John Barth - Letters

2. 1967/68 (Year O): Programming of LILYVAC II [i.e., the modifications and extensions of LILYVAC I to be made this fall with Tidewater Foundation funds, contingent on renewal of our grant] with data for The Complete and Final Fiction: e.g. analyses of all extant fiction, its motifs, structures, strategies, etc. Production of an abstract model of the perfect narrative, refined from such crudities as are now available, e.g. the “Swan-Geese” formula cited earlier. Toad that under cold stone days and nights has 31 sweltered venom sleeping got.

3. 1968/69 (Year V): 1st trial printouts of RN and analysis of same. Fillet of a fenny snake.

4. 1969/70 (Year E): Completion of analysis. Eye of newt. Reprogramming of LILYVAC II (or construction of LILYVAC III) for composition of Final Fiction RN.

5. 1970/71 (Year L): Final print-out of NOVEL (i.e., RN). Revelation of true identity. Rout of impostors and pretenders. Assumption of throne of France. Restoration of “Harrison Mack II” to throne of England. Destruction of all existing stocks of insecticides and prohibition of their manufacture forever. Toe of frog. Reunion with parents. Commencement of New Golden Age.

We have explained already that LILYVAC found it unnecessary actually to compose the hypothetical fictions, having adumbrated their possibility and demonstrated the capacity. Nor can it be said that the creature who appended his name to the false Giles has been neutralized: we have not got all the birds out of LILYVAC I, and its capacity, while exceeding what could have been expected of so modest a facility, falls short of our requirements for years O through L — a discrepancy which we look to the Tidewater Foundation to rectify. But he shall pay.

Moreover and finally, our spring work period was abbreviated by an almost successful attempt on the part of our enemies to assassinate us in late May of this year. In the guise of Chautauqua County officials and with the pretext of “fogging the woods around Lily Dale against lake-fli_s,” they laid a cloud of poison gas about the car in which Ms. Bernstein and we had parked, en route from our afternoon’s work, in order to review our draft of this very letter. Thanks to her quick action in rolling up the windows and taking the wheel, and the admirable traction of our loyal VW on marshy woodland lanes, we made good our escape. Ms. Bernstein, we are relieved to report, suffered no more than a few tears and sneezes; we on the other hand were gassed to unconsciousness for 24 hours, suffered delirium, nausea, poisoned entrails, and muscular spasms for the following week, and still experience occasional twitches and a sustained low-grade nervous disorder. They shall pay.

But we survived! (The innocent lake-blanks, alas, did not.) And, come August 15 and the commencement of our fall work period, we shall proceed with the implementation of Year O, for which nothing is wanted save sufficient funding for the redesign of LILYVAC I. And while such funding is available to us from several sources, the voice of History directs us to RESET Complimentary Close

JBB

F: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly (and Lady Amherst).A de-cla-ra-ti-on and an ex-hor-ta-ti-on. With several postscripts.

The Lighthouse, Mensch’s Castle

Erdmann’s Cornlot

Dorset, Maryland

March 3, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Whom It Concerned

TO:

Yours Truly (cc. Germaine Pitt)

RE:

Your blank and anonymous letter to me of May 12, 1940

Dear Sir or Madam:

Fill in the blank: AMBROSE LOVES ______________.

A.

P.S. (to G.P.): Dear Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English and Acting Provost of the Faculty of Letters of Marshyhope State University College Germaine Gordon Pitt Lady Amherst: I love you! And I shall in your pursuit surely make an ass of

P.P.S.: Sixth love of my life, admirable GGPLA: here are the first five “Words of Five Syllables” in the old New England Primer:

Ad-mi-ra-ti-on

Be-ne-fi-ci-al

Con-so-la-ti-on

De-cla-ra-ti-on

Ex-hor-ta-ti-on

They correspond, sort of, to this affair’s predecessors; also to the Story Thus Far (thus far unknown to you) of our relation, whereof we are come to Stage D already and shall by this letter be fetched E-ward.

In my student days, Lady, when science had still not purged itself of 19th-century pathos, the first principle of embryology was that Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: that the evolutionary history of the individual rehearses the ditto of his race. Law too lovely to be true! Which therefore I here take as first rule of my next fiction: its plot shall be the hero’s recapitulation, at the midpoint of his life, of his Story Thus Far, the exposition and complications of its first half, to the end of directing his course through the climax and dénouement of its second. My hero Perseus (or whoever), like a good navigator, will decide where to go by determining where he is by reviewing where he’s been. And inasmuch as my life here in the Lighthouse is itself a species of fiction, it follows that law of reenactment. On May 12, 1940, when I was ten, I found a note in a bottle along the Choptank River shore just downstream from where I write this: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, torn from a tablet and folded thrice; on a top line was penned in deep red ink TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN; on the next-to-bottom, YOURS TRULY. The lines between were blank — a blank I’ve been trying now for 29 years to fill! All my fictions, all my facts, Germaine, are replies to that carte blanche; this, like them, I’ll bottle and post into the broad Choptank, to run with the tide past cape and cove, black can, red nun, out of the river and the Bay, down to the oceans of the world. My Perseus story (if I write it) will echo its predecessors as middle-aged Perseus rehearses his prior achievements, before adding to their number; the house I live in is built from the stones of my family’s history, our past fiascos reconfigured. (And Marshyhope’s up-going Tower of Truth, worse luck for it, is rising on footers of those same false stones.) No wonder, then, dear G, if to my eyes these ABC’s from the N.E.P. spell Q.E.D. E.g.:

1. Ad-mi-ra-ti-on. When first I beheld you in the halls of Marshyhope last fall, an English tea rose among our native cattails and marsh lilies, et cetera. In fact, admirable lady, as a sometime scholar I had admired already your editions of Mme de Staël’s letters and your articles on her connection with Gibbon, Byron, Constant, Napoleon, Jefferson, Rousseau, Schlegel, & Co.; also your delicate commentary on Héloise’s letters to Peter Abelard; also your discreet recollections of H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Mann. Oeuvre wise, milady, we were well met ere we met!

Even if, as I quite imagine, my own obscure, tentative, maverick “writings” (I mean the works of “Arthur Morton King”) have yet to swim into your ken. What must you make, Fair Embodiment of the Great Tradition, of my keyless codes, my chain-letter narratives with missing links, my edible anecdotes, my action-fictions, my récits concrets, my tapes and slides and assemblages and histoires trouvées? No matter: yours not to admire, but to be admired! I know a little of your history; I admire it. I know a bit more of your struggle with our horse’s ass of an acting president, John