John Barth - Letters

These last were the only overt testamentary evidences of Harrison’s grand delusion. While much toned down from his original proposals (e.g., a Society for the Reunion of His Majesty’s American Colonies with Mother England), and altogether more interesting than John Schott’s tower, they remained the obvious openings for any contest of the will. Were I Jane Mack, certainly if I were Jeannine, most certainly if I were Drew, I’d contest.

And it seems they all more or less intend to. Unselfishness takes many forms, Dad: had you noticed? Drew wants his father’s entire estate returned to The People, from whom he maintains it was wrongfully wrested by two generations of capitalist-industrialist Macks. This end he would effect, not by retroactive refunds to all purchasers of Mack Pickle Products since 1922, but via free day-care centers for blacks, improved living facilities and organizational muscle for migrant farm workers, and other, more revolutionary, projects. He is neither hurt nor surprised by his disinheritance: father-son hostility he regards neither as an Oedipal universal nor as an accident of temperaments, but as “inherent in the dialectic of the bourgeois family.” He acknowledges that his father was deranged, but believes (correctly, in my opinion) that the derangement accounts only for certain of his benefactions, not for the disinheritances. He will of course have to argue otherwise in court.

Jeannine is hurt but not surprised. I do not think either the Macks or the Andrewses greatly capable of loving. Affection, loyalty, goodwill, benignity, forbearance, yes; and these are virtues, no doubt about it. But love… Yet the more imaginative of us (you listening, Dad?) can sharply wish we had that problematical capacity, which cares enough to hassle where we will not bother, to cry out where we are stoical, to treasure another quite as much as ourselves. And even the less imaginative of us can wish to be loved, and fancy ourselves capable at least of reciprocation, or heartfelt echo. Jeannine believes (I gather) that inadequate fathering doomed her to a promiscuous and unsuccessful search for substitutes. What about adequate daughtering? I ask her. She’d’ve been a good daughter, she replies, if her father had been etc. Should she contest (she’s presently too scattered to decide), it will not be simply to enrich herself — she and Drew both have trust income from their grandparents, adequate to subsist on, and there is alimony from “Golden Louie,” as she calls her last ex — it will be for reparation. And to enable Reg Prinz to produce as well as direct his next film.

As for Jane, and the first part of 10 R: she will of course contest, she informed me promptly and pleasantly that afternoon, when she came into the office: punctual as always and, as always, handsome, striking, yea beautiful. About the Tower of Truth she had no strong feelings one way or the other, though she opposed the use of foundation funds to supplement the GSD appropriation: let John Schott find his money elsewhere; that’s what college presidents were for. The Loyalist business she regarded privately as more silly than demented; while she was grateful to me in principle for having talked Harrison out of its wilder versions, she meant nonetheless to use those earlier drafts and my revisions to support her contention that he was neither of sound mind nor properly his own man in his later years. A. B. Cook — who I now learned was a distant relative of hers — she regarded as a humbug, to be neither feared, trusted, nor otherwise taken seriously. John Schott was an ass. With Germaine Pitt she had no quarrel; on the contrary; she would not dream of contesting that bequest. The disinheritance of her children was doubtless regrettable but neither surprising, given their “provocative track records” (her term), nor tragic, given their earlier legacies, their present life-styles, the trusts established for Drew’s children (Yvonne, thank heaven, could be depended upon to educate them Sensibly), and the Reasonable Provision she herself was making for Drew and Jeannine in her own will. She herself of course was well off even without all that jointly owned property, and very well off with it; she would bear Harrison no grudge even if he’d been quite sane when he made his last will. Nevertheless, two million was two million: since she had no particular fondness for the Tower of Truth, the cause of British loyalism, or Mr. A. B. Cook, she meant to sue for as much of it as she could get. She quite expected Drew and Jeannine to do the same; would urge them to, if they bothered to ask her opinion.

All this delivered coolly, crisply, cordially in my office on a spanking early spring afternoon. Since burying Harrison and reestablishing herself at Tidewater Farms, Jane had found time for a week’s rendezvous in Tobago with her new friend “Lord Baltimore” (she would not tell me his name), a French-Canadian descendant of the original Irish proprietary lords of Maryland and (more news) a relative of her relative A. B. Cook—“but not close enough to worry us about the consanguinity business.” Tanned, fresh-eyed, wrinkled only as if by too much outdoor tennis, Jane looked younger and livelier than Lady Amherst: a vigorous 45 at most — certainly not 55, most decidedly not 63! And from her I caught, among the pleasant fragrances of wools and suedes and discreet perfume, a tiny heart-stinging scent from #8 L, 37 years and several pages past: a scent of salt spray and sunshine on fresh skin, in clean hair, as if she’d just come in from small-boat sailing on a summer afternoon.

O, O, O pale pervert Proust: keep your tea and madeleine! Give me the dainty oils of hair and skin (for all I know it might have been, both then and now, some suntan preparation) to trigger memory and regain lost time! I had to close my eyes; Jane reached over the desk to touch my arm and wonder if I was all right. I was 69, I replied, and subject to attacks of nostalgia; otherwise fit as a fiddle — and ready to go to court if Harrison’s will were contested. But not, I should apprise her at once, as her counsel in the dispute — or Drew’s or Jeannine’s, both of whom I told her had approached me informally on the subject since the will was read. As Harrison’s executor on the one hand and executive director of his Tidewater Foundation on the other, I was clearly caught in a division of interest (I had urged him, vainly, to name Jane his executrix, as she well knew). As his friend, I would have to decide which role to abdicate and which to act in, the better to see his wishes carried out. As her friend, I’d be happy to recommend to her the estate lawyers I’d least like to cross swords with.

Unnecessary, she responded cheerfully: she knew scads of lawyers, bright young ones as well as sly old ones. And she had Harrison’s crazy early drafts, and letters he’d written as George III dating back to 1955, and the testimony of two psychiatrists, and enough Georgian costumery to outfit the staff of Williamsburg (where in fact she was negotiating its sale), and innumerable eye-witnesses to the long-running royal charade at Tidewater Farms — including a videotape made with Harrison’s consent by Reg Prinz only last Guy Fawkes Day. Not to mention certain freeze-dried items in safe deposit with Mack Enterprises, of demonstrated efficacy in the proof of unsound mind. No doubt whatever that she could break at least the two “Loyalist” articles in the will and, at least, divide that million with Drew and Jeannine, on the grounds that Harrison’s mad identification of them with Queen Charlotte, the Prince of Wales, and Princess Amelia, respectively, accounted for their disinheritance. Moreover, she was reasonably confident that a separate action could establish that in her own case it was only the invidious historical identification, not any blameworthy conduct of hers, that had done the trick, whereas his disaffection with Jeannine and Drew antedated his madness and marked his lucid as well as his demented intervals. She had not yet decided which tack to take.