John Barth - Letters

I wrote ahead to the Macks and received from Jane a crisp but courteous invitation to be their guest until I found lodgings. She also confirmed André’s report of her husband’s decline since ’62, and hoped my conversation might amuse him. But except in his ever less frequent intervals of true lucidity, she warned (when he knew he was Harrison Mack, who in his madness fancied himself George III), and his ever more frequent intervals of second-degree delusion, as it were (when he fancied himself George III mad, fancying himself Harrison Mack sane), I must be prepared to hold onto my own sanity, so entirely did he translate Tidewater Farms into Windsor Castle, or Buckingham Palace, or Kew, or Bath. Only her deliberate and entire immersion in business affairs, for which she had found she had talent, preserved Jane’s reason. She declared herself sorry to hear of my own bereavement — but I could hear envy in her phrasing, and I sympathised. She kindly sent a car to fetch me from Friendship Airport in Baltimore to her office at the Mack Enterprises plant in Cambridge, where I admired — a shade uneasily, I confess — her extraordinary physical preservation, whilst she completed her forewarning of what I must expect out on Redmans Neck.

There Harrison was gently but absolutely confined, in a kind of ongoing masquerade. One of his psychiatrists, it seems, had attempted to render his delusion untenable by quizzing him in detail on Georgian history, of which he was innocent. A second, opposed in principle to the first, had thought to undo his colleague’s mischief by providing Harrison with the standard biographies and textbooks on the period, including studies of George’s own psychopathology. The patient blithely played the second against the first by sophisticating his derangement on the one hand whilst on the other attributing any gaps in his historical information, or discrepancies between the Georgian and Harrisonian facts, to his madness, to the fallibility of historiography, or to the misguided though doubtless well-intended masquerading of his courtiers!

“He calls himself a Don Quixote inside out,” Jane declared — and I observed to myself (a) that it bespoke a wistful detachment on Harrison’s part to see himself so, and (b) that it would have to be he, or some literate doctor, who so saw, since Jane herself carried no freight of literary reference. What I could not appreciate at second hand was the aptness of Harrison’s self-description: not only did he (so he was persuaded) mistake, in his “enchantment,” giants for windmills and soldiers for sheep, instead of vice versa — that is, he madly imagined that in “his” (George III’s) madness, Windsor Castle looked like Tidewater Farms, and the royal coach-and-four like a Lincoln Continental — but he informed me, in our first extended conversation, that “George Third the First” had actually made notes on Don Quixote at Windsor during his first mature seizure, in 1788, when also he had remarked to William Pitt (my husband’s ancestor, by the way) that having been disgracefully defeated in his first American war, he must needs be “a second Don Quixote” to involve himself in another.

Thus he could cast Jane, unflatteringly, in the role of homely Queen Charlotte, whilst “in his madness” perceiving and relating to her as Jane Mack, a handsome creature from another life in another time and place. Their son the vicious ingrate Prince of Wales, to spite and shame his father, carried on as a radical commoner named Drew Mack, wed to a “toothsome blackamoor wench”; their daughter Princess Amelia had not only died, but scandalously gone on stage under false names afterward to conceal the fact, etc. Only two people in the court were exempt from this double identity: His Majesty’s old friend Todd Andrews, whom he compared explicitly to Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, and his new friend—“the son [he] should have had,” his “Duke of York,” the “proper Prince Regent, when it comes to that”—who “never humoured [his] madness, because he shared it”; an “18th-Century courtier trapped in 20th-century America”…

Reg Prinz. Todd Andrews declares the name is, if not its bearer’s “real” one, at least an alias well antecedent to Harrison’s: a coincidence doubtless turned to account, but not an ad hoc imposture. Its young bearer had an established early reputation as an avant-garde cinéaste before his application to the Tidewater Foundation for subsidy; as he was not given to conversation, and spoke cryptically when at all, the most he could be taxed with was his not vigorously denying a role he most certainly did not “play.” For some reason Harrison had been taken with him on sight, and Jane acknowledged that while Prinz readily accepted all proffered support for his cinematic activities, he could not be accused of exploiting Harrison’s esteem. His visits to Redmans Neck were in part as a planning consultant to Marshyhope’s Media Centre, the directorship of which he had declined; and in part out of an apparent interest in Harrison himself.

I met His Majesty that same evening, Mr Prinz not till several months later. The original George III in his distress was often physically out of control; required constant attendance by Dr Willis and company; often needed restraining by strait-waistcoat (Willis calls it in his journal “the &c”; George himself referred to the restraining chair as his “coronation chair”); and suffered concomitant bodily infirmities. Harrison, until the twin strokes that blinded and killed him, was in rosy health and amiable temper, a little heavy but by no means obese, withal rather handsomer at seventy than he’d been in his forties, when I first met him at Capri — though not, like Jane, preternaturally youthful. And he was as entirely in control of himself as his complex dementia allowed: certainly in no way dangerous to himself or others, and inclined more to manic fancies than to manic projects. Therefore he needed very little supervision; his company was agreeable, and his conversation, if often saddening, was civilised and frequently clever. Not to disgrace, by his ubiquitous “delusions” (e.g., that Cambridge, England, was Cambridge, Maryland, or that his ministers were trustees of the Tidewater Foundation), the monarchy he held in such esteem, he ventured off the “palace grounds” only reluctantly and never unaccompanied. The “affairs of the realm” he gladly turned over to the queen and ministers aforementioned, though he still opposed the idea of installing Drew as prince regent. And since, “in his madness,” those crucial affairs were translated into such hallucinations as Marshyhope State University College, His Royal Highness into a minor American industrialist named Harrison Mack, Jr., he conscientiously attended to what was represented as the news and business of those hallucinations, and could talk as knowledgeably about Lyndon Johnson’s administration as about John Adams’s and Napoleon’s.

From all this one might imagine that, pragmatically speaking, he was not mad at all. But though his conduct of affairs “in this world,” as he put it, was in the main responsible and judicious, his identification with mad King George was more than an elaborate, self-cancelling whimsy. Harrison suffered from the duplicity of reality, as it were; events and circumstances that he could not “decipher” into Georgian terms, and thus deal with on their own, alarmed him, lest he mishandle them. And if his nightmares (and infrequent daytime seizures) were learnt from the history books — like George, he fancied he had seen Hanover through Herschel’s telescope; imagined London flooded, and would rush in the royal yacht to rescue “certain precious manuscripts and letters”; signed death warrants for “all six of [his] sons,” etc., etc. — the terror and anguish they caused him were heartfelt.