by John Barth
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
Author
N: Lady Amherst to the Author. Rejecting his counterinvitation.
Office of the Provost
Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
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
Yours,
Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost
GGP(A)/ss
O: Lady Amherst to the Author. Reconsidering.
Office of the Provost
Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
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…”
I am distraught, as even my penmanship attests. You found disconcerting, you say, certain “spooky” coincidences between my first letter to you and your notes toward a new novel. I find disconcerting, even alarming, some half-prophetic correspondences between your reply and the course of my current life: so much so that I am led (yet another manifestation of early middle-aged foolishness, no doubt) seriously to reconsider your proposal, or proposition. I have much to tell, no one to tell it to…
But you must swear to me, by the Muse we both honour, that you are not nor have lately been in communication with Ambrose Mensch, as he has sworn to me he is not with you. Can you, sir, will you so swear? To
Yours sincerely,
Germaine Pitt
24 L Street
Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612
L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Confessing her latest love affair and the excesses of its current stage.
24 L Street
Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612
19 April 1969
My dear B.,
L Street and its companions—five long vowelled avenues crosshatched through sand and weeds by a score of short consonantal streets—comprise what is euphemistically called, by its “developers,” the residential “development” of a large corn and tomato field belonging to Mack Enterprises, Inc. Lying athwart an ever shallower winding creek midway between Cambridge and Redmans Neck, at the vertiginous “Heights” of five to seven feet above mean low water, it consists presently of the low-rise brick apartment house at 24 L—tenanted by new MSUC faculty, married graduate students, and (as of a few weeks ago) myself—and three prefabricated “model homes,” unoccupied. The rest is scrub pine, weedy drainage ditches, wooden temporary street signs, and advertising brochures. Mrs Jane Mack, whose backward brainchild Dorset Heights is, confidently expects the burgeoning of Marshyhope U., and the consequent demand for low-cost housing in its proximity, to turn this paper polis into a town half the size of Cambridge by 1976 and to swell her already distended fortune: the capital for its next phase of construction she has borrowed against her expectation of a settlement in her favour, rather than her children’s, of her late husband’s disputed estate.
Jane and I have, you see, since Harrison Mack’s death, become—rather, rebecome—friends: more or less, and faute de mieux, and warily at that. The woman is civilised. She is uncommonly handsome for her sixty-some years; could almost pass for my coeval. She is very consciously in that line of shrewd Baltimoriennes fatefully attractive to European nobility: Betsy Patterson, Wallis Warfield Simpson… We depend, lightly, upon each other’s society here in the depths of Dorset Heights (she drops in for a chat at my pied-à-marais; I am no longer non grata at Tidewater Farms), and this little dependency itself depends on Jane’s truly remarkable capacity for repressing disagreeable history. If she remembers my late connexion with poor Harrison, for example, or her earlier, less decorous one with my late husband (my small resentment whereat I had long since put by), she gives no sign of it. But her memory for property values, tax assessments, deed transfers, and common stock quotations is photographic! And the Yankee genius for commercial exploitation has flowered full in her since middle age: in those cool grey eyes there is no such thing as “the land”: what the soldier sees as terrain, the artist as landscape, the ecologist as matrix and theatre of natural processes, Jane sees, just as reflexively, as real estate to be developed, or otherwise turned to financial account. About history, tradition, she is utterly unsentimental, except as they might enhance the market value of real property. Such concerns as social equity or the preservation of “undeveloped” environments for their own sake she sincerely regards as madness.
Thus Dorset Heights. Thus L Street (she has offered me a stipend, as a “resource person,” to devise “appropriate” names for her alphabetic streets: a notion I thought echt mid-20th-Century American until Ambrose informed me that Back Bay Boston was so laid out in the 19th, on fenland drained and filled by Jane’s spiritual ancestors). And thus #24, where I write this, half appalled, half envious—“tuning my piano,” as your Todd Andrews puts it: waiting only, in order to begin the real substance of this letter, for your assurance that you and Ambrose have not lately been in touch; deciding not to wait after all (What would it matter? Have I not begun confiding already?); wondering really only where properly to begin, and why, and why not.
Yours of the 13th in hand, sir, accepting with polite apologies my rejection of your proposal. A gentlemanly note, for which thanks. Whether I should trust you, there is no way for me to know; but I feel strongly (a familiar, ambivalent feeling) that I shall, in any case. Last week I read your second novel, The End of the Road: a chilling read withal. Whatever its literary merits, it came obviously as something of a personal revelation to me (as did your first) concerning those several of its characters among whom I dwell: the people we are calling John Schott, Harry Carter, especially poor tragical Joe Morgan, and above all poor pathetical dead Rennie Morgan—with whose heartless exploitation, at least, I readily empathise. I am full of loathing for your narrator Jacob Horner (not only nature abhors a vacuum), who puts me disquietingly in mind of certain traits of my friend A.M., as well as of—
May I ask whether your Remobilisation Farm and its black quack guru were based on anything factual? And whether your “Joe Morgan” has been heard from lately?
Never mind, of course; I know how meaningless such queries are. And I quite understand and sympathise with Horner’s inability to account for his submissive connexion to the Doctor, for I have much the same feeling with respect to my own (uncharacteristic!) submission, both to your request for the Story of My Life and to a man to whom I cannot imagine myself being more than civil this time last year.
I mean, as you will have guessed, Ambrose Mensch: my colleague; my junior by half a dozen years, as he voluptuously reminds me; my ally against Schott and Carter in the Great Litt.D. Affair; my friend of the past few months, since the death of Harrison Mack—and, since Thursday, March 20 last, my lover.
Begun, then!
And where it will end, deponent knoweth not, only feareth. What Ambrose makes of me is plain enough and scarcely flattering, despite his assurances that (reversing the order of your own interests) my person attracted him first, my “symbolic potential” only later. What to make of him I do not know, nor how much of his past and present you’re acquainted with. Like the pallid Tityrus of André Gide’s Marshlands novel, which Ambrose has not read, he lives a near-hermit life in a sort of tower on the Choptank shore—a tower he has converted into a huge camera obscura! An “expert amateur of life,” he calls himself; an “aspirant to honorary membership in humankind.” In that sinking tower my lover measures the stars with a homemade astrolabe, inventing new constellations; he examines bemused beneath a microscope his swarming semen, giving names to (and odds on) individual spermatozoa in their blind and general race. He savours a tepid ménage à trois of many years’ languishing with the soulful East Italian wife of his stolid stonemason older brother (“two Krauts with garlic dressing”); he awaits with mild interest the turning cancerous of a port-wine birthmark on his brow—allegedly bee-shaped, but I see in its outline no more Apis mellifica than I see the initials AMK (for Arthur Mo
rton King, his nom de plume) he claims to find in the constellations Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Perseus. (Admittedly I can’t see Perseus and company there either, only a blinking bunch of stars.) He writes me “love letters” in the form of postscripts to an anonymous Yours Truly, from whom he claims once to have received a blank message in a bottle, and posts them on the Choptank tides (I get photocopies by the regular mail). His notion of wooing is to regale me with accounts of his previous love affairs, to the number of five—a number even less remarkable in that three were with the same woman (that Abruzzesa aforementioned) and two of those all but sexless.
Indeed, on the evidence of these “letters” and what I’d gathered of his life, I would have judged the man probably impotent, certainly no candidate for loverhood. Not in my book, any road, though God knows I’ve loved some odd ones, H.M. II (R.I.P.) not least among them. With that affair, such as it was, I was only just done; I wasn’t ready for another of any sort. Moreover, my taste has ever been for older men, make of it what you will: considerably older men, who’ve made some mark in the world. I’ve no time for nobodies, never have had; were our Tityrus as glamorous as a cinema star (he isn’t), I’d not have been interested in his clownish propositions.
So I thought, so I thought—and I thought wrong. My lover is most decidedly not impotent, only regressive and a bit reclusive. Like myself (I now realise, having paid scant attention to such things hitherto) he goes easily for considerable intervals without sexual connexion; then he sets about it as if the thing were just invented, or like a camel tanking up till the next oasis. I like him altogether better as a friend—so I told him frankly when he followed up his first “love letter” with an imperious visit to my office, pressing through Miss Stickles’s defences like Napoleon back from Elba. That tidewater Tuileries once attained, he plied his suit so ardently I almost thought he meant a rape, and was anxious less for my “honour” (he had no weapon, and I am not helpless) than, believe it or not, for the integrity of our ad hoc nominating committee for the Litt.D.: an integrity already vulnerable for our having become personal friends.