John Barth - Letters

If it was my brother’s hope that the family would take up where his legacy left off, he was disappointed: work on the house ceased with the August meteor showers. In September Peter announced his engagement to Magda and enlisted in the Corps of Engineers. I had our bedroom to myself; no longer needed to masturbate under the covers when my brother, I hoped, was asleep. Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth smiled from the walls, hung too with plane spotters’ silhouettes of Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs, Heinkels. But it was Magda Giulianova I dreamed of, by me rescued from the holocaust that incinerated all dear obstacles to our love. In the shelter of the unfinished basement of the unbuilt castle, we mourned our losses in each other’s arms.

M

“Mulch Peter’s rosebushes, better, against the Onion Snow.”

Aunt Rosa’s final words, as reported by Mother. She never rested under our tree, though in her last weeks she enjoyed looking down from the hospital solarium upon its bare young withes. From her uterus the cancer spread like an ugly rumor; it was the willows of the Dorset Cemetery she soon slept under, beside her Konrad. Her small estate she had long since conveyed to Father except for her third of Mensch Masonry, divided equally between him and Uncle Karl, and the ancient egg, expressly devised to Peter and me.

But I, I rested often under Peter’s tree in nineteen forties five and six and seven, as the nation finished its war, my brother his term of military enlistment, Mensch Masonry its seawall project and the foundations of Mensch’s Castle, and I my high school education.

Say, rather, my education at high school age: not much book learning was accomplished in rural Southern public schools at that time, when ablebodied male teachers were in the military and many of the married women left to follow their husbands. What passed for schooling one could dispatch with the left hand; my right ransacked the public library, no treasure house either in those days. But in the shade of our willow I contrived to read Sophocles and Schopenhauer, and bade farewell to my youthful wish to be an architect. There too, with Magda, I read John Keats, Heinrich Heine, and her beloved rueful Housman, and in time said good-bye to boyhood.

Magda’s face is round, her complexion white: not my preference. But her eyes and mouth are rich, her nose is finely cut, her voice deep, soft, stirring. She has grown heavy in motherhood; at forty she’ll look like an Italian peasant; even at eighteen she was displeased with her hips, her backside, her legs — too large by modern standards, but (as I learned to remind her) the ideal in other centuries, especially combined with her graceful neck and shoulders, her delicate breasts. When I appraised her — I was seventeen — it was not in the lustful humor with which one sized up the slim tan girls of beach and boardwalk. The frivolity of her summer cottons was belied by that grave voice and figure; those thighs and buttocks were serious as her eyes. Magda played no sports; was self-conscious in slacks or shorts or swimsuit; wore her dark hair long and straight or wound handsomely in a bun when all the fashion was for short and curly. Yet one guessed her able to stand unclothed before a lover with perfect ease, unbinding that hair for him without joke and tease and giggle. Similarly, one could imagine an affair with Magda, but no flirtation. And the affair, one understood, would be nothing sportive…

Of late she has become a complainer, speaks of the republic’s decline in the tone of one hectoring a foolish husband. But at eighteen and nineteen she brooded stoically upon grand problems; her pessimism was cosmic and impersonal, a tidewater Tragic View. I read her the science page of the Sunday Times, which moved her even more than Housman’s verse. The population was increasing past our means to support it. The planet’s skin of vital topsoil was washing into the sea. The century would see the end of our fossil fuel reserves. Our science had thwarted natural selection, with the result that our species degenerated year by year. Our antibodies were breeding supergerms, our insecticides superinsects, and poisoning the waters as well. The incidence of violent crime was soaring. Half the entering class at Columbia University would not distinguish Hagia Sophia from the Taj Mahal.

“We’re adding so much carbon dioxide to the air that the winters are getting warmer,” I read to her. “A little more will melt the polar ice cap, and the whole Eastern Shore will be under water.”

We would be sitting under the willow tree or leaning against the new foundations of the Castle on a Sunday morning, while our elders were in church. Magda’s legs, stubbled or razor-nicked, would be crossed, the large calves flattened in their nylon sheaths. She would shake her head soberly at the river and observe: “You can’t just sit by. But every single thing you do costs more than it’s worth.”

Those brown eyes saw what general truths were implied by particulars. “Here’s an anthropologist,” I reported, “who defends the idea of national characters. He says the Germans are the most ingenious people in Europe and the most barbarous, and that the two go together.”

Magda concurred: “We’ve every one of us got the vices of our virtues.”

And on the day we first put my penis into her vagina, she having stood naked and unwound her hair for me quite as I’d imagined, and I lamented that our pleasure must be at my brother’s cost, she sighed unsmilingly: “Every silver lining has a cloud.”

This was in late spring 1947, and by way of a commencement gift. While work on the Castle had resumed and was progressing rapidly, the family’s fortunes, so bright not very long before, had fallen to their lowest point since the year of my birth and Hector’s confinement. Had Peter not managed a construction loan through an army friend whose father was a local banker, and hired Mensch Masonry to complete the house, our firm would have been all but idle. Several fresh misfortunes had beset us, not least of which was Father’s resigning his principalship in 1945 and devoting his energies full-time to the company. Carting and cleaning the Baltimore rocks for reuse as exterior masonry had proved finally more costly than buying fresh stone from the mainland quarries; in the end they had to be sandblasted on all six surfaces, and even then, despite their historical interest, our customers usually preferred new stone. What was perhaps our last chance to use them profitably came early in the year, when fire destroyed a wing of East Dorset Grace Methodist Protestant Southern Church: Mensch Masonry bid to rebuild the facade with the Baltimore rocks, many of which approached the hue of the original granite. Father pled the poetry of saving East Dorset souls with what had once preserved East Dorset property; of building as it were for Zion with the rubble of Babylon. But by that time we were so discredited in the town that the lay leaders rejected our bid and raised instead a brick-veneered structure in the modern fashion, to our minds (but we are neither architects nor true believers) devoid of spirituality.

The cause of our latest disfavor was again the seawall, which by V-J Day, before we’d completed its improvement, had in places already cracked, and was all but breached when Magda relieved me of my sexual virginity. Two hurricanes had pounded at the seam between the old wall and the new; nor’easters had driven water into every crevice, which frozen had heaved and humped the concrete. Damage was especially heavy along the Cornlot, from which the Baltimore rocks had been entirely cleared, and in those portions of the wall where we had piled them as filler when our crusher broke. Great chunks of concrete came away entirely; twenty-foot lengths of wall leaned out of plumb; the spring tides broached them and dissolved the land behind into muddy depressions; salt water then killed the grass, and the soil washed out with remarkable celerity. Along with rose pollen and cottonwood poplar seeds, litigation was in the air: owners of waterfront lots, who had paid their assessments and confidently invested in tons of fill, were closing ranks against the city council, which in turn was preparing an action against Mensch Masonry. There was talk of collusion between us and the mayor to defraud our town. That latter worthy, a Dixiecrat, charged the “liberal” Democratic councilmen with fabricating issues for the ’48 elections. In fact, no suits were finally filed, but the publicity served us ill, as did the repairs we undertook at our own cost — extensive repairs, but mainly cosmetic — in the interest of improving our public image and forestalling litigation.