John Barth - Letters

Some of those names, Yours, I didn’t even know! The dates might have stung more if my memory were better — So that’s what you were doing in Philadelphia that weekend, etc. — and I could perhaps have made use of the list when Marsha’s lawyers were working me over. But now I neither despised nor pitied the woman, only tisked my tongue, resolved to stay clear of her, and sighed at the regurgitative habit of History that had brought her up in my life again.

In this instance, however, the dramaturge was in all likelihood not Clio but Reg Prinz, who seems as bent on redreaming my history as “St. Joseph” his own. The man wants some sort of showdown, clearly, and not only for his show. I expected to discover he’d photographed my tête-à-tête with Horner yesterday; indeed, lest there be hidden cameras in the Progress and Advice Room of the Remobilization Farm, I showed even less emotion than I felt at sight of those entries in Horner’s Hornbook: I simply fetched forth my Mightier-Than-Etc. and, in the interest of accuracy, put a (?) after Angie’s name.

Marsha, for pity’s sake! Well hear this, Y.T.; you too, Clio — and you, R.P., if your cameras are even now peeking over my shoulder: there is a limit to what I’ll swallow the second time around! As of my last to you I’d rescrewed Magda (Peter & Germaine forgive us), on the 12th anniversary of my virgin connection with her and the 19th of your water message. Very possibly I shall be in “Bibi’s” bibi ere our tale is told: Prinz seems to be setting us up, and Bea looks more golden in her glitterless “Rennie Morgan” role than she’s looked since we tumbled in her rumble seat back in the forties. My treatment of Milady A. has been unspeakable; I do not speak of it. Que sera etc. But I will not reenact my marriage! Salty Marsha, you shall not fuck me over over! Closed-circuit history is for compulsives; Perseus and I are into spirals, presumably outbound.

The question of the plot is clear: How transcend mere reenactment? Perseus, in his life’s first half, “calls his enemy to his aid,” petrifying his adversaries with Medusa’s severed head. In its second half — his marriage to Andromeda broken, his career at an impasse — he must search wrongheadedly for rejuvenation by reenactment, and some version of Medusa (transformed, Germaine: recapitated, beautiful!) must aid him in a different way: together they must attain “escape velocity”; open the circle into a spiral that unwinds forever, as if a chambered nautilus kept right on until it grew into a galaxy. The story must unwind likewise, chambered but unbroken, its outer cycles echoing its inner. Behind, the young triumphant Perseus of Cellini’s statue; ahead, the golden constellations from which meteors shower every August; between, on the cusp, nonplussed middle Perseus, stopped in his reiterative tracks, yet to discover what alchemy can turn stones into stars.

The planning, Yours, goes well; the writing is another matter. When I discover Perseus’s secret for him, I think you’ll hear from me no more; until I do, I pursue these ghosts in circles, beastly, buffaloed, and in these circles am by them pursued.

Beset, too, by metaphors, as by geriatric furies: the dry Falls; this tideless lake; old Chautauqua fallen out of time; this antique, improbable hotel, named after the place named after the city named after the gray-eyed goddess, Perseus’s wise half sister. The elders rock on the porches; bats flitter through the Protestant twilight; the water does not ebb and flow.

Waiting our arrival here this afternoon, a note from Magda: Mother’s condition grave. Will call if it grows critical. Angle sends love. Drop her a postcard from the Falls. M

No period, I note, after the initial. Mere inadvertence: coded signals are not Magda’s way of messaging. Even so, given History’s heavy hand with portents, I’m dismayed: there’s another scene must never be replayed.

Thirty-nine. With luck, about halfway through. Nothing to show for it but a pickup job, a screwy bibliography, a sore divorce, a short string of hedged liaisons, a cracked tower, a brain-damaged daughter. My heart smarts. My birthmark itches. Milady is properly fed up. This letter goes into Chautauqua Lake: the first one guaranteed not to return to sender.

Eloquence, redescend upon me. I despair.

E: The Author to A. B. Cook VI.A request for information and an invitation to participate in the work in progress.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

Sunday, June 15, 1969

A. B. Cook, Poet Laureate

Chautaugua, Maryland 2114?

Dear Mr. Cook:

Eventually, I hope, this letter will reach you. I learned only recently that you live in a place called Chautaugua, Maryland; my zip code directory lists no such post office, but while I was down your way on business two weeks ago, I noticed a road sign for Chautaugua along the Governor Ritchie Highway between Baltimore and Annapolis — it caught my eye because I live on Chautaugua Lake in west New York — and my map of Anne Arundel County confirms that there is indeed a Chautaugua Road not far from the mainland end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I must hope that four-fifths of a zip code plus your title will do the trick.

I have been told that you are descended from Ebenezer Cooke, poet laureate of late-17th/early-18th-Century Maryland, and from Henry Burlingame of Virginia, who is listed among those accompanying Capt. John Smith in his exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608. Fictionalized versions of both gentlemen play a role (indeed, Cooke plays the leading role) in my 1960 novel called, after Cooke’s satirical poem, The Sot-Weed Factor. I am forwarding you a copy, and trust you’ll indulge the liberties I’ve taken with your forebears.

My work in progress, which is of a different character, accounts for this letter. It is itself to be composed of letters, in both senses of the word: an epistolary novel, the epistles to be arranged in an order yet to be devised (I’m just past half through the planning of it). I’m also past half through my biblical threescore-and-ten, which detail no doubt accounts for my second notion about the story: that it should echo its predecessors in my bibliography, while at the same time extending that bibliography and living its independent life. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in the womb, but the delivered child must breathe for itself; one’s forties are the “product” of one’s thirties, twenties, etc., as the present century is the product of those before it — but not merely the product. You see my point.

Thus I am hazarding, for various reasons, the famous limitations both of the Novel-in-Letters and of the Sequel, most fallible of genres. The letters will be from seven correspondents: one from each of my previous books (or their present-day descendants or counterparts, in the case of the historical or fabulous works), plus one invented specifically for this work, plus — I blush to report, it goes so contrary to my literary principles — the Author, who had better be telling stories than chattering about them.

These seven correspondents I imagine contributing severally not only the letters that comprise the story but the elements of its theme and form. The main character, for example — a remarkable middle-aged English gentlewoman and scholar in reduced circumstances — by inviting the Author to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from the small American college where she’s presently teaching, suggests to him, even as he declines her invitation, the general conceit of “doctored letters.” From “Todd Andrews” (the lawyer-hero of my first novel, The Floating Opera) came both the notion of free-standing sequelae and the Tragic View of history, to which in fact I subscribe. From “Jacob Horner” (novel #2, The End of the Road) comes what might be called an Anniversary View of history, together with certain alphabetical preoccupations and the challenge of “redreaming” the past, an enterprise still not very clear to me. Et cetera.