John Barth - Letters

It was dismay now in our eyes, sir, and the dark unspoken fear that our grubby foes had somehow wormed their way into LILYVAC! What NOTES? But we could forestall our rest no longer, not even to impart to frantic Merope the possibility (which occurred to us even as our eyes were closing) that here was no setback but a RESET That LILYVAC in its “wisdom”—which is to say, our parents and noble forebears in theirs: Father, Mother, Grandpa, Granama! — was once again transcending our limited conception of project and program, as when Concordance was superseded by NOVEL; that it was trying so to speak to tell us something.

A restless rest period, which, so far from completing our recuperation from the DDT’s, has left us weakest when we most need strength, at the exact midpoint of our life and work, tonight and tomorrow and RESET When, as the full Pink Moon is penumbrally eclipsed, we must together confront the 1st draft as it were of the revolutionary “novel” NOTES. With the relief and weary RESET For what kept birding us as we “slept” (and Merope as she wintered the goats, made fudge, and revisited her alma mater to recruit a cadre for the struggle ahead) were such questions as whether for example notes was meant in the sense of verbal annotations, say, or of transcribed musical tones. Given the former, would the forthcoming printout be but a sort of Monarch Notes on NOVEL? Given the latter, was LILY VAC changing media?

We shall soon know. Be assured, sir, that we are now fully awake and, if far from restored, equal nonetheless to the task ahead. Our loyal Merope is in perfect health and high spirits, having enlisted in Waltham and Boston a splendid young group whom we look forward to meeting next month when they migrate here after their finals (always assuming that Doomsday does not occur, as predicted, at 6:13 PM PST this coming Friday). The Farm hums with suspense and confident anticipation; we are as busy as a hive of mice in search of fenny snakes. It is because we expect this to be our last free afternoon for some weeks that we take time now to set down this letter.

And we look forward to posting to you and to the Foundation, at the 1st opportunity, a report of the printout itself, to a world RESET But you must confirm to us that these communications are getting through intact. That you are an ally. That you will commence our action before the statute runs. Then let us together RESET JBB encl

ENCLOSURE #1

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

J.B., “Author”

Dept. English, Annex B

SUNY/Buffalo

Buffalo, N.Y. 14214

Toad that under cold stone days and nights has 31 sweltered venom sleeping got:

You may wish to avail yourself of this final opportunity to avoid litigation and exposure. Full accounting from your publishers of monies paid you for “your” “novel” G.G.B.! Full reparation to us in that amount! Full assignment to us of any future royalties accruing to that “work”! We are willing, if you comply promptly and fully, to drop action against you in the earlier cases — your “borrowings” from our Shoals of Love, The — asp, and Backwater Ballads —though our attorney has been apprised of these also and waits only for a sign from us.

We float like a butternut, but sting like a bean! Even as we draft this ultimatum, LILYVAC’s printers clack away at the text of RN, the Revolutionary NOTES that will render your ilk obsolete. If you have not responded to our satisfaction by 6:13 PM PST Friday April 4, you are doomed.

JBB

cc T. Andrews

W: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly and Lady Amherst.THE AMATEUR, or, A Cure for Cancer, by Arthur Morton King

The Lighthouse, Mensch’s Castle

Erdmann’s Cornlot

Dorset, Maryland

March 31, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Whom It Still Concerns

TO:

Yours Truly (cc: GGPLA)

RE:

Your message to me of May 12, 1940

Dear Sir or Madam:

Whom it so concerned, the undersigned, You wrote not a word to, not a letter, in Your letter to me of 5/12/40. Therefore I write You, seven times over, everything.

The enclosed You may have seen already: an early effort, abortive, on the part of “Arthur Morton King” to come to terms with conventional narrative and himself. Nine years ago tonight, on my 30th birthday, I first chucked it into the Choptank. There had been a little party for me here in my brother’s house, my wife’s contribution to which was a jeroboam of Piper-Heidsieck; walking home afterward (we had a flat near the yacht basin in those days) we enjoyed what was becoming a ritual quarrel. Marsha alleged that I was unfaithful to her, in spirit if not in physical fact, with my brother’s wife. I protested that there was a great difference, both between psychological and physical infidelity and between my wife and my sister-in-law, and that while I had admittedly loved Magda Giulianova once when she was Peter’s girlfriend and again when she was his bride, that latter “affair” (third of my life, Germaine) was nonsexual and had been entirely supplanted by my marriage.

All which was more true than not, and irrelevant, the real burden of Marsha’s complaint being not that I loved Magda or another, “physically” or “spiritually,” but that I did not love herself as much as either she or I could wish. And to this not-always-unspoken charge I could in good faith at best plead nolo contendere: I loved Marsha and Marsha only, but not greatly — a description that fit as well my feeling for myself.

The night lengthened; tempers shortened. Bitter Marsha went to bed alone. I withdrew to my “study” (daughter Angie’s bedroom) with the last two inches of Piper-Heidsieck, reviewed by night-light this work-then-in-progress and my 30-year-old life, lost interest in continuing either, washed down 30 capsules of Marsha’s Librium with the warm champagne, corked The Amateur in the empty jeroboam, walked drowsily across the park to launch it from Long Wharf on what I hoped was an outgoing tide, and went home to die.

Perhaps to die: I believed that 30 Libriums (I did not know the milligrammage) was probably a fatal dose, as Andreyev believed — when, at age 21, he lay between the railroad tracks in Petersburg — that the train would probably kill him. I also knew, like him, that my belief was possibly mistaken. The probability and the possibility were equally important; no need to go on about that. As I approached the bedroom I was struck by the thoughtlessness of imposing my corpse upon Marsha and Angie. The night was not cold; I had remarked early yachts in their slips; now I returned to the basin, thinking foggily (from the hour and the alcohol, not the Librium) to borrow a dinghy and go the way of my manuscript. None in evidence. A police car cruised from High Street down toward the wharf, parking place of young lovers; I took cover in the cockpit of the nearest cabin cruiser, not to be mistaken for a thief or vandal; curled up on the dew-damp teak; began to feel ridiculous.

And chilly. And cross. It seemed to me that my shivering and sniffling and general discomfort would likely keep me awake, and that unless I slept, the chemicals might make me only nauseated instead of comatose and finally dead. Back to the apartment, which had never seemed so cozy: let the living bury the dead, etc. Good-bye Angie, I wasn’t the best of fathers anyhow; ditto Marsha, ditto husband. My head was fortunately too heavy for more than this in the self-pity way. I stretched out on the living-room couch and tried to manage a suitable last thought: something to do with the grand complexity of nature, of history, of the organism denominated Ambrose M.; with the infinite imaginable alternatives to arbitrary reality, etc. Nothing came to mind.