John Barth - Letters

Now: re your letter of August 3, and my call. Enclosed is my ground plan for that Perseus-Medusa story I told you of, together with more notes on golden ratio, Fibonacci series, and logarithmic spirals than any sane writer will be interested in. My compliments. All that remains is for you to work out a metaphorical physics to turn stones into stars, as heat + pressure + time turn dead leaves into diamonds. I have in mind Medusa’s petrifying gaze, reflected and re-reflected at the climax, not from Athena’s mirror-shield, but from her lover Perseus’s eyes: the transcension of paralyzing self-consciousness to productive self-awareness. And (it goes without saying) I have in mind too the transformation of dead notes into living fiction — for it also remains for you to write the story!

Me, I’m done with it, as with another fictive enterprise I’d begun to fancy, which I shan’t lay on you. What occurred to me as we spoke was that a project as sevenish as the one you describe in your letter ought to be your seventh book rather than your sixth: sixes are my thing. What’s more, your busiest reader hereabouts — my good Dame History — has caught up with your production and needs a quickie to tide her over while you do that long one. So, friend, here are your alphabetized instructions:

1. Author my Perseus/Medusa story and the Bellerophon/Chimera one you mentioned, both concerning midlife crises and Second Cycles that echo First. (I see these as novellas.)

2. Bring to light a third story, from entirely different material, but with enough echoes and connections so that you can graft the three together and

3. Call the chimerical result a novel, since everyone knows that the novella is that form of prose fiction too long to sell as a short story and too short to sell as a book. Good luck.

4. Draft then that epistolary Opus #7 you speak of (including or excluding any version of Yours Truly, in or out of the Funhouse he could almost wish he’d never left, it was so peaceful being lost in there), whose theme seems to me to want to be not “revolution”—what do you and I know about such things? — but (per our telephone talk) reenactment.

5. Epistle yourself to the penultimate seventh of that septpartite opus (Yrs. T. would make it the 6th 7th of that sixth seventh, but he excuses you from such programmaticism), where you’d thought to insert a classical-mythical text-within-the-text. Leave it out (you’ll already have published it as Opus #6)! And for that crucial, climactic, sexissimal keyhole…

6. Find or fashion a (skeleton) key that will unlock at once the seven several plot-doors of your story!

Q.E.D.

As for me: if and when my good right hand is back in service (typing with my left brings me closer than ever in his lifetime to my poor dead father, who wrestled one-armed with that marble all those years) and this movie done (we’ve but two more scenes to shoot), perhaps I’ll commence my Second Cycle — with a novel based on the movie that was meant to be based on your novels but went off in directions of its own. Or perhaps with a crab-and-oyster epic: a Marylandiad? In any case, I advise us both, as we shall not likely be being brief, at least to be bright. May your progression from letter to letter be consistently so; as for Y.T., he will be content if his regression be but brightly consistent: if, like Odysseus striving home from Troy, he can

7. Go from energetic dénouement [to] climactic beginning.

A.

T: The Author to Ambrose Mensch.Soliciting his advice and assistance in the LETTERS project.

Chautauqua, New York

August 3, 1969

Ambrose Mensch

The Lighthouse

Erdmann’s Cornlot

“Dorset,” Maryland

Dear Ambrose,

Time was when you and I were so close in our growings-up and literary apprenticeships, so alike in some particulars and antithetical in others, that we served each as the other’s alter ego and aesthetic conscience; eventually even as the other’s fiction. By any measure it has been an unequal relation: my life, mercifully, has been so colorless in its modest success, yours so comparatively colorful in what you once called its exemplary failure, that I’ve had more literary mileage by far than you from our old and long since distanced connection.

Neither of us, I presume, regrets either that closeness or this distance. My guess is that you, too, ultimately shrug your shoulders at “the pinch of our personal destinies as they spin themselves out upon Fate’s wheel”—your pet line from William James in graduate-school days. This letter is not meant to alter that spinning; only to solicit a bit more of that unequal mileage and to wave cordially from Chautauqua Lake to Chesapeake Bay.

I have in mind a book-length fiction, friend, more of a novel than not, perhaps even a sizable one. Having spent the mid-1960’s fiddling happily with stories for electronic tape and live voice — a little reorchestration of the oral narrative tradition — I’m inclined now to make the great leap forward again to Print: more particularly, to reorchestrate some early conventions of the Novel. Indeed (I blush to report) I am smitten with that earliest-exhausted of English novel-forms, the epistolary novel, already worked to death by the end of the 18th Century. Like yourself an official honorary Doctor of Letters, I take it as among my functions to administer artificial resuscitation to the apparently dead.

Here’s what I know about the book so far. Its working title is LETTERS. It will consist of letters (like this, but with a plot) between several correspondents, the capital-A Author perhaps included, and preoccupy itself with, among other things, the role of epistles — real letters, forged and doctored letters — in the history of History. It will also be concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made. Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our word letters: Literature, which a certain film nut is quoted as calling “that moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance.”

What else. LETTERS is a seven-letter word; the letters in LETTERS are to be from seven correspondents, some recruited from my earlier stories (a sure sign, such recycling, that an author approaches 40). They’ll be dated over the seven months from March through September 1969, though they may also involve the upcoming U.S. Bicentennial (a certain number of years hence), the War of 1812, the American Revolution, revolutions and recyclings generally. I’ve even determined how many letters will be required (88, arranged and distributed in a certain way: a modest total by contrast with the 175 of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for example, not to mention the 537 of Clarissa) —but I’m not yet ready to declare what the book’s about!

However, experience teaches us not to worry overmuch about that problem. We learn, as Roethke says, by going where we have to go; and among the things we may learn, like Aeneas, is where all along we have been headed.

Two further formal or procedural considerations. (A) At a point 6/7ths of the way through the book — that is, in the neighborhood of its climaxes — I want there dutifully to be echoed the venerable convention of the text-within-the-text: something classical-mythological, I think, to link this project with its predecessor and to evoke the origins of fiction in the oral narrative tradition. I have in mind to draft this little off-central text first and let the novel accrete around it like a snail shell. The myth of Bellerophon, Pegasus, and Chimera has been much in my imagination lately (In the myth, you remember, just at or past the midpoint of his heroical career, Bellerophon grows restless, dissatisfied that he has not after all got to heaven by slaying the Chimera; he wonders what he might manage by way of encore to that equivocal feat. There towers Mount Olympus, still beyond his reach; there grazes the winged horse, turned out to pasture and, like his master, going to fat…), but I can’t seem to get old Pegasus off the ground! Any suggestions?