her knockers rewrapped in the St Sp B, makes to turn the Eagle’s talons on Tinkerbell, who to my further satisfaction (her leotard mopped and her dander up) lays the same order of insults on her that were lately laid on me: M-F’ing Old Bag, & cet. The Director has his hands full keeping them apart. Britannia and weary Literature retire arm in arm from the scene, not much the worse for wear and withal fairly pleased with ourselves, as well as mightily entertained. In this reenactment at least, the redcoats might not have won the Scajaquada Scuffle, but Brother Jonathan surely seems to’ve come off second best.

Having been in her position myself, I was even able then to feel a certain sympathy for Bea, as aforementioned; especially next day, when word came that filming will not be resumed until Friday next, at Fort Erie. Our Director appears to have withdrawn with Tinkerbell to New York City; Ms Golden, very distraught, to the Remobilisation Farm, whether to rejoin the company on 15 August or not, we don’t know.

I worry about J. Bray, whose psychopathology I take seriously — Merry Bernstein’s hysterics I regard as entirely in order! — but Ambrose only shrugs and speculates, with further amusement, on Bray’s likely reaction upon returning to Lily Dale and discovering that Marsha too (per Joe Morgan’s report) has thrown him over. At Prinz’s departure some sort of payment was disbursed to all hands; Ambrose’s share, unaccountably, was generous (to me, even that seemed ominous). We decided to make a little vacation tour of the Niagara Frontier until the 15th — and here we are at Kissing Bridge: a low-rise ski-platz, August-empty, fit for lovers.

So much for the chronicling (the good people of Buffalo are baffled as I am by the Meaning of All This, which however they found at least as diverting as the pop art at the Albright-Knox); now for the News. As you will have gathered, my menstrual period’s nearly a fortnight overdue. Surely, surely at my age this signifies nothing. I am fifty, John: fifty, fifty! I will not, I dare not hope…

What I must acknowledge would be a real hope now, not a bitter one. Till today, Ambrose and I had not made love since Saturday morning last; yet this has been a week the reverse of loveless: reminiscent rather of our chaste May, even more so of our first courtship. We are in accord as to the probabilities — but he is all gentleness and, especially since the Battle of Conjockety, Ad-mi-ra-ti-on for my conduct on that occasion. Admiration, it would seem, for my history and character in general, and I am either vain enough or bruised enough by the season’s humiliations to find his attitude convincing as well as therapeutic. He cannot thank me sufficiently for enduring and indulging his early importunities in my office and elsewhere, his excesses and sentimentalities; his programmatical later abstinence followed by yet more programmatical inseminations; his couturial and other demands; his outrageous behaviour at the Marshyhope commencement ceremonies; his infidelities and other unkindnesses. Quite a catalogue! He declares all that to have been the purgation by reenactment (a variety of catharsis not mentioned by Aristotle) of sundry immaturities and historical hang-ups long laid on him like a spell. He declares that my love and forbearance have dispelled that spell, set him free to love me truly and properly for what I am, have been, shall be — this without regard to what’s what womb-wise, though nothing could more crown his Ad-mi-ra-ti-on than Ge-ne-ra-ti-on. Part of why we’re here, indeed (I mean why we’ll do Toronto and Stratford and, if he has his way, even Castines Hundred), is the returning of a few corners in my own intimate biography: once the Movie’s “in the can” and my Condition is established one way or the other — and his mother’s done dying, and his brother’s prognosis is clearer — he hopes we can revisit Coppet, Capri, London, Lugano, Paris, Geneva — Scenes I Have Been Knocked Up In.

I tell him I do not particularly share his taste for reruns. Why not make it Tobago, Maui, Tahiti — scenes untouched, if not by History, at least by our several histories?

Just as I wish. But I won’t object, surely, to an evening’s theatre at Niagara-on-the-Lake or a good meal in Toronto?

I jolly won’t! And jolly well haven’t objected to this week’s tender knocking about west New York in our budget subcompact, from the handsome Grape Belt down your way (but giving a wide berth to Lily Dale, and not bothering to bother anyone at Chautauqua), to the scene of Commodore Perry’s prodigious accomplishment at Presque Isle, to the haunts of the Tuscaroras and Niagara Falls.

This last by way of a revisit to ourselves, so to speak, more agreeable by far than last time ’round. The American spigot, I’m sure you know, has been fully reopened, and if still not equal to the Canadian, it at least inspired my lover and beloved (how sweet, John, at last to use those terms unironically!) to post in it, in an empty bottle of Moët & Chandon Brut, what he fancies may be the last of his replies to that famous Yours Truly who blankly messaged him in 1940. The gesture (I didn’t read the letter, but welcomed his comment as one more fatuity purged) appears to have turned his own spigot back on as well: we are now making spirited, I think reciprocal, love here at Kissing Bridge.

There, I think, is the term. It has been a week, not really of abject and fulsome apologies, solicitudes, smarms, but of easy reciprocity: two seasoned adults renewing (you know what I mean) their mutual love, which had grown rocky and uneven to say the least.

I like it! And should it (as I pray) persist, and should its persistence (as it may) come to make these weekly communiqués as unnecessary for me as Ambrose’s bottled epistles have become for him — why then, we shall be at our story’s end, you and I, and that will be that.

But we are not there yet. Seven days do not a season make. You are not done with (Ambrose’s)

Germaine

P.S.: Rereading this, I see I left out, unaccountably — I had been going to say one detail, but it struck me even at the time as the key and climax to last Saturday’s skirmishing, perhaps to my whole connexion with Mr Ambrose Mensch. The battle done, as he and I withdrew by rental rowboat back to “Canada,” in midpond our hero shipped his oars and kissed me. More particularly, as we paused there under the windy stars (early P.M. showers having ushered in a clear cool front), he bade me look him straight in the eyes whilst he took my head in his hands, declared he loved me, and kissed my mouth. That’s it. Romantical, what? I hear you ask, indeed, So what? But Britannia here declareth herself stirred to the ovaries by that open-eyed osculation, which bridged, I felt, our every past and present difference; brought us truly for the first time to ourselves with each other; sealed some compact; inaugurated this 6th, this blissful, Stage.

P.P.S.: Oxymoron! The shocking news now comes in (on the Kissing Bridge Motel telly) of the “ritualistic” murders of Sharon Tate & Co. in Roman Polanski’s villa. I think of our erratic Director, of my darling Author, of that madman Bray’s last words to us from the pavilion railing… Zeus preserve us!

O: Lady Amherst to the Author.The Sixth Stage continues. The Fort Erie Magazine Explosion and Second Conception scenes.

Erie Motel

Old Fort Erie

Ontario, Canada

16 August 1969

Old pen pal,

Our last day on the Niagara Frontier. We’d meant to stop one more night here in the Erie (a cozy place this second time around; you recall our troubled visit of mid-June, a hundred years ago): it’s a chapter I’d consented to review, as it were, in Ambrose’s dramatised Short History of Us, inasmuch as that story’s dénouement still appears a happy one. But when we telephoned Magda yesterday, as we’ve done periodically through our absence, we learned that Mensch mère has entered what really seems to be her terminal terminality, and that Peter is worse too. (How was I? that remarkable Italiana wanted earnestly to know. Since Ambrose and I agree that the right news would actually be some comfort to her, I confessed that I’ve not menstruated since 29 June. Magda was tearfully ecstatic.)