John Barth - Letters

5. 1955—?: My 2nd and presumably final sexual flowering, altogether more modest: prompted by #2 above; aided by a prostatectomy too long put off, which relieved a condition both painful and conducive to impotence; principally abetted by dear Polly Lake. An efflorescence with, apparently, a considerable half-life: there is evidence that that garden is even yet not closed for the night. O yes, and I remeet the Macks, reinvolve myself in their Enterprises, and largely put by the profession of law for directorship of their Tidewater Foundation.

6. Groundhog’s Day, 1930: Your inexplicable suicide, which teaches me to the bone the emotion of frustration, and remains to this hour by no means explained to my satisfaction. I move into the Dorset Hotel; I pay my room rent a day at a time (see #4 left, above); and I open my endless Inquiry into your death. O you bastard.

6. I don’t know. June 21 or 22, 1937, when I close the Inquiry (see #13, below left)? June 22 or 23, same year, when I reopen it? I think fall, 1956, when publication of The Floating Opera novel prompts me to buy the Macks’ old summer cottage down on Todds Point, virtually move out of the Dorset, and abandon both the Inquiry and the Letter, from the emotion of boredom. Damn you.

7. 1930-37: My long involvement with Col. Morton of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, who cannot understand why I have made an outright gift, to the richest man in town, of the money you left me upon your death. Money! O you bastard.

7. 1955: My direction, for Mack Enterprises, of the purchase of Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes, which, following upon my remeeting Jeannine on the New Year’s Eve (#2 right, above), and followed by the appearance of that novel, led to my reassociation with Harrison and Jane: his madness, her enterprises.

8. Aug. 13, 1932: I am seduced by Jane Mack, with Harrison’s complaisance, in their Todds Point summer cottage, and learn — well, to the vesicles — the emotion of surprise. Sweet, sweet surprise.

8. May 16, 1969: We shall come to it. Same emotion, not surprisingly. O, O, O.

9. Oct. 2, 1933: Jeannine Mack, perhaps my daughter, is born, and the Mack/Mack/Andrews triangle is suspended.

9. Jan. 29, 1969: Harrison Mack, perhaps her father, dies, and the royal folie à deux at Tidewater Farms is terminated.

10. July 31, 1935: The probate case of Mack v. Mack begins in earnest, and Jane resumes our affair.

10. Mar. 28-May 16, 1969: Another Mack v. Mack shapes up. And O…

11. June 17, 1937: Polly Lake farts, inadvertently, in my office, and thereby shows me how to win Mack v. Mack and make Harrison and Jane millionaires, if I choose to. Of this, surely, more anon.

11.

12. June 20 or 21, 1937: My dark night of the soul, when a combination of accumulated cardiac uncertainty (cf. #4 left, above), sexual impotency (cf. #5 left & right, above), and ongoing frustration (cf. #6 left, you bastard), led me to

12.

13. June 21 or 22, 1937: My resolve to commit suicide at the end of a perfectly ordinary day, in the course of which I take breakfast coffee with Capt. Osborn Jones’s geriatric company in the Dorchester Explorers’ Club, pay my room rent for the day, work on my unfinished boat, drop in at the office to review cases in progress and stare at my staring wall, submit to a physical examination by Marvin Rose, take lunch with Harrison Mack, premise that Nothing Has Intrinsic Value, escort little Jeannine on a tour of the Original Floating Theatre, decide to employ its acetylene stage- and house-lights to my purposes that evening, take dinner with Harrison and Jane, am amiably informed that our affair is terminated (they being about to take off for Italy), resolve Mack v. Mack in their favor by a coin flip, return to the Dorset, close my Inquiry into your suicide, which I mistakenly believe I now understand, stroll down to the showboat, attempt my own, fail, and observe that I will in all probability (but not necessarily) live out my life to its natural term, there being in the abstract no more reason to commit suicide than not to. Got that, Dad? Inquiry reopened; Letter to you resumed; Floating Theatre memoir — and Second Cycle of my life — begun.

13.

Okay, the correspondences aren’t rigorous, and there are as many inversions as repetitions or ironical echoes. The past not only manures the future: it does an untidy job. #11, #12, & #13, which happened back-to-back 1st time around, are yet to recur, unless we count Polly’s airhorn work on the New Bridge in July 1967 as 11 R, and my subsequent vast suspicion (that Nothing — and everything else! — has intrinsic value) as 12 and 13 R. But now that I have perceived the Pattern — and just barely begun to assimilate 8 & 10 R — my standards of praeterital stercoration have been elevated. I now look for Polly to fire a literal flatus at us 32 days hence (or, like a yogi, take air in). It will no longer do that I have in a sense, via the foundation, already reconstructed the showboat I tried and failed to destroy in 1937 (Nature had a hard time of it, too: the O.F.T. sank three times between 1913 and 1938, was each time raised and refitted, was finally sold for scrap in ’41, but burned to the waterline off the Georgia coast en route to the salvage yard. Were the Author of us all a less heavy ironist, one would suspect arson for insurance; but I believe He managed spontaneous combustion in the galley, under the stage, where I and the acetylene tanks once rendezvoused). A second Dark Night clearly lies ahead for me, this June or next, followed by another Final Solution — and, no doubt, somebody’s second first novel, or first last!

Meanwhile, back at 8 and 10 R…

Seven Fridays ago, the last of March, I saw her name on the appointment calendar, not in my foundation office out at the college, but in my law office on Court Lane. She’d reserved a full hour of the afternoon. I wondered what exactly for, and asked Polly; she wondered, too. Harrison’s will, we grimly supposed.

I had drawn and redrawn it for him a number of times, and was named his executor. I did not much approve of its provisions; had striven earnestly, in fact, with some success, to persuade him to alter a number of them in the interests both of equity and of maintaining the appearance of mens sana. I didn’t relish the prospect of its execution, but meant to see it through unless the will should be seriously contested, in which case I would probably disqualify myself as executor in order to defend (again with little relish) the interest of the foundation, his chief beneficiary. Thus he had stricken from his copious drafts, at my urging, all references to the flooding of England, to Her Majesty the Queen, to his disaffected American colonies, to “meae dilectissimae Elizabethae,” and the rest. The sum settled on Lady Amherst for her pains was scaled down to noncontroversial size (she deserved more); ditto the executor’s share, embarrassingly generous. And for appearances’ sake Jane was given a cash bequest in addition to the considerable jointly owned property (including Tidewater Farms) which became hers automatically by right of survivorship. Finally, I had persuaded Harrison to put in trust a sum for each of his two grandchildren. But to Drew and Jeannine he would not leave a penny, and only with difficulty had I prevailed upon him not to denounce as well as disinherit them. His share of Mack Enterprises and his other stock holdings, as well as real property inherited from his father and not jointly owned with Jane — that is, the bulk of his bequeathable estate and more than half of his net worth — were to pass to the foundation, along with the benefits of his several life-insurance policies. Especially considering how much Harrison had put already into the original endowments of the foundation and of Tidewater Tech, this bequest came to a very great deal of money: more than two million dollars. Half was to be added to “our” endowment, where it was to be vested in a contingency fund until Marshyhope College’s “Tower of Truth” was completed; should further cost overruns or budget cuts by the State General Services Department (with whom “we” have a complex relationship in such special projects) threaten to truncate the tower, it was to be rescued with this money, which otherwise would revert to the foundation’s general fund, its income to be used as we saw fit. The other half was to be divided equally into two trusts: one for establishing, furnishing, and maintaining a Loyalist Library and Reading Room in that same tower, another for founding an American Society of British Loyalists under the directorship of A. B. Cook, the self-styled Maryland Laureate.