Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Which was enough. For (having re-married me in the Christian tribal ceremony to appease her parents) Andrée review’d for me, & enlisted my aid in the completion of her inquiry into, what in these three months & four letters I have set forth to you, & can now conclude: the history & pattern of our family error. Halfway thro life’s journey & about to become a father, I can now no longer properly despise my own, whoever he was, whyever his neglect of me. I wish only he had vouchsafed me some account—of his motives, his confusions, false starts, illuminations, mixt feelings, successes, failures, final aims, net values – that I might have understood & believed when my mind was ready, however much I had spurn’d it in my younger cynicism. We have tried to help Tecumseh, & fear we have undone him (we shall try again); surely our grandparents did not intend to be Pontiac’s undoing, as my father declared. Whence then my confidence that H.B. IV workt with Little Turtle to undo him, or my grandfather’s confidence that H.B. III workt with the Bloodsworth Island conspirators to undo them? Oh, for an accounting! We have misspent, misspent our powers, Cookes & Burlingames canceling each other out. May we live, Andrée & I, to be the 1st of our line to cancel out ourselves, to the end that you (guided by these letters, which must be your scripture if aught should take us from you) may be the 1st to be spared the necessity!

To sum up: We no longer believe (what my grandparents taught) that Henry Burlingame III was a British agent out to divide the Bloodsworth Islanders (his Ahatchwhoop brother “Bill-o’-the-Goose” and the rest): we believe he meant in good faith to unite them, & fail’d. We do not believe (what my father taught) that my grandparents were British agents out to subvert Pontiac’s conspiracy; we believe they meant to abet it, & fail’d. We no longer believe (what your parents would have taught, this time last year) that Henry Burlingame IV was (is?) an American agent bent on dividing first the Iroquois League & then Little Turtle’s; we believe he workt for their best interests, & fail’d. So we pray you will not believe us to have been in the employ of William Henry Harrison or James Madison against noble Tecumseh: we wisht to aid him, & have so far fail’d.

Father, I forgive you. My life’s 1st half is done: it too I forgive, & the Andrew Cook who lived it, who now must set about its rectification so that you (my Henry, Henrietta), when in years to come you shall have read this long accounting, will have nothing to forgive or be forgiven for.

Envoi. I commenced this letter on 14 May; ’tis now a dozen days since, & still you linger! Andrée is huge, predicts a Gargantua – or, as the sun is now into Gemini…

You will be born into a war: I think no one can now prevent it. I must hope (& try with my life) that no one will “win” it, or all is lost. Andrée & I are pledged now neither to the British nor to the “Americans”—nor, finally, to the Indians – but to division of the large & strong who would exploit the less large, less strong. Thus we are anti-Bonapartists, but not pro-Bourbon; thus, for the nonce, pro-British, but no longer anti-“American.” No hope or point now in destroying the United States; but they must be checkt, contain’d, divided, lest like Gargantua’s their mad growth do the destroying. May this be your work too, when your time comes. Farewell. Do not restart that old reciprocating engine, our history; do not rebel against the me who am rebelling against myself: the father of

Your new-born father,

Andrew Cook IV

~ ~ ~

S: Jerome Bray to Drew Mack. LILYVAC’s LEAFY ANAGRAM.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

May 13, 1969

Andrews F. Mack

c/o Tidewater Foundation

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

Comrade:

St. Elret, patron of cipherers, be with you as with yours truly. Death to Jacobins, usurpers, anti-Bonapartists. The King is dead; long live the 2nd Revolution. Beware Todd Andrews, agent of the pesticide cartel. Excuse our longhand. May we together RESET

Our spring work period here at Lily Dale is at its peak. LILYVAC II is on-line and programmed to capacity. Ditto our comrade associate Ms. Le Fay a.k.a. Merope Bernstein see below at our new base in Chautauqua. Things are buzzing buzzing. We must scratch out this report by hand no time for epistolary printouts but you would be surprised what LILYVAC can RESET

We last met in February at the funeral of H.R.H. your father H.M. II G. III R.I.P. when you questioned us closely as to the practicality not to say the authenticity of LILYVAC’s Novel Revolutionary program RN for which you had twice loyally arranged support from the Tidewater Foundation. At one point you even declared straight out your suspicion that it and we were pure humbird. We do not doubt that you were distracted by your grief we ourself are an orphan have never known our dear parents were raised in the Backwater Wildlife Refuge and RESET

As for us we could scarcely have responded properly to your unexpected though perfectly justified interrogation. It was the last-but-one and deepest month of our winter rest period. Snug as a bag in a rug off-line and dreaming of the revolutionary title NOTES read out by LILYVAC at the midpoint of Year V a.k.a. T a.k.a. 12/21/68 vide infra we could have been roused at all by nothing less momentous than the death of your father the most trusted the most RESET

This letter is to allay your skepticism to report to you personally as we can no longer trust the Tidewater Foundation per se the setbacks and successes of our spring work period and to warn you against the aforementioned T.F. Executive Director T.A. He shall RESET

On Tuesday March 4 Feast of Purim Full Worm Moon we authorized said A to institute certain plagiarism proceedings as part of our general campaign to neutralize anti-Bonapartist counterrevolutionaries. No reply. On April 1 St. Elret’s Day on the eve of LILYVAC’s 1st trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES we took time to write him again confiding the results of our fall work period and our hopes for the spring e.g. our initial concern at LILYVAC’s entitling the project not NOVEL but NOTES our wondering whether therefore we were in Year T rather than Year V see RESET

In the same letter we urged him to reply to ours of 3/4 and move against B whom also we rewarned to make reparation by Doomsday i.e. 6:13 PM PST 4/4 or RESET No RESET We are going to have to reprogram LILYVAC not to RESET

That same Tuesday 4/1 overcast and chilly here in west NY rain in the PM ☾ on Equator ☌♃☾‧☌☾ U.S. to reduce B-52 raids Gas explosions seal Mexican coal mines 145 feared dead Eisenhower funeral train goes to Abilene China convenes 9th National Congress Mao in complete charge Cultural Revolution accomplished 2nd Revolution waiting to be RESET Full of that weary exultation which only true revolutionary lovers can RESET We toasted the moment with cordials of apricot nectar and pushed the Printout button for the 1st trial draft of the RN NOTES a 1 and a 2 give us an N give us an O No no whats this a 1 and a 14 and a 1 and a 7 and an 18 and a 1 and a 13 12 5 1 6 25 et cet exclamation point

I.e., no NOVEL no NOTES but a swarm of numbers exclamation point Merope and we looked into each other’s RESET On and on 13 1 187 1 1256 1 25 then a string of 55’s and 49’s alternating page after page after RESET Not got all the chinks out of the ointment 17 rules for the comma et cet push PUNCT Point No Stop No

? Yes. Check:,!()? OK, OK.

Words cannot describe our dismay, sir, faithful Merope’s and ours. Numbers! Scrambled integers, not even binary! We were still weak: last summer’s gassing, the interruptions of our winter’s rest. The printout went on, reams and quires of single and double digits. We stood by numb, rudderless, like a man-of-war whose T has been crossed. At midnight LILYVAC tapped out a string of 26’s and fell silent. Dialogue. Maybe Doomsday’s early this year, said Merope, and led us to bed.

That was Tuesday. Thursday 4/3 was Maundy Thursday, also Nisan 15 and 1st night of Passover. Description. The sky cleared over Lake Cassadaga; the air was mild along the Niagara Frontier. As we took our constitutional about the grounds of Lily Dale, where a few early spiritualists raked their yards and spruced their cottages for the coming season, we could see clearly atop the hills on the farther shore the low buildings of the Pope John XXIII Retreat. At Merope’s direction, and to distract us from our gloom (the great pile of printout lay still untouched at LILYVAC’s feet), we vowed to put all numbers out of our minds until the Friday, just as LILYVAC avoids all references to, whether by deletion or by artful substitution, e.g. bean for bean. We had searched and destroyed on the Wednesday night all leavened bread in our cottage against the 7 days to come. Now toward sunset she arranged on the Seder tray the 7 symbols: matzo, baked egg, lamb’s bone, haroseth, karpas, hazereth, and fillet of a fenny snake. She lit the 2 candles, filled the 2 wine cups, and bid me begin the 15 stages of the service. We drank our 4 cups of wine, asked and answered the 4 Questions, recited the story of the 70-year bondage of the Israelites, discussed the 10 Plagues and Rabbi Judah’s coding them by their initials; BFL, BMB, HLDF (Blood Frogs Larks, Beasts Murrain Boils, Hail Lilies Darkness 1st-Born-Slaying); we sang the 14 verses of Dayenu and the 10 of An Only Kid; we remarked upon the reckoning of climacteric years in the Hebrew calendar

also its designation of sabbatical and jubilee years, the 7 days of Levitical purifications and of 2 of the 3 major Jewish feasts, the 7 weeks between the 1st and 2nd of the latter, and the 7 years of Nebuchadnezzar’s beasthood and of Jacob’s service with each of his wives; we were reminded of the Hebrew tradition that the 7th son of a 7th son has a special destiny; that God is called by 7 names and created Creation in 7 days; that Solomon had 700 wives and 7 seals, and his temple 7 pillars; that Balaam would have 7 bullocks and 7 rams sacrificed upon his 7 altars; that Naaman was commanded to dip 7 times into the Jordan; that 7 priests with 7 trumpets marched daily for 7 days around the walls of Jericho, and 7 times on the 7th day; that Pharaoh dreamed of 7 kine and 7 ears of corn; that Samson’s wedding feast lasted 7 days, on the 7th of which he told Delilah the secret of his strength, whereupon she bound him with 7 withes and shore him of 7 locks of hair; that Salome danced with 7 veils. That Mary Magdalene was exorcised of 7 devils. Dialogue. Never mind the goyishe stuff, Merope protested, before I could mention the 7 deadly sins and cardinal virtues and gifts of the Holy Ghost and Champions of Christendom and years of their ordeals and joys of Mary and sorrows of RESET Sayings on the cross holy angels churches of Asia parts of the Lord’s Prayer, also the candlesticks stars trumpets spirits horns vials plagues monster-heads and lamb-eyes in the Book of Revelations. Back to the Hebes, then: that their very verb to swear means to come under the influence of 7 things; and that the Torah itself, according to one Kabbalistical tradition, had been a heptateuch before it was a pentateuch, 1 of its books having disappeared entirely and another shrunk to 2 verses (#35 and #36) in the 10th chapter of the Book of Numbers.

Dialogue. Next year in Jerusalem! You know, said Merope, that reminds me of LILYVAC’s printout. Oh? All those numbers. Ah. Remember back in Year O, she went on, 1967/68, when we programmed LILYVAC II with Thompson’s Motif-Index to Folk-Literature plus the fiction stacks of Lily Dale’s Marion Skidmore Library plus Masterplots plus Monarch Notes and like that? Yes. Plus everything we could think of that comes in 5’s, such as the fingers, toes, senses, and wits of Homo sapiens, the feet of pentametric verse and Dr. Eliot’s shelf of classics, the tones of pentatonic music, the great books and blessings of China, the bloods of Ireland, the (original) Nations of the (noble) Iroquois, the divisions of the British Empire, the books of the Pentateuch, the weekdays of the week, the vowels of the alphabet, the ages of man, the months of Odysseus’s last voyage as retold by Dante, the stories framed by Scheherazade’s Tales of the Porter and the 3 Ladies of Baghdad, and a few non-serial odds and ends such as quincunx, pentagon, quintile, pentacle, quinquennium, quintuplet, and E-string, inasmuch as NOVEL is a 5-letter word and our plan is a 5-year plan? Yes. Well: remember back there in all that fiction a tale by E. A. Poe called The Gold Bird 1843 in which William Legrand finds a message spelled out in numbers and deciphers it from the hypothesis that if the numbers stand for letters and the coded message is in English then the most frequently recurring number probably stands for the 5th letter of our alphabet E et cetera and he drops the bird through the eye of a skull that he finds on the 7th limb of a tree I forget why and it leads him to Captain Kidd’s treasure I forget how? Gee whiz, Merope, are you suggesting dot dot dot? Yes, well, we Jews, you see, are Hebrew? And our alphabet, like the Greek, served in olden times for counting as well as for spelling out words? So when an old-time Jew looked at words on a page he also saw a string of numbers? So it’s not surprising that among the mystical traditions associated with the books of the Kabbalah, a Hebrew word meaning “tradition,” is the tradition of Gematria, the manipulation of the numerical equivalents of the letters? Et cetera. Hum, we expostulated, by gosh Merope, we believe that you have found the hidden matzo, the Afikomen in the ointment, the nigger in the woodpile that is the key to the treasure. Grace. Hallel. Accepted.

Narrative. That day we reclined no more. We now pass over our night-long ardor in the workroom among those sheaves of numbers, every one of which, aha, was under 27 except the 55’s and 49’s – no problem there, 5 5 is the letters of our NOTES and the years of our plan, and 4 from 9 is 5, right, E, our prime letter and the year to come. But it were too much to expect a 1-to-l correspondence (1 to 1 = A to A, a mere tautology; we gave it a go anyhow, why not; the 1st dozen letters came out MARGANAYFAEL, forget it).

Thus the Thursday. Next day, Friday, 4/4, St. Ambrose’s Day, beware him, Comrade, Reg Prinz too, they will RESET Good Friday for the Christians Day of Adam’s creation for the Mohammedans 2nd of Pesach for Merope and 3 of her comrades who now swarmed in from their colleges and communes Canada to reduce NATO forces Looting and rioting in Chicago after M. L. King memorial service Doomsday RESET Understandably her young friends did not at 1st quite trust ourself despite Merope’s assuring them that under our cape we were not the creepy WISP we might appear but a sort of 3rd Worlder plus a bona fide 2nd Revolutionary, 3 plus 2 = et cetera. Dialogue. Come off it. Narrative. But we were patient, and altogether too preoccupied with the search for a base-5 key to the cipher to share our Merope’s distress at their youthful jibes. 5 5 5 5 5: we suggested to LILYVAC that the key to those numbers was that number; at 6:13 PM PST (9:13 at our meridian) we all gathered round for the 1st 5 trial translations of the NOTES numbers into letters (i.e., 1 = A, 2 = A, 3 = A, etc.). Ourself held Merope by the fingers of her hand; Rodriguez-from-CCNY held the other; on my right black Thelma and her lover Irving from Fort Erie smoked cannabis. 1: MARGANAYFAEL, then nonsense; 2 ditto; also 3 4 5. Fooey, said Merope. Inverse order of frequency, then: 1 =E et cet.? MARGANAYFAEL + nonsense. Sheesh, said Merope. Inverse order of frequency: 26 = E et cet.? It is written in the Zohar, offered Rodriguez, that just as the initial letter Aleph is the male principle and proclaims the unity of G_d, so the 2nd letter, Beth, is female; together they postulate the alphabet, alpha plus beta, get it? But B is the instrument of creation, the mother of letters and of the world Amen.

Wow, said Merope: Let’s try that, Jerry. Hum, well, OK, here goes: MARGANAYFAEL + nonsense.

Elsewhere in the Zohar, vouchsafed Thelma, or is it the Sepher Yetzirah, it says how Yodh, the 1st letter of the Tetragrammaton, is the Father, He the mother, Vau (W) the Son, and the 2nd He the Daughter? Also how Yesod is the sacred phallus and Zion the sacred yoni? Try them ones.

Right on, said Merope. Hum, well, OK, here goes: MARGANAYFAEL. Your turn, Irv. I’m a Catholic myself, confessed Irving, but Mister Horner over at the Farm, who sends his regards, showed me an old-time hornbook in which was written AEIOU His Great Name doth spell; Here it is known, but is not known in Hell. Play that on your calliope.

MARGANAYRESET Margana y who? inquired Rodriguez. You’re cute, you are, Merope volunteered. They chatted on, the 4, of other traditions from the Kabbalah, explaining to Irv that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet had originally refused to submit to the spelling out of a Torah which dealt in commandments and prohibitions; that just as the primordial universe of the Greeks was a Chaos of atoms which later formed themselves into the Cosmos, so the primordial Torah was a jumble of letters which arranged themselves into words and sentences only as the events they set forth came to pass; that at the Diaspora the letters of the Holy Name were separated, male from female, like YHWH from the Shekinah. Matthew Arnold somewhere remarks, rejoined Irv, that God puts a heap of letters into each man’s hand, for him to make what word he will. They went out then to stroll in the balmy PM, leaving ourself alone to brood upon our scrambled NOTES as Maimonides affirms that the Holy One (Blessed be He!) before Creation was alone with the letters of His name.

Holy Saturday ☌♆☾ 4/5! Nixon intensifies secret Viet negotiations Antiwar march in NYC USSR presses criticism of Tito and Czechs 25,000,00 °Chinese being sent to farms from cities Man goes berserk on Pa. Turnpike kills 3 + self Dante & Virgil finish descent through Hell Danton guillotined 4th Lord Baltimore dies! Thelma, Irving, and Rodriguez planned to spend the weekend secretly filling the water coolers in the Buffalo offices of certain large industrial corporations with polluted Lake Erie water; they urged Margana to leave me behind to crank out more mishmash with my big dumb toy and come with them. She hesitated loyally a moment before saying yes. Dialogue. What’s this Margana, she inquired. Why, chortled Thelma, ’tis short for Margana le Fay, like LILYVAC say. Tut and fie, suggested Merope: if I am Margana le Fay, then Jerome is Merlin. Arthur, Arthur! teased Rodriguez. We urged them, if they craved a holiday from the serious work of finding the key that will turn LILYVAC’s numbers into revolutionary letters, to devote their youthful energies while in Buffalo to the neutralization of that “Author” who mimics ourself as the wily Schizura unicornis mimes, not the flawless hickory leaf (never found in fact), but, flawlessly, the flawed and bitten truth of real hickory leaves. What in the name of crucified Christ is he talking about? cheerfully interrogated Irving. O that’s J, Merope reassured them: any reference to B and he’s off. You ask me, Thelma said, he’s out of his motherfucking carton. I propose, proposed Rodriguez, that we leave him alone with his jumbled letters, as Maimonides and the pre-Zoharic Jewish mystics maintain that YHWH RESET Merope smartly reminded them that we had fought the good fight against DDT and were still to some degree a casualty of that battle, hence our twitches, but it was her conviction that each must make the Revolution in his/her own way, Don’t Bog Thy Neighbor et cet. And she kissed us good-bye on the cheek and said Hasta la vista Pops Don’t forget to feed the goats Ta-ta, and Irving joshed Feed them the numbers, man, and Thelma enounced Some eats um some plays um hee hee.

Hum. Off they went in our faithful VW blank, leaving us alone with our RESET They were gone 2 weeks, I began to wonder, Dante climbed Mount Purgatory said good-bye to Virgil and ascended to the Earthly Paradise, Jesus rose from the dead, Cain was born, Abel slain, Passover ended, Napoleon abdicated, Lincoln was shot, the Titanic sank, Sirhan RESET Paul Revere rode, we tried key after ditto after same: MARGANAYFAEL. Where was our Merope?

Despair, Comrade Mack. When on the 19th they returned after all to Lily Dale to celebrate the 194th anniversary of the 1st American Revolution, i.e., the skirmish at the Old North Bridge in Concord and the battle of Lexington Snow on the ground U.S. fleet heads for Korea patrol Blacks seize Cornell Student Union – we tearfully embraced our Merope’s proffered cheek and declared: Dialogue. My dear, our scrambled NOTES are turned to stone. Hoo, exclaimed Thelma, we stoned too. Jeez, marveled Irving, he really is still at it. I have something painful and difficult to tell you, Jerome, declared Merope. Cool it, Marg, suggested Rodriguez, he’ll learn it himself soon enough. Did you bring us a surprise, we inquired of the smiling youthful 4some. Sort of, teased Irving: like, we checked that hornbook business up at the Farm, OK? And this cat Morgan that’s up there these days, that’s got all kind of smarts? He told us how AEIOU is an anagram for IEOUA, dig? Which is sort of a nonconsonantal counterpart, if you follow me, to the vowelless Tetragrammaton YHWH, a.k.a. Jehovah, get it? It was further suggested by Monsieur Casteene, added Rodriguez, who I must say has got a proper Yiddishe Kopf on his shoulders if I ever saw one, that the so-called “Faithful Shepherd” book of the Zohar declares, Not as I am written [i.e., YHWH] am I read. Casteene feels this to be an allusion to – he had better said a vindication of – the Kabbalistical practices of Notarikon and Themurah, which with the aforementioned Gematria comprise the 3 principal approaches of the Kabbalists to Scripture-regarded-as-cipher. Gematria, you will recall, is the search for meaning in the numerical values of the letters: thus MARGANA, for example, has a value of 55 (13 +1 + 18 + 7 + 1 + 14 + 1), and LE FAY, a.k.a. YFAEL, 49. Thus far Casteene, with whom we young 4 agree that Notarikon is unlikely to be of help to you: it consists of regarding the letters of a word as an acrostic for a sentence or vice versa (e.g. the closing paragraph of V. Nabokov’s story The Vane Sisters, which also mentions en passant the Fox sisters of Lily Dale: The narrator, puzzling over his dream of the 2 dead sisters Cynthia and Sybil, writes: I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies – every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost. He does not see what your adept of Notarikon perceives at once, the teasing message from the sisters spelled out by the initial letters of those words. But I digress, like an old-time epistolary novel by 7 fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual). MARGANAYFAEL and the rest not being words, no acrostic can be legitimately extracted, and to regard the whole printout as itself the acrostic for a much larger text – that were madness, no? No, it strikes us that Themurah, which is to say anagrammatical transposition, is the key to the treasure, Jerome old sport: a key 1st hit upon by good Thelma here when she turn YFAEL into LE FAY, and echoed by your scrambling of NOTES into stone. What you have here, friend, what your LILYVAC hath wrought, is a leafy anagram of monstrous proportions, beside which the runes scribbled on the Sibyl’s oak leaves and scattered by the wind in Virgil’s Aeneid were no tougher than an acorn to crack than the Sunday crossword. To it, old man, to it! Steer terse RESET through that dense foliage till that thou comest to the golden bough or flawless hickory leaf never found in fact but RESET Only grasp it and RESET Meanwhile we got other fish to fry, unfinished business as it were, ha ha, Margana too, how you gonna keep a chick down in Paree after she’s seen that Farm. We all off to Chautauqua where the action is.

End monologue Dialogue Thus crumbleth the matzo ball, Jer, said Merope/Margana tenderly: Each must revolt in his/her own RESET I’ll stop by de vez en cuando to do a leaf or two with you. St. Elret smile upon you, Irving intoned, and upon your leafy anagram Amen Bye.

Exposition complication climax dénouement. Comrade Mack, we are ready. That was 3 weeks 3 days ago. Since then Daylight Saving Time has begun, de Gaulle has lost his referendum and retired, the Bounty crew has mutinied, General Proctor and Tecumseh have besieged Fort Meigs, Mayday Mayday, Louis XVII has been restored to the throne of France, and Napoleon has given out the fiction of his death on St. Helena, vive le RESET Peter Minuit has bought Manhattan, and LILYVAC and we, vouchsafed this astonishing illumination from Comrades Rodriguez Thelma and Irving, blessed and inspired by Merope/Margana who drops us the odd wish you were here from Chautauqua Institution or the Remobilization Farm where she is making the Revolution in her own RESET Alone here with the letters of our amen we have found the treasure; we have found the lock; nothing is wanting save the key for LILYVAC’s unscrambling of the LEAFY ANAGRAM. And while funding is available to us from many sources, the voice of History tells us to RESET This is the final battle On Wisconsin Off the pigs Hail to the chief O say can you see any bedbirds on me Today is Tuesday the 13th Jamestown founded U.S. declares war on Mexico Riots at SUNY/Stony Brook Arson at Brooklyn College Nixon urges draft reform Sunny and mild here in Lily Dale then cloudy and showers We are floating like a butterfat stinging like a key to the RESET Complimentary close Hold on just an adjective minute A modest supplementary grant, Comrade, from the Tidewater Foundation or perhaps from the legacy of His Majesty your father if his will has been done would surely do to work the last remaining monkey wrenches out of the ointment of this flawed leafy RESET Next thing we know it will write in longhand and even fill in the blanks in its own armor like a simile Having a wonderful time wish you were RESET 10 2 2

H: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. A reflection upon History. His defeat by the Director at Ocean City: an Unwritable Sequence. Magda celebrates a certain anniversary.

The Lighthouse, etc.

Erdmann’s Cornlot, etc.

May 12, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Whom etc.

TO:

Yours Truly, Author of

RE:

Your message to me of May 12, 1940

Madam or Sir:

History is a code which, laboriously and at ruinous cost, deciphers into HISTORY. She is a scattered sibyl whose oak-leaf oracles we toil to recollect, only to spell out something less than nothing: e.g., WHOL TRUTH, or ULTIMATE MEANIN.

Item: On the bumper of the car next to mine in the hotel parking lot in Ocean City this morning, a sticker reading, in large capitals, BUMPER STICKER. This evening at the Lighthouse, on the rear of Peter’s pickup, another, put there by the twins, declaring in ever diminishing type:

THE CLOSER YOU GET THE LESS YOU SEE

Item: My attempt to reenact in Ocean City this morning what I am only now and here enacting: this latest reply to your letter of etc. 29 years ago today – when, as now, Saturn was on the farther shore of Pisces, leaving the water signs for another revolution of the zodiac – on the beach below Willy Erdmann’s Cornlot I received your water message, the sense of which perhaps only now I begin to see. Zeus knows I have been bone-tired before: wrung out, hung over, down. But never heretofore all these and almost 40 too, my life’s first half wound past its terminating ticks, no key in hand yet to rewind me for the second. Only some portents that, if one does not look to’t, biography like history may reenact itself as farce.

Amazing, this A.M.‘s business on the beach! To have wrestled all night with Prinz’s damned scenario; to have found after all the words that might make the wordless happen; then to be shown—so roughly, publicly, instantly, and incontrovertibly! – their irrelevance… We’ve lost a battle, Ma’am or Sir, in what till now I’d not understood to be a war. That P. is a genius (at improvisation, at least: a master of the situational moment) merely surprises me: I’d thought him able at his trade; now I believe him to be a genuine virtuoso. What shocks is the revelation of his absolute enmity: the man contemns, the man despises me!

Is it less or more distressing that his contempt is not even particularly personal? I ought to find it amusing that he’s out to get, not Ambrose-Mensch-the-oddball-in-the-tower, but “Arthur Morton King,” whom in his antiliteracy he mistakes for an embodiment of the written word as against the visual image; of Letters versus Pictures! Does he not see that what he’s acting out is a travesty of my own running warfare against the province of Literature? That we are comrades, allies, brothers?

Of course he sees – with the wrongheaded clear-sightedness of Drew Mack, who lumps stock liberals like Todd Andrews with reactionaries like A. B. Cook. And it “proves” P.’s point, I suppose, that in the face of his blank hostility I see my own dispute with letters to have been a lovers’ quarrel. Sweet Short Story! Noble Novel! Precious squiggles on the pristine page! Dear Germaine.

Your old letter, then, Ms. or Mr. Truly – that blank space which in my apprenticeship I toiled to fill, and toward which like a collapsing star I’d felt my latter work returning – was it after all a call to arms? Left to right, left, right, like files of troops the little heroes march: lead-footed L; twin top-heavy T’s flanked by eager E’s, arms ever ready; rear-facing R; sinuous S – valiant fellows, so few and yet so many, with whose aid we can say the unseeable! That green house is brown. Sun so hot I froze to death. History is a code which, laboriously and at ruinous cost, deciphers into etc. Little comrades, we will have our revenge! Good Yours, I have never been more concerned!