John Barth - Letters

Madness! And in these letters (which you may presently read in print, for I shall do what that hand bids me, with every misgiving in the world) I perceive a pattern of my own, A.C. IV’s and V’s and VI’s be damned: It is the women of the line who’ve been the losers: Anne Bowyer Cooke and Anna Cooke, Roxanne Édouard, Henrietta and Nancy Russecks, Andrée Castines I and II and III — faithful, patient, brave, long-suffering women driven finally, the most of them, to distraction.

And of this sorry line the latest — unless she finds the spiritual wherewithal to do an about-face of her own with what remains of the second half of her life — is “your”

Germaine!

S: Todd Andrews to his father.His life’s recycling. Jane Mack’s visit and confession. 10 R.

Skipjack Osborn Jones

Slip #2, Municipal Harbor

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

11 P.M. Friday, May 16, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

O dear Father,

Seven decades of living (seven years more than you permitted yourself), together with my Tragic View of Order, incline me on the one hand to see patterns everywhere, on the other to be skeptical of their significance. Do you know what I mean? Did you feel that way too? (Did you ever know what I meant? Did you feel any way?)

So for example I did not fail to remark, on March 7 last, when I wrote my belated annual deathday letter to you, that it was occasioned by the revival of events that prompted my old Letter in the first place; but having so remarked, I shrugged my shoulders. Even seven weeks ago, when the dead past sprouted to life in my office like those seeds from fossil dung germinated by the paleontologists, I resisted the temptation to Perceive a Pattern in All This. I mean a meaningful pattern: for of course I noticed, not for the first time, that Drew Mack and his mother were squaring off over Harrison’s estate quite as Harrison and his mother had once done over Mack Senior’s. But I drew no more inferences from that than I shall from the gratuitous recurrence of sevens above; I merely wondered: If (as Marx says in his essay The 18th Brumaire ) tragic history repeats itself as farce, what does farce do for an encore?

Then came, on April Fool’s Day, a letter from the author of The Floating Opera novel, inquiring what I’d been up to since 1954 and whether I’d object to being cast in his current fiction. I obliged him with a partial résumé—in course of which I began to see yet further Connections — then not only declined, at least for the present, to model for him, but observed that his project struck me as the sort conceived by an imagination overinclined to retracing its steps before moving on. I even wondered whether he might not be merely registering his passage of life’s celebrated midpoint, as I once did.

I’ve not heard from him since. But I withdraw that pejorative merely, and I am at once chastened and spooked by that clause as I once did. O yes: and at age 69 I’m also in love, Dad. Whether with a woman or a letter of the alphabet, I’m not yet certain.

Something tells me, you see— lots of things — that my life has been being recycled since 1954, perhaps since 1937, without my more than idly remarking the fact till now. The reenactment may indeed be fast approaching its “climax”; and as I made something of a muddle of it the first time around, I’d best begin to do more than idly remark certain recurrences as portentous or piquant.

Item: the foregathering, in Cambridge and environs, of Reg Prinz’s film company, to shoot what was at first proposed to be a film version of some later work by the author of The Floating Opera, but presently intends to reprise at least “certain themes and images” from that first novel — and which features “Bea Golden.” Will she play Jane Mack?

Item: in the morning’s mail, notice of two scheduled visits to Cambridge this summer of “our” showboat replica, The Original Floating Theatre II, about which Prinz had inquired of me only last Friday, in his fashion, whether it would be putting in here during the July Tercentennial celebration. He was interested in using it as a ready-made set for “the Showboat sequences”—should he have said sequel? — in his film.

For as it turns out (so I reported to him up on deck some hours ago), the O.F.T. II will play at Long Wharf not only during the week of July 18–25, but on the third weekend in June as well: 32nd anniversary of that midsummer night when I tried (and failed) to blow its prototype, myself, and tout le monde to kingdom come. Heavy-footed coincidence! God the novelist was hard enough to take as an awkward Realist; how shall we swallow him as a ham-handed Formalist?

Well, that production-within-a-reproduction must sink or swim without me; I shan’t be going. But since Harrison’s funeral on your 39th deathday; since my own 69th birthday and my letter to you; since my new association with Jane Mack, even with Jeannine — to get right down to it, since this evening’s cocktail party aboardship and subsequent sunset sail with one of my guests, since whose disembarkation I’ve sat here at the chart table drawing up parallel lists and exclaiming O, O, O — I’ve been feeling like the principal in a too familiar drama, a freely modified revival featuring Many of the Original Cast.

In the left-hand column (from early work-notes for my own memoir, drafted between 1937 and 1954, of Captain James Adams’s original Original Floating Theatre), the cardinal events of my life’s first half, as they seemed to me then and still seem today, 13 in number. On their right, more or less correspondent events in the years since. To wit:

1. Mar. 2, 1900: I am born.

1. June 21 or 22, 1937: I am “reborn” (you know what I mean) after my unsuccessful effort to blow up the O.F.T.

2. Mar. 2, 1917: I definitively lose my virginity to Betty Jane Gunter, R.I.P., upstairs in my bedroom in your house, puppy dog-style on my bed, before the large mirror on my dresser, and learn to the bone the emotion of mirth.

2. Dec. 31, 1954/Jan. 1, 1955: I definitively lose my middle-aged celibacy (also, one idly remarks, after 17 years, and also on a Friday) to Sharon-from-Manhattan, after a New Year’s Eve party at Cambridge Yacht Club, thence to Tidewater Inn, Easton, where I relearn, if not mirth, certainly amusement. And refreshment!

3. Sept. 22, 1918: I bayonet a German infantry sergeant in the Argonne Forest, after learning to the bone the emotion of fear.

3. July 23, 1967: I forestall Drew Mack & friends from blowing up the New Bridge, and in the process learn to the ventricles the strange emotion of courage.

4. June 13, 1919: I am told of a cardiac condition that may do me in at any moment, or may never. I begin, not long after, the attempt to explain this state of affairs to you in a letter, of which this is the latest installment.

4. End of June, 1937: I am told by my friend the late Marvin Rose, M.D., R.I.P., that in my place he would not worry one fart about a myocardium poised for so many years on the brink of infarction without once infarcting. Never mind the discrepant chronology, Dad; my heart tells me that here is where this item belongs. I perpend Marvin’s opinion, in which I have no great interest since my “rebirth,” and resume both my Inquiry and my letter to you, of which etc.

5. 1920-24: My Rakehood, or 1st sexual flowering, during which I also study law and learn of my low-grade prostate infection. Followed by a period (1925-29) of diminished sexual activity, my meeting with Harrison Mack, and my entry into your law firm.