John Barth - Letters

P.S.: But there is a curious, painful postscript to that letter, the last I ever had “from him.” Back in his tutoring days at Yale (so he confest to Mother, who recorded the anecdote in her diary), Father had briefly courted & made verses with an intelligent young woman named Elizabeth Whitman, and had stopt short of matrimony only on account of the same infirmity that had made him so shy in Church Creek. Miss Whitman subsequently was courted by Joel Barlow, who however prefer’d & eventually married Ruth Baldwin, & by yet another tutor at Yale, who too saw fit not to wed her. She withdrew from New Haven to Hartford to live with her mother & to languish on the margin of the Hartford Wits. Early in 1788 she found herself pregnant, and in June of that year, under the assumed name of Mrs. Walker, she left town to have the baby. In July the child was stillborn, like my sister; like my mother, Betsy Whitman died a few days later of childbed fever. She left only a letter, addrest to “B,” the lover who had abandon’d her: “Must I die alone? Why did you leave me in such distress?” & cet.

It could have been Joel Barlow: he was in Hartford at the time, studying for his bar examination, involving himself in the Scioto swindle, & satirizing with his fellow wits, in the Anarchiad, Daniel Shays’ admirable rebellion. It could have been Joseph Buckminister, the other Yale tutor amongst Betsy’s former beaux. But the town to which she fled to hide the scandal was Danvers, Massachusetts; and the hostelry in which “Mrs. Walker” & her baby died was the Bell Tavern — where, she declared to the end, her husband would be joining her promptly…

Inspired by that fateful letter (and by the success in America of Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa), a relative of Betsy Whitman’s named Hannah Foster turn’d her story into a romance on the wages of sin call’d The Coquette (1797): the 1st American epistolary novel. Inspired by that later epistle from the Bell Tavern, your father stay’d in Paris to join in the Terror & to applaud the guillotining of the whole paternal class. But that is matter for another day, sweet child, another letter.

A.B.C.

R: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews.Reviewing Year O and anticipating LILYVAC II’s first trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES. With an enclosure to the Author.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

April 1, 1969

Mr. Todd Andrews

c/o Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Md. 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

RESET Beg pardon. Among the carryovers of our original program into LILYVAC II is a tendency to repetition in the printouts, imperfectly corrected by a reset function. Especially on the anniversaries of significant earlier printouts, the computer inclines as it were to mimic itself: e.g., every Bastille Day since 1966 it has rewritten our 1st letter to “Harrison Mack II” (Enclosure #1 of Enclosure #1 of our letter to you of March 4, q.v.).

To which last we are distressed to have had no reply, whether because it never reached you (we know the P.O. to be infested with anti-Bonapartists, in high places as well as low: vide the “American Indian” Commemorative of Nov. 4 last, which not ingenuously passed over the noble nations of the Iroquois in favor of the Nez Percé, an idle swarm of dope-smoking savages) or because the Mensch-Prinz cabal have persuaded you against us. A prompt response from you in the matter of our proposed action is imperative, since the statute of limitations will run on August 5, and he must RESET Meanwhile, given our uncertainty both of your position and of the confidentiality of our correspondence, we are torn between our wish neither to repeat ourselves nor to divulge promiscuously details of the status of the NOVEL project, and on the other hand our concern to get on with the neutralization of our enemies and to keep our benefactors apprised of the fruits of their patronage. We are therefore attaching a copy of our latest ultimatum to the Defendant, and will summarize in only the most general way the results of our recent work periods, which summary we trust you will pass on to Mr. Drew Mack and the Tidewater Foundation.

Our objective for the 2nd year (1967/68: Year O ) of LILYVAC’s 5-Year Plan was to modify and extend the capacities of LILYVAC I with the aid of a renewed Foundation grant; then to reprogram LILYVAC II with data for the Complete & Final Fiction, to the end of producing an abstract model of the perfect narrative, refined from such poisoned entrails and crude prototypes as are now RESET Pursuant to this objective, in the late spring of 1968 (we were, you remember, still recuperating through the fall ’67 work period from the attempted assassination of Ms. Bernstein and ourself in May of that year), Merope and we supplied LILYVAC II with all the entries in Professor Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, together with such reference works as Masterplots and Monarch Notes; also the complete holdings in fiction of Lily Dale’s Marion Skidmore Library and the collected letters of the Fox sisters (true visionaries, unlike those wrongly commemorated Pierced Noses), certain rare but standard treatises on the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Series, and a list of everything in the world that comes in 5’s. By the 5th day of the 5th month of that year (the anniversary, by no coincidence, of the Emperor’s pretended death on St. Helena), LILYVAC generated its 1st trial model, a simple schema for the rise and fall of conventional dramatic action, sometimes called Freitag’s Triangle—

— in which AB represents the “exposition” of the conflict, BC the “rising action,” or complication, of the conflict, CD the climax and dénouement, DE the “wrap-up” of the dramatic resolution. You can supply for yourself the revolutionary “allegory” at the heart of these ostensibly literary concerns. By May 18, the Emperor’s coronation day, we had already progressed to a “Right-Triangular Freitag”—

— and by George III’s birthday to a “Golden-Triangular Freitag”—

— which prescribed exactly the ideal relative proportions of exposition, rising action, et cetera, the precise location and pitch of complications and climaxes, the RESET By June 18, the last week of the spring work period, we had our perfected model, which of course we cannot entrust to the mails.

Finally, we secured per program a toad that under cold stone days and nights had 31 RESET We then betook ourselves to rest, leaving to faithful Merope the simple if exacting task of working out with LILYVAC the historical-political analogues of our progress thus far. It was during this period that LILYVAC’s aforementioned tendency to self-mimicry was most vexingly displayed: e.g. RESET Which nigger in the ointment we have countered provisionally with an “editorial” program-amendment to recognize and RESET Just as we have programmed it to avoid or scrupulously delete any reference whatever to

The fall work period of Year V was devoted to preparations for the 1st trial printouts (scheduled for tonight through Friday) and their analysis. On its final day, the winter solstice — anniversary (on the Gregorian calendar) of the Pilgrims’ landing on Plymouth Rock, of young Werther’s letter to Charlotte apprising her of his intended suicide, of our misguided posting to the Wetlands Press, in all good faith, the priceless edited typescript of the Revised New Syllabus they shall RESET While we swam against the full ebb tide of nature as it were to keep our eyes open long enough to make out the precious letters, LILYVAC vouchsafed to us the title of the text-to-come. It gave us an N; it gave us an O. Cheered by this 1st tangible hatch of our ardent, arduous labors, Merope and we looked into each other’s eyes with that relief and weary exultation which only true revolutionary lovers know. But then ensued, not V, not E, not L, no: but NOT, then NOTE, then NOTES!