John Barth: Letters

Kynge through a

Longe lyfe

May Mirthe

Open a

Path of Peace & never

Quit you but give you

Rest &

Sunneshine In

Trial may you bee

Unceasynglie

Victorious & attaine

Wealthe & Wisdom &

Xcellence Bee

Younge in hearte with

Zest to enjoy these & alle other good thyngs

Amen

B.

L: The Author to the Reader.LETTERS is “now” ended. Envoi.

“Sunday, September 14, 1969”

Dear Reader,

LETTERS reaches herewith and “now” (the Author outlines this last on Tuesday, July 4, 1978. The U.S. Bicentennial was celebrated, in the main, quietly, two years since, by a citizenry subdued by the Watergate scandals, the presidential impeachment hearings, the resignation of President Nixon, and his full and complete pardon by President Ford, himself defeated four months later by President Carter, with whom this week’s polls show only 23 % of the electorate to be satisfied. The post office has raised the first-class postal rate to 15¢ per ounce. Vice-President Mondale has returned from private talks with Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Begin meant to renew the stalled Middle East peace negotiations. New fighting in Lebanon. RN, ex-President Nixon’s memoirs, is #3 on the New York Times list of nonfiction best-sellers. The Dow-Jones Industrial Average continues to decline, the dollar likewise against other currencies, the nation’s economy to inflate at the alarming rate of 11 % annually for the first half of 1978. The administration is now pledged to give that problem priority over unemployment, the flagging détente with the U.S.S.R., the country’s lack of a coherent energy policy, and other national concerns.

(The Author drafts this in longhand at Chautauqua Lake, N.Y., on Monday, July 10, 1978, a decade since he first conceived an old-time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls etc. U.S. cancels missions to U.S.S.R. to protest trial of Soviet dissidents. Cloudy and cool on Niagara Frontier, warm and humid on Chesapeake Bay. In the interim between outline and longhand draft, as again between longhand draft and first typescript, first typescript and final draft, final draft and galley proofs, he goes forward with Horace’s “labor of the file”: rewriting, editing, dismantling the scaffolding, clearing out the rubbish, planting azaleas about the foundations, testing the wiring and plumbing, hanging doors and windows and pictures, waxing floors, polishing mirrors and windowpanes — and glancing from time to time, even gazing, from an upper storey, down the road, where he makes out in the hazy distance what appear to be familiar loblolly pines, a certain point of dry ground between two creeklets, a steaming tidewater noon, someone waking half tranced, knowing where he is but not at first who, or why he’s there. He yawns and shivers, blinks and looks about. He reaches to check and wind his pocketwatch.

(He types this on October 5, 1978, in Baltimore, Maryland. Time flies. Sloop Brillig found abandoned in Chesapeake Bay off mouth of Patuxent River, all sails set, C.I.A. documents in attaché case aboard. Body of owner, former C.I.A. agent, recovered from Bay one week later, 40 pounds of scuba-diving weights attached, bullet hole in head. C.I.A. and F.B.I, monitoring investigation by local authorities. Nature of documents not disclosed. Time now to lay the cornerstone, run Old Glory up the pole, let off the fireworks, open doors to the public. This way, please. Mind your step: floors just waxed. Do read the guide markers as you go along. Here’s one now.

(You read this on [supply date and news items]. How time passes. Sic transit! Plus ça change! On the letterhead date itself, in fact, there was, beyond certain actions of our story, no particular news of note. Further U.S. troop withdrawals from Southeast Asia scheduled for the fall; South Vietnamese army desertion rate continues at 10,000 per month. Exxon oil tanker Manhattan completes first successful Northwest Passage to Alaska. U.S. Attorney General’s office receives without disapproval “more reasonable schedule” of court sentences for illegal drug use. Happy birthday Jan Masaryk, Ivan Pavlov, Alexander von Humboldt, Luigi Cherubini. On this date in history: 1901: President McKinley dies from assassin’s bullet in Buffalo, New York. 1862: General McClellan drives back General Lee in Battle of South Mountain, Maryland. 1814: Fort McHenry bombardment ceases; F. S. Key reports flag still there) the end.

John Barth won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1973 for Chimera, a volume of novellas. He is the author of four novels, Giles Goat-Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor, The Floating Opera, and The End of the Road, as well as a series of short fictions for print, tape, and live voice, Lost in the Funhouse. Born in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1930, Mr. Barth was elected in 1974 to both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

John Barth is presently the Alumni Centennial Professor of English and Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

LETTERS…

scarlet

fatal

forged

misdirected

amatory

doctored

concealed

crossed

purloined…

are triumphantly delivered in this new comic masterpiece, the first novel in a decade by the man the New York Times called “the best writer of fiction we have in America at present, and one of the best we have ever had.”

LETTERS revives an old-time form — the epistolary novel — and transforms it into a dazzling comic epic of today. The seven letter-writers—“drolls and dreamers” all — are:

• a fifty-year old British gentlewoman, erstwhile mistress (by her own confession) of Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley and James Joyce, who finds herself disconcertingly pregnant again;

• a seventy-year-old small-town bachelor lawyer who enjoys cordial incest during his final cruise on Chesapeake Bay;

• a long-time patient at a Canadian Remobilization Farm, who is ordered to re-dream history or die;

• a terrorist, or counter-terrorist, poet laureate who sets about to blow up the birthplace of our National Anthem, or to prevent others from so doing;

• a rival novelist, who may in fact be a very large insect with computer assistance, plotting from his base in the Spiritualist Capital of America;

• the avant-garde lover of the aforementioned gentlewoman;

• the Author himself, none other.

At once John Barth’s most novel novel, the culmination of all his fiction thus far, and a fabulous roller-coaster ride through the hazards and delights of our lives and histories, such is LETTERS.