John Barth - Final Fridays

3. the third sense of “letters,” Literature: dear dwindling diversion, sometimes made of letters made of letters by men and women of letters, its measureless inventory of passions, situations, speculations, flights of fancy, heartbreaks/ha-ha’s/ho-hums all ultimately reducible to a couple-dozen squiggles of ink on paper.

“Work all of this in,” I instructed my muse, “in a certain arrangement of eighty-eight epistles from seven correspondents over seven months of the seventh year before Seventeen Seventy-Six’s two hundredth anniversary — and have the thing ready for publication by that date, okay?”

She obliged, except in that final particular. “I’m not a demand feeder,” she reminded me, and took her own sweet time lactating LETTERS : seven years, appropriately, from the first work-notes to the novel’s first publication in 1979, by when the Bicentennial was yesterday’s newspaper and an even meaner decade waited in the wings. Six books later, as in 1994 I write this foreword letter by letter (never since unaware, at least subliminally, of every l, e, t, t, e, r, & s I scrawl), LETTERS is the fit midpoint of my bibliography, perhaps of the road of my life as well.

I like that, and am gratified to see the old girl here second-cycled into print.

Sabbatical: A Romance , written between 1978 and 1981 after my seven-year involvement with the novel LETTERS , was indeed a sabbatical from that extended, intricated labor. The project’s original working title was Sex Education and Sabbatical ; I had in mind an odd Siamese twin of a book comprising a fantastical playscript (about a postmodern romance between a skeptical spermatozoon and a comparably wary ovum) followed by a realistical novel involving a middle-aged male Homo sapiens , recently retired from the CIA, and his somewhat younger professorial wife, newly pregnant with, perhaps, the consummation of that playscript romance — which she may decide to abort. For better or worse, as happens with a fair percentage of twin pregnancies, the weaker sibling expired in utero (to be resurrected, more or less, in The Tidewater Tales: A Novel [1987]). The survivor is the work in hand, narrated from a viewpoint that I believe myself to have invented: the first-person-duple voice of a well-coupled couple.

The story was suggested by the curious death in Chesapeake Bay, my home waters, of one Mr. John Arthur Paisley, an early-retired high-ranking operative of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who, in late September 1978, disappeared from his sloop Brillig during an overnight solo cruise in fair weather on this normally tranquil estuary. The unmanned sloop was found aground soon after, all sails set, lunch half prepared in the galley, no sign of foul play, et cetera; the body of its owner/skipper, levitated by the gases of decomposition, surfaced a week later, 40-odd pounds of scuba-weights belted to the waist, a 9mm bullet hole behind the left ear. In those halcyon Cold War years of CIA/KGB huggermugger, when such more or less deranged intelligence chiefs as the Soviet Union’s Lavrenti Beria and the USA’s James Jesus Angleton saw or suspected moles within moles within moles, “the Paisley case” received much local and some national and international attention, duly echoed in the novel. Had the fellow been done in by the KGB because he had discovered their Mole in our agency? By the CIA because he was the Mole? By one or the other because he was only apparently retired from counterintelligence work in order to scan covertly from his sailboat the high-tech snooping gear suspected to be concealed by the Soviets in their U.S. embassy vacation compound, just across the wide and placid Chester River from where I write these words? Et cetera. A few less intrigue-driven souls, myself among them, imagined that the chap had simply done himself in, for whatever complex of personal reasons and despite certain odd details and spookish unresolved questions (see novel) — but by the end of the American 1970s one had learned that paranoia concerning the counterintelligence establishments was often outstripped both by paranoia within those establishments and by the facts, when and if they emerged.

INDEED, MY U.S.-HISTORY homework through that decade for the LETTERS novel, together with our war in Vietnam, cost me considerable innocence concerning the morality of our national past and present, especially with respect to foreign policy and to such agencies as J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Allen Dulles’s CIA, whose clandestine, not infrequently illegal operations I found to be rich in precedent all the way back to George Washington’s administration. Given our political geography, a fair amount of that activity turns out to have taken place in and around my tidal birthwaters (see novels).

During the long course of writing LETTERS , I happened to move with my new bride back to those birthwaters after a 20-year absence, to teach at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, and to begin for the first time ardently exploring, in our cruising sailboat, the great estuarine system that I had grown up on, in, and around. It was sobering, in those high-tension times, to see the red hammer-and-sickle banner flying above the aforementioned Soviet embassy retreat across the river, and to note on our charts (abounding in Danger Zones and Prohibited Areas) the 80-plus Pentagon facilities scattered about this fragile tidewaterland — including the Pentagon itself, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Edgewood Arsenal’s chemical and biological weapons development facilities, not to mention several CIA “safe houses” and the headquarters of the Agency proper. Sobering too to sail past the odd nuclear missile submarine off Annapolis, packing firepower enough to wreck a continent, and to know that among one’s fellow pleasure-sailors and anchorage-mates would be a certain number of federal employees including the occasional admiral, active or retired, taking a busman’s holiday, and the occasional Agency spook, ditto, perhaps ditto. And sobering finally to be cruising the pleasant waters that a British task force had invaded during the War of 1812, burning Washington, bombarding Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and inspiring our national anthem — waters increasingly stressed by agricultural run-off ever since the first European settlers cleared the forests to farm “sot-weed” in the 17th century; by military dumping and residential development through the 20th; and by history, more or less, over that whole span.

Sabbatical glances at all that, perhaps even attempts here and there to stare it down, but it’s really only marginally about the Wonderlandish machinations of the CIA/KGB and the American heritages represented (in the novel) by Francis Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe. First and finally, the story is what its subtitle declares it to be: a romance, in the several senses of that term.

— Postscript, possibly evidencing that truth is more Postmodern than fiction:

After Sabbatical’s first publication in 1982, I learned from certain ex-colleagues of his and readers of mine that the unhappy Mr. Paisley had toward the end grown fond of declaring that “in life, as on the highway, fifty-five is enough” (his age at death). Moreover — and more poignantly, sober-ingly, vertiginously — I was informed by his son that the late Agency operative had been a fan of my novels, especially The Floating Opera and The Sot-Weed Factor —which it pleases me to imagine his having enjoyed in happier times as he and Brillig sailed the Chesapeake.

R.I.P., sir: Having surfaced in Sabbatical as in the Bay (and resurfaced in this novel’s successor, The Tidewater Tales ), you shall not float through my fiction again.