Letters (11 page)

On with the story.

March 16, 1969

Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst?):

Not many invitations could please me more, ordinarily, than yours of March 8. Much obliged, indeed.

By coincidence, however, I accepted in February a similar invitation from the main campus of the State University at College Park (it seems to be my year down there), and I feel that two degrees in the same June from the same Border State would border upon redundancy. So I decline, with thanks, and trust that the ominous matters you allude to in your remarkable postscript can be forestalled in some other wise.

Why not award the thing to our mutual acquaintance Ambrose Mensch? He’s an honorable, deserving oddball and a bona fide avant-gardist, whose “career” I’ve followed with interest and sympathy. A true “doctor of letters” (in the Johns Hopkins Medical School sense), he is a tinkerer, an experimenter, a slightly astigmatic visionary, perhaps even a revolutionizer of cures—and patient Literature, as your letter acknowledges, if not terminal, is not as young as she used to be either.

Cordially,

P.S.: “I have made this longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter”: Pascal,
Letters provinciates,
XVI. Perhaps Mme de Staël was paraphrasing Pascal?

P.P.S.: Do the French not customarily serve the salad
after
the entrée?

March 23, 1969

Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst):

Ever since your letter of March 8, I have been bemused by two coincidences (if that is the word) embodied in it, of a more vertiginous order than the simple coincidence of the College Park invitation, which I had already accepted, and yours from Marshyhope, which I felt obliged therefore to decline in my letter to you of last Sunday.

The first coincidence is that, some months before the
earlier
invitation—last year, in fact, when I began making notes toward a new novel—I had envisioned just such an invitation to one of its principal characters. Indeed, an early note for the project (undated, but from mid-1968) reads as follows:

Then arrived in the post the College Park invitation in February and yours in March. I was spooked more by the second than the first, since it came not only from another Maryland university, but from—well, consider this other notebook entry, under the heading “Plot A: Lady____ & the Litt.D.”:

This circa September 1968. Then, two weeks ago, your letter, with its extraordinary postscript…

Hence my bemusement. For autobiographical “fiction” I have only disdain; but what’s involved here strikes me less as autobiography than as a muddling of the distinction between Art and Life, a boundary as historically notorious as Mason and Dixon’s line. That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history—disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favor of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a détente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover.

So, my dear Lady Amherst: this letter—my second to you, ninth in the old
New England Primer
—is an
In-vi-ta-ti-on
which, whether or not you see fit to accept it, I pray you will entertain as considerately as I hope I entertained yours of the 8th instant: Will you consent to be A Character in My Novel? That is, may I—in the manner of novelists back in the heroic period of the genre—make use of my imagination of you (and whatever information about yourself it may suit your discretion to provide in response to certain questions I have in mind to ask you) to “flesh out” that character aforenoted? Just as you, from
my
side of this funhouse mirror, seem to have plagiarized my imagination in your actual life story…

The request is irregular. For me it is unprecedented—though for all I know it may be routine to an erstwhile friend of Wells, Joyce, Huxley. What I’d like to know is more about your history; your connection with those eminent folk; that “fall” you allude to in your postscript, from such connection to your present circumstances at MSUC; even (as a “lifelong mistress of the arts” you will surely understand) more delicate matters. If I’m going to break another lance with Realism, I mean to go the whole way.

I am tempted to make your acquaintance directly, prevailing upon our mutual friend to do the honors; I’d meant to pay a visit to Dorchester anyhow in June, from College Park. But I recall and understand Henry James’s disinclination to hear
too much
of an anecdote the heart of which he recognized as a potential story. Moreover, in keeping with my (still vague) notion of the project, I should prefer that our connection be not only strictly verbal, but epistolary. Cf. James’s notebook exclamation: “The correspondences! The correspondences!”

Here’s what I can tell you of that project. For as long as I can remember I’ve been enamored of the old tale-cycles, especially of the frame-tale sort:
The Ocean of Story, The Thousand and One Nights,
the
Pent-, Hept-,
and
Decamerons.
With the help of a research assistant I recently reviewed the corpus of frame-tale literature to see what I could learn from it, and started making notes toward a frame-tale novel. By 1968 I’d decided to use documents instead of told stories: texts-within-texts instead of tales-within-tales. Rereading the early English novelists, I was impressed with their characteristic awareness that they’re
writing
—that their fictions exist in the form, not of sounds in the ear, but of signs on the page, imitative not of life “directly,” but of its documents—and I considered marrying one venerable narrative tradition to another: the frame-tale and the “documentary” novel. By this time last year I had in mind “an open (love) letter to Whom It May Concern, from Yours Truly.” By April, as grist for what final mill I was still by no means certain; I had half a workbookful of specific formal notes and “incidental felicities”: e.g., “Bit #46,” from Canto XVIII of Dante’s
Paradiso:
the choirs of the blessed, like sailors in formation on an aircraft-carrier deck or bandsmen at halftime in an American football match, spell out with themselves on the billboard of Heaven DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM (“Love justice, [ye] who judge [on] earth”); or #47, an old English hornbook riddle in the Kabbalistic tradition of the Holy Unspeakable Name of God: “AEIOU His Great Name doth Spell;/Here it is known, but is not known in Hell.”

I could go on, and won’t. “The correspondences!” I was ready to begin. All I lacked were—well, characters, theme, plot, action, diction, scene, and format; in short, a story, a way to tell it, and a voice to tell it in!

Now I have a story, at least in rough prospectus, precipitated by this pair of queer coincidences. Or if not a story in Henry James’s sense, at least a narrative method in Scheherazade’s.

But it is unwise to speak much of plans still tentative. Will you be my “Lady A,” my heroine, my creation?

And permit
me
the honor of being, as in better-lettered times gone by, your faithful

5 April 1969

Mr John Barth, Esq.
Dept of English, Annex B
SUNY/Buffalo

Dear Mr B.:

No!

I am
not
Literature! I am
not
the Great Tradition! I am
not
the aging Muse of the Realistic Novel! I am not

GGP(A)/ss

12 April 1969

Dear Mr B.:

On the 22nd of this month I shall turn… forty-five. Germaine de Staël, at that age, had borne four children—one by her husband, two by her lover Narbonne, one by her lover Benjamin Constant—and was about to conceive her fifth and last, by a coarse young fellow half her age, whom her son Auguste (almost his coeval) called Caliban. The child, imbecilic last fruit of middle-aged passion, fatigue, and opium, would be named Giles, attributed to fictitious parents (Theodore Giles of Boston and Harriette, née Preston), and regarded jokingly by the household as a native American… But Germaine herself much admired Americans; spoke of them on her deathbed as
“l’avant-garde du genre humain, l’avenir du monde”;
was in correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris about moving to her property in Leroysville, New York, to escape Napoleon—and herself nicknamed her idiot child by her peasant lover
Petit Nous:
“Little Us”…

We British are great stoics; we French, famously unsentimental. But I cannot reflect on these things dry-eyed. I have no children (and no novels, and no estates), but my years have been hardly less vicissitudinous than my namesake’s; more so than anyone supposes; more so than I myself can believe. In our place and time a woman my age may expect, for better or worse, three or four decades yet to live; in this country especially, she may look and dress half her age, play tennis daily, dance all night, take lovers and the Pill…

Today, sir, I am very tired; those decades to come weigh me down like a heavy sentence. Today I could wish to be a middle-aged widow of the lower class in a Mediterranean village: already wrinkled, fallen-breasted, gone in the teeth, dressed in black, supernumerary, waiting to die.

Well.

Your letter to me of 16 March, declining our honorary degree, was cordial, if disappointing and problematical (the matter is far from resolved). Your follow-up letter of the 23rd was similarly cordial but, at least as I then regarded it, impertinent; hence my peremptory no of Saturday last. My reasons were several, over and above the vexing problem of thwarting John Schott and A. B. Cook; but I was in no humour just then to set them forth. I shall do so now.

In latter March (as promised in my initial letter), I read your
Floating Opera
novel, having been introduced earlier by Ambrose Mensch to the alleged original of your character Todd Andrews. I enjoyed the story—the first novel of an ambitious young man—but I felt a familiar uneasiness about the fictive life of real people and the factual life of “fictional” characters—familiar because, as I’m sure I have intimated, I’ve “been there before.” I could not look forward to being there again: yet again more or less artfully misportrayed for purposes not my own, however commendable; yet again “immortalised” like the victims of Medusa or the candid cameraman: picking their noses, scratching their backsides. Too, there was to be considered the fallen state of Literature, in particular of the Novel, most especially of trade fiction publishing in your country, as I learn about it from Ambrose Mensch. No, no, it was an impertinence, your suggestion that I offer my life for your literary inspection, as women used to offer their handbags for Isaac Babel’s!

A life, at that, lately turned ’round such sharp, improbable corners (even in the little space between my first letter and your reply) that I can scarcely recognise it any longer as my own, far less understand or rationally approve it. For Mme de Staël—I think for history generally—April truly
is
the cruellest month, as my old friend and fellow cat-lover once wrote: the tumultuous month when Cain slew Abel, when Jesus (and Dante) descended into Hell; when Shakespeare and Cervantes an Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. (and Germaine de Staël’s beloved father) all died; when the
Titanic
sank and the American Revolution began and Napoleon abdicated and the crew of the H.M.S.
Bounty
mutinied and all the black slaves in New York rebelled; when both ill-starred Germaines (and
“Petit Nous”)
were born; and when, in 1794, that other, better Germaine wrote despairingly from Coppet to her lover Narbonne in England: “Apparently, everything I believed I meant to you was a dream, and only my letters are real…”