John Barth - Letters

There, I’ve said it, and quickly now before I lose my nerve, will you consent, sir, to my using your name and circumstances and what-all in this new novel, clearing the text of course with you before its publication et cetera and for that matter (since other “actual persons living or dead” may wander through this literary mail room) to my retaining you, at your customary fee, for counsel in the libel way?

Cordially,

P.S.: Do you happen to know a Lady Germaine Amherst (Germaine Lady Amherst? Germaine Pitt Lady Amherst? Lady Germaine Pitt-Amherst?)? What about a nut in Lily Dale, N.Y., named Jerome Bonaparte Bray, who believes himself to be the rightful king of France, myself to be an arrant plagiarist, and yourself to be his attorney?

H: The Author to Todd Andrews.Accepting the latter’s demurrer.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

Sunday, April 6, 1969

Todd Andrews

Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

How a letter written and presumably mailed by you in Cambridge on Good Friday could reach my office here in Buffalo on Holy Saturday is a mystery, considering the usual decorous pace of the U.S. mail. But on this pleasant Easter Sunday afternoon, having got through the Times betimes, I strolled up to the campus to check out some epistolary fiction from the library, found it closed for the holiday, stopped by my office, and voila: its postmark faint to the point of illegibility; its twin 6¢ FDR’s apparently uncanceled; the mystery of its delivery intact.

And its plenteous contents avidly received, sir, twice read already, and respectfully perpended. Be assured that I share your reservations; nevertheless, I forge away.

Be assured further that I will honor your request not to make use of your name and situation, or the confidences you share with me in your letter, without your consent. When I have a view of things at all, it is just your sort of tragic view — of history, of civilizations and institutions, of personal destinies — and I hope I live it out with similar scruple. Even given your eventual consent (which I still solicit), I would of course alter facts as radically as necessary for my purposes, as I did fifteen years ago when I invented a 54-year-old lawyer named Todd Andrews, and cut the Macks from whole cloth to keep him company. The boundary between fact and fiction, or life and art, if it is as arguable as a fine legal distinction, is as valuable: hard cases make good law.

So we are, I think, in the accord your letter would bring us to, except for one small matter of record. You wonder why I made no mention of our conversation in the Cambridge Yacht Club on New Year’s Eve, 1954. It is because I don’t recall being there, though I acknowledge that something like your Inquiry and Letter must have turned my original minstrel-show project into the Floating Opera novel. In the same spirit, I here acknowledge in advance your contribution, intended or inadvertent, to the current project: it had not occurred to me to reorchestrate previous stories of mine in this LETTERS novel, only to have certain of their characters stroll through its epistles. But your ironic mention of sequels tempts me to that fallible genre, and suggests to me that it can be managed without the tiresome prerequisite of one’s knowing the earlier books. I will surely hazard it: not perversely, to see whether it can be got away with, but because it suits my Thematic Purposes, as we say.

For this contribution, thanks. Let’s not press further the historicity of our “encounter.” Given your obvious literary sophistication, you will agree with me that a Pirandelloish or Gide-like debate between Author and Characters were as regressive, at least quaint, at this hour of the world, as naive literary realism: a Middle-Modernist affectation, as dated now as Bauhaus design.

Finally, my thanks for your expression of goodwill and loyalty to our medium. To be a novelist in 1969 is, I agree, a bit like being in the passenger-railway business in the age of the jumbo jet: our dilapidated rolling stock creaks over the weed-grown right-of-ways, carrying four winos, six Viet Nam draftees, three black welfare families, two nuns, and one incorrigible railroad buff, ever less conveniently, between the crumbling Art Deco cathedrals where once paused the gleaming Twentieth Century Limited. Like that railroad buff, we deplore the shallow “attractions” of the media that have supplanted us, even while we endeavor, necessarily and to our cost, to accommodate to that ruinous competition by reducing even further our own amenities: fewer runs, fewer stops, fewer passengers, higher fares. Yet we grind on, tears and cinders in our eyes, hoping against hope that history will turn our way again.

In the meanwhile, heartening it is to find among the dross a comrade, a fellow traveler, whose good wishes we reciprocate most

Cordially,

P.S.: As to those cinematographical rumors. The film rights to The Floating Opera are contracted, and a screenplay is in the works, but I have no particular confidence that the story will actually be filmed, on location or elsewhere. Many shuffle the cards who do not play when the chips are down.

In any case, the Prinz-Mensch project is something different, I gather, and altogether more ad libitum. Prinz I know only by his semisubterranean reputation on the campuses; in 1967 he communicated to me, indirectly and enigmatically (he will not write letters; is said to be an enemy of the written word) his interest in filming my “last novel,” which at the time was Giles Goat-Boy. Later he introduced himself to me by telephone and, as best I could infer, gave me to know that it was my “last book ” he was interested in filming— i.e., by that time, the series Lost in the Funhouse, just published. I had supposed that book not filmable, inasmuch as the stories in it were written for print, tape, and live voice, have no very obvious continuity, and depend for their sense largely on manipulations of narrative viewpoint which can’t be suggested visually. I told Prinz these things. If I read correctly his sighs, grunts, and hums, they were precisely what appealed to him!

I let him have an option, the more readily when he intimated that our friend Ambrose Mensch might do the screenplay. Our contract stipulates that disagreements about the script are to be settled by a vote among the three of us; so far I’ve found Prinz at once so antiverbal and so personally persuasive that I’ve seconded, out of some attraction to opposites, his rejection of Mensch’s trial drafts. And almost to my own surprise I find myself agreeing to his most outrageous, even alarming notions: e.g., that by “last book” he means at least a kind of Ongoing Latest (he wants to “anticipate” not only the work in progress since Funhouse but even such projected works as LETTERS!); at most something ominously terminal.

No question but he will execute a film: my understanding is that principal photography is about to be commenced, both down your way and — for reasons that we merely literate cannot surmise — up here along the Niagara Frontier as well. I find myself trusting him rather as a condemned man must trust his executioner.

We shall, literally, see.

I: The Author to Lady Amherst.Accepting her rejection of his counterinvitation.

Department of English, Annex B

SUNY/Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

April 13, 1969

Professor Germaine G. Pitt, Lady Amherst

Office of the Provost, Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University