John Barth - Letters

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

My dear Lady Amherst:

In response to your note of April 5: I accept, regretfully, your vigorous rejection of my proposal, and apologize for any affront it may have given you. I did not mean — but never mind what I did not mean. I accede to the counsel of your countryman Evelyn Waugh: Never apologize; never explain.

May I trust, all the same, that you will not take personally my use of at least the general conceit — for the principal character in an epistolary novel as yet but tentatively titled and outlined — of A Lady No Longer in Her First Youth, to represent Letters in the belletristic sense of that word?

Cordially,

M: The Author to Lady Amherst.Crossed in the mails. Gratefully accepting her change of mind.

Chautauqua Lake, New York

April 20, 1969

Germaine G. Pitt

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland

My dear Ms. Pitt,

My note to you of April 13, accepting your rejection of my proposal, must have crossed in the mails yours to me of April 12, tentatively withdrawing that rejection: a letter my pleasure in the receipt of which, as that old cheater Thackeray would write, “words cannot describe.” Since, like myself, you seem given to addressing certain correspondents on certain days of the week, I happily imagine that this letter, too — welcoming your reconsideration and hoping that you will entrust me with whatever confidences you see fit to share — will have passed, somewhere between western New York and the Eastern Shore of Maryland (along the Allegheny ridges, say: the old boundary between British and French America), yet another from you, bringing to light those mysteries with which yours of the 12th is big.

Vicissitudes! Lovers! Pills! Radical corners turned! The old familiar self no longer recognizable! Encore!

I jest, ma’am, but sympathetically. (Excuse my longhand; I write this from a summer cottage at Chautauqua, where snow fell only yesterday into the just-thawed lake. And on the Chesapeake they are sailing already!) If April — in the North Temperate Zone, at least — is the month of suicides and sinkings, that’s because it’s even more the month of rebeginnings: Chaucer’s April, the live and stirring root of Eliot’s irony. (So you really knew Old Possum! How closely, please? You are not the One who settles a pillow by her head and says to Prufrock: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all…”?!) In this latter April spirit I wish you a happy birthday.

I also swear by all the muses that I am not just now nor have I lately been in touch with Ambrose M. We have amicably drifted apart in recent years, both personally and aesthetically; have not corresponded since early in this decade. The news of his connection with Reg Prinz was news to me. I’ve seen (and concurred with Prinz in the rejection of) A’s first draft of the opening of that screenplay alleged to be based on some story of mine. It seems tacitly understood between us that direct communication would be counterproductive while he’s taking — with my tacit general approval — vast liberties with my fiction. Have you and he become close?

Enfin: I am by temperament a fabricator, not a drawer-from-life. I know what I’m about, but shall be relieved to get home to wholesale invention, much more my cup of tea. Meanwhile, I urge you to tell on, while I like a priest in the box draw between us now a screen. Or better, like a tape recorder, not distract you by replying. Or best, like Echo in the myth, give you back eventually your own words in another voice.

Cordially. Hopefully. Exhortingly. Expectantly.

Respectfully. Sincerely,

— L Street? I find neither in my memory nor on my map of Cambridge any neighborhood or suburb called Dorset Heights, or streets named for letters of the alphabet.?

T: Lady Amherst to the Author.The Third Stage of her affair with Ambrose Mensch. Her latter-day relations with André Castine.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

Saturday, 3 May 1969

My dear B. (or, Dear Diary),

Thanks, I think, for not responding to my last two “chapters.” You understand why, even as I made to slip last Saturday’s into the drop box (such odd-shaped ones over here!), it occurred to me to post it on the Monday by certified mail instead: having seen fit to comply with your request, I need only some confirmation that these letters are being received, and by the addressee. Your “John Hancock” on the receipt is my “Go now and sin some more.”

I should prefer not to. I am not heartily sorry— au contraire —but I am heartily weary of things sexual. By Ambrose’s count (leave it to him) he had as of April’s end ejaculated into one or another of His Ladyship’s receptacles no fewer than 87 several times since the month — and the “Second Stage” of our love affair — began. More precisely, since the full Pink Moon of 2 April, when the onset of my menses so roused him that I had to take it by every detour till the main port of entry was clear (A’s analogy, tricked out with allusions to American runners of the British blockade in “our” wars of 1776 and 1812). Which comes, he duly reported two days ago, to three comes per diem.

Thank God then it was Thursday, I replied, and April done, for my whole poor carcase was a-crying Mayday. The cramps were on me again, breasts tender, ankles swollen, I was cross and weepy: all signs were (he’d be glad to know) that douche and cream and pessary had withstood his “low-motile swimmers.”

As if I’d spoken by chance some magic phrase, my lover’s humour changed entirely. He removed his hand, rezipped his fly, asked me gravely, even tenderly, was I quite sure? I was, despite the irregular regularity of it: by next night’s full moon — which he told me was the Flower Moon — his overblown blossom would close her petals for a spot of much needed rest. He kissed me then like (no other way to say it) a husband, and left my office, where, not long before, our committee had delighted John Schott by proposing after all, alas, A. B. Cook for the Litt.D. (We could delay no longer. What’s more — but I shall return to this. Would you had said yes! Failing that, would it could be Ambrose!) That day, like a played-out Paolo and Francesca, we made love no more, just read books.

Yesterday too. Sweet relief! A. stopped by early; let himself through the front door of 24 L before I was up, as he sometimes does. I took for granted it was the usual A.M. quickie, as he calls it, and as I had indeed begun flowing that night like a little Niagara, I rolled over with a sigh to let him in the back door and begone. But lo, he was all gentle husband again: had only stopped to ask could he fetch me a Midol? Make tea? He jolly could, and jolly did. I was astonished, mistrustful. Some new circus trick in the offing? Or l’Abruzzesa… No, no, he chided: merely in order to have “run in a month’s glissando the whole keyboard of desire” (his trope), he hoped we might add one last, 88th connexion to the score we’d totted up between Pink and Flower Moons; but he vowed he was as pleasantly spent as I by our ardent April, and would be pleased to shake less roughly, and less often, his darling bud in May.

So I blew him, whilst our Twining’s Earl Grey was a-cooling. He even tasted different: something has changed! Last evening we made sea trout au cognac together, spent the P.M. (a longie) with books and telly; then we slept together, like (quoth he, after Donne) “two-sevenths of the snorting Sleepers in their Caves.” Slept, sir, so soundly that Yosemite’s Tunnel Sequoia, which I read this morning fell last night, could have dropped on 24 L and never waked us. Now he’s back to his strange screenplay; I to my novel-of-yours-of-the-month. Our “2nd Stage,” it would appear, is over; not without some apprehension I approach the 3rd, whatever in the world it may prove to be. Meanwhile, I read and bleed contently — and am informed by my tuckered lover that, this being the Saturday before the first Sunday in May, phials of the blood of martyred St. Januarius in the reliquary of the Naples duomo are bubbling and bleeding too. Tutti saluti!