John Barth - Letters

Very near the end of her Honey Dust, you Replied: that final two weeks’ worth she fetched from Lily Dale just prior to the Great Fort Erie Magazine Explosion, as if in payment for delivering Bibi to Comalot Farm. A using up (that of that supply) that you Looked Forward To with very nearly as much apprehension as to Day 45, with which it might well coincide. She was meanwhile, your Woman, you Reported, principally engaged in composition of a Bombshell Letter, her own description, to her former husband: a Bombshell that, while you yourself Did Not Precisely Know its nature, she was pleased to imagine would Knock The Bastard Dead.

Not visibly arrested by this news, Joe lit his pipe and either inquired in declarative fashion, or asserted, or reminded you: Pocahontas is pregnant.

So it would appear, you Painfully Acknowledged. Unless, as is by no means impossible, she is experiencing early menopause. Marsha is 39. Has not menstruated since June. Was “due” in mid-July and again in the first half of August. So. Her (possible) pregnancy, however, you Have Reason To Believe — at least this pregnancy — is not the substance of her Bombshell Letter to Ambrose Mensch.

Joe was not curious about your Woman’s Bombshell Letter.

The father? he inquired. You Chose Not To Speculate. But not yourself? Not yourself; your Bilateral Vasectomy of October 1954 precluded Parenthood. Hum. But you Are Still, in your Phrase, a Couple? So yourself at least Were Pleased Still To Regard yourselves.

Hum. Abortion, Horner? Such recourse is not without precedent, you Know, both historical and literary.

You Knew. You Planned To Discuss that very question with Marsha in September, after Exhaustion Of Honey Dust, Successful Passage Of Deadline, and Unequivocal Determination Of Pregnancy, but before Expiration Of First Trimester Thereof.

You Speak of Successful Passage Of Deadline, Horner.

More Wish than Hope, you Admitted; and yet more Hope than Expectation.

I should say, Joe said. Espial is one thing. You and your Fogged-Out Friend may Dismount from your Exercycles, Finish your Latest Long Conversation about my hyperrationalism and its Pygmalionizing of our marriage, Walk Around to my office window, and Peek through the blind, where you’ll See me behaving as in our novel. Your Pocahontas may then to the best of her limited ability pretend to be Rennie Shocked to the Center of her Soul, whom you will Seductively Comfort with (I believe the script reads) “the wordless, grammarless language she’d taught me to calm horses with.”

Well.

Espial is one thing, Joe repeated. Play it as you Like; I won’t have to watch. But Successful Passage of my Deadline is quite another. Surely you Don’t Expect — when I demand that you Redream History and Give Me Back, alive and unadulterated, my dead wife — to Palm Off as Rennie Morgan your fucked-up, knocked-up Pocahontas?

Stung as always by his kindless adjectives, but Judging it the part of diplomacy once again to Let Them Pass, you Acknowledged that you Entertained no such expectations. Nor any real hope. Only the wish aforementioned, and that ever more ardently.

Forget it.

Well.

Look here, Horner. You Looked. On September 1, 1953, the day following your original Espial, you Revisited The Doctor at his Remobilization Farm, then in Maryland. Yes. Your Quarterly Visit. Yes. Is the account of that visit in our script a fair approximation of what transpired? Fair. You were “Weatherless.” Mm. But you Tended, in your P & A Session with the Doctor, to a manner more Brisk and Assertive than was your Wont: a manner Imitative, the Doctor immediately guessed, of some New Friend or Colleague of yours at the College. Mm. He chaffed you a bit for the imposture, then spoke at some length of Mythotherapy: the systematic assumption of borrowed or improvised personae to ward off paralysis in cases of ontological vacuity. Mm. He then demanded a response; you Found None To Hand; he demanded more sternly; you Began Slipping Into Catalonia; and he assaulted you, briefly, to bring you to. Pugilistic Therapy, I believe the script calls it.

Yes. Well.

Hum. Joe tapped out his pipe, its charge timelily combusted. We’re done, Horner. Given the calendar and my double role in this travesty, we’ll schedule your next P & A for Monday instead of Thursday. Labor Day. Anniversary of that other one, etc.

You Shrugged your Eyebrows.

I’ll be bringing an old friend of ours, Joe announced neutrally, and To your Horror drew from the Doctor’s desk (he no longer does the facing-chairs, knee-to-knee routine considered by the Doctor to be essential to Progress and Advice) the very pistol so prominently featured in your Recent Dreams, your Last Letter, and the events of autumn 1953. A Colt.45 for Day 45, he mirthlessly remarked. We’ll combine the P & A Scene of September 1 with the Pistol Scene of October 5, 1953.

Look here, Joe, you Expostulated.

You Bring A Friend too, Joe said, not exactly an invitation. My wife. Alive and unfucked by you.

Joe.

Maybe I’ll tell you then what my real grievance against you is, Horner.

You Believed you Could Guess.

It’s not finally that you Betrayed Our “Friendship,” you Know. It’s not even that you Destroyed My Marriage, possibly Impregnated My Wife, and Contributed To Her Untimely Death.

Mm.

Rennie had a hand in all that too. So did I.

You here Assiduously Kept your Own Counsel, even unto facial expression, twitch of hand, and any other controllable body language interpretable as Yes Well.

One more thing, Jake.

That catalogue you’ve Been Compiling for a while?

Your Hornbook, I believe you Call it?

Bring it, too.

D: A. B. Cook VI to his son.The third posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: the Battle of New Orleans and Napoleon’s surrender to Bellerophon.

Aboard S.S. Statendam

Off Bermuda

Wednesday, August 6, 1969

Dear Henry:

Dreamer that I still am (even as I approach the 52nd anniversary of my birth), I had imagined I would have word from you however curt, even sight of you however fleeting, in the weeks between my last and this. Especially last week, when I was at our work in the Buffalo/Fort Erie theater, I half-expected—

Je ne sais quoi, particularly given my disappointment of the week before, when, having transcribed at so long length for you Andrew IV’s adventures from the birth of his children through his “death” at Fort McHenry, and posted copies of my transcription to you c/o that novelist I had thought my partner (on the off chance it might be he who’d showed you the “prenatal” letters), I receive from him —crossed in the mails — nothing less surprising than a rejection of my acceptance of his own invitation to collaborate with him on a Marylandiad! And he has returned the four prenatals, which I must now assume will be followed by what followed them.

He will be sorry. Not because I plan, at least for now, any particular retaliation, but because he has cut himself off (as have you, Henry; as have you) from much that either a novelist or a 2nd-Revolutionary could make use of: the account of our forebear’s “Second Cycle,” of my own, perhaps even of yours. See how drolly, in despite of rude awakenings, I still dream!

We have, then, you and I, not yet begun to talk. Nevertheless, I shall continue, per program, that series of decipherments and anniversary transcriptions, withholding them from the mails till I shall have your proper address, or find you, or you find me. What’s more, as we are no longer to be monitored by that authorial “third ear,” I shall speak more confidentially: not of Andrew Cook IV, of whom I know only what his wife would have known had she not (like our novelist, but with better reason) declined to read these lettres posthumes, nor — yet — of my own history, but of the circumstances of these transcriptions and what I’ve been up to this past month with my left hand, as it were, while the right transcribed.