John Barth - Letters

Magda laughed. “How many have you sniffed?” Then she chided me for both my discourtesy and my misinformation: I would find, she said, that some women were fortunate enough to smell fresh of crotch even after a night of doucheless love, just as some, like some men, perspired almost inodorously. Others, like herself, were less lucky, however fastidious: Love learned not to mind, if not positively to enjoy. As for her “weight”—by which she assumed I meant her figure, as she was not overweight for her height, build, and age — Peter had compared her to the nudes he’d found in one of the art books Uncle Wilhelm had shipped home from France, and lovingly called her his oda — odie-something-or-other.

“Odalisque,” I groaned, contrite. “I’m such a jerk, Magda.”

“Odorless is what you want,” she said mildly. “Those dainty little things in the underarm ads.”

Mother’s health declined. In late July, radical mastectomy, which the surgeon assured us would arrest, before it reached her lymphatics, the malignancy he’d biopsied in her breast. But he had been Aunt Rosa’s hysterectomist; we were not much comforted. One Sunday morning, after visiting her in the hospital, I lay perspiring in Peter’s living room. Magda discovered a large blue mole on my chest.

“Look here, Ambrose. That could turn into something serious.”

Her eyes shone. I stroked her back as she explored the new hair of my chest for more. She discovered six in all, arranged more or less like the stars in Cassiopeia, and saluted each with an eager small cry. Then, despite our Sunday worsteds and seersuckers, the hour and circumstance, she waxed more ardent than I’d ever known her. Presently I cried: “For heaven’s sake, marry me!”

She wiped sweat from her lips, smiled, shook her head. “Your brother’s the one for me. He’s got a heart, he has.”

The phrase put me painfully in mind of Mother. As we left, straightening plackets and shirttails, I glanced up toward the hospital solarium. There stood Father and Karl, impassively regarding us, their heads wreathed in my uncle’s blue cigar smoke.

That evening at supper Peter telephoned from Germany, where it was already past midnight. He would be discharged in six to ten weeks. Magda could plan the wedding for early October. I was to be best man. We should proceed with footings for the “lookout tower,” if we hadn’t already. He wished we could see the ones he’d seen over there, just like in Aunt Rosa’s egg. The word in German was Turm; a castle was a Schloss; he was a regular linguist these days…

No one home except Father and me. Hector rubbed his nose and regarded, from the side porch of the Menschhaus, the lights of the cars returning from Ocean City over the New Bridge toward the Bay ferries and the mainland.

“Your Uncle Karl and I have talked it over,” he said to me. My heart drained. He lit a Lucky Strike, managing the book match with one hand. “One part lime to three sand from now on, is what we think. Pete won’t mind. No Portland except for pointing. It’s all damned nonsense. D’you follow me?”

N, O, et cetera

“No, I don’t!” I should have cried, Yours Truly; and “No, I shan’t!” dear Germaine. But oh, I did, I followed them, follow them yet, shall follow them finally and readily into our ultimate plot in the Dorset boneyard, where Uncle Wilhelm’s unmarked stone still marks his grave. M ends this fragment and my first “love affair,” which, with that water message, began my vocation and my trials as an nomme de lettres: still laboring to fill in the blanks, still searching for an exit from that funhouse, a way to get the story told and rejoin my family for the long ride home.

“Nonsense,” says Arthur Morton King, my drier half: “It’s all damned nonsense.” He abandoned “personal” literature long since, as tacky, smarmy. He could not care less that, come fall, the Narrator went off to college (along with the unnamed other laborer on Mensch’s Castle that summer, his friend and fellow writer-to-be); that Peter came home, married Magda, entered the firm as Karl’s partner, and took over completion of his ill-founded house. I tell and tell, Germaine; yet everything is yet to tell: how Ambrose got from ’47 to ’69; from the sandy basement of the Castle to its “Lighthouse” camera obscura; from his realization that that water message must be replied to, through his maverick noncareer as A. M. King, to his present commitment (first draft now two-sevenths complete and sent to Reggie Prinz in New York) to make a screenplay from his fellow laborer’s labors. Along that way, for romantical interest, four other affairs: two with Magda, one with the would-be star of Prinz’s current project, one with wife Marsha, mother of his backward angel.

“All damned nonsense,” King declares. “Take a (blank) page from Uncle Wilhelm’s book: already in his day art was past such tack and smarm.”

But this Ambrose has the family syndrome: will somehow nudge and bully it through, and make love to Milady A., and do that filmscript however often Prinz rejects it. And compose a seamless story about life’s second revolution; and help Peter salvage firm and family. And— here A. M. King and I are one—“rescue” Fiction from its St. Helena by transforming it altogether, into something full and luminous as the inside of Rosa’s egg.

S: The Author to Todd Andrews.Soliciting the latter’s cooperation as a character in a new work of fiction.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

March 30, 1969

Mr. Todd Andrews

Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

Some fifteen years ago, when I was 24 and 25 (Eisenhower! Hurricane Hazel!), I wrote my first published novel, a little tidewater comedy called The Floating Opera. It involved, among other things, a showboat remembered from Aubrey Bodine’s photographs and an imaginary 54-year-old Maryland lawyer named Todd Andrews, who once in 1937, when he was 37, cheerfully attempted to blow himself up together with the Floating Opera and a goodly number of his fellow Eastern Shorers. You may have heard of the story.

At that time, as a budding irrealist, I took seriously the traditional publisher’s disclaimer—“Any resemblance between characters in this novel and actual persons living or dead,” etc. — and would have been appalled at the suggestion that any of my fictive folk were even loosely “drawn from life”: a phrase that still suggests to me some barbarous form of capital punishment. I wanted no models in the real world to hobble my imagination. If, as the Kabbalists supposed, God was an Author and the world his book, I criticized Him for mundane realism. Had it been intimated to me that there actually dwelt, in the “Dorset Hotel,” a middle-aged bachelor lawyer with subacute bacterial endocarditis, who rented his room by the day and spent his evenings at an endless inquiry into his father’s suicide…

No matter. Life is a shameless playwright (so are some playwrights) who lays on coincidence with a trowel. I am about the same age now as “Todd Andrews” was when he concluded that he’d go on living because there’s no more reason to commit suicide than not to: I approach reality these days with more respect, if only because I find it less realistic and more mysterious than I’d supposed. I blush to confess that my current fictive project, still tentative, looks to be that hoariest of early realist creatures, an epistolary novel — set, moreover and by God, in “Cambridge, Maryland,” among other more or less actual places, and involving (Muse forgive me) those most equivocal of ghosts: Characters from the Author’s Earlier Fictions.