Mr John Barth, Esq., Author

Dear sir:

At the end of the current semester, Marshyhope State University will complete the seventh academic year since its founding in 1962 as Tidewater Technical College. In that brief time we have grown from a private vocational training school with an initial enrolment of thirteen students, through annexation as a four-year college in the state university system, to our present status (effective a month hence, at the beginning of the next fiscal year) as a full-fledged university centre with a projected population of 50,000 by 1976.

To mark this new elevation, at our June commencement ceremonies we shall exercise for the first time one of its perquisites, the awarding of honorary degrees. Specifically, we shall confer one honorary doctorate in each of Law, Letters and Science. It is my privilege, on behalf of the faculty, (Acting) President Schott, and the board of regents of the state university, to invite you to be with us 10 A.M. Saturday, 21 June 1969, in order that we may confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa. Sincerely hopeful that you will honour us by accepting the highest distinction that Marshyhope can confer, and looking forward to a favourable reply, I am,

GGP(A)/ss

P.S.: A red-letter day on my personal calendar, this – the first in too long, dear Mr B., but never mind that! – and do forgive both this presumptuous postscriptum and my penmanship: some things I cannot entrust to my ‘good right hand’ of a secretary (a hand dependent, I have reason to suspect, more from the arm of our esteemed acting president than from my arm, on which she’d like nothing better, if I have your American slang aright, than to ‘put the finger’) and so must pen as it were with my left, quite as I’ve been obliged by Fate and History – my own, England’s, Western Culture’s – to swallow pride and

But see how in the initial sequence (my initial sequence) I transgress my vow not to go on about myself, like those dotty women ‘of a certain age’ who burden the patience of novelists and doctors – their circumstantial ramblings all reducible, I daresay, to one cry: ‘Help! Love me! I grow old!’ Already you cluck your tongue, dear Mr-B. – whom-I-do-not-know (if indeed you’ve read me even so far): life is too short, you say, to suffer fools and frustrates, especially of the prolix variety. Yet it is you, sir, who, all innocent, provoke this stammering postscript: for nothing else than the report of your impatience with just this sort of letters conceived my vow to make known my business to you tout de suite, and nothing other than that vow effected so to speak its own miscarriage. So perverse, so helpless the human heart!

And yet bear on, I pray. I am . . . what I am (rather, what I find to my own dismay I am become; I was not always so . . .): old schoolmarm rendered fatuous by loneliness, indignified by stillborn dreams, I prate like a ‘coed’ on her first ‘date’ – and this to a man not merely my junior, but . . . No matter.

I will be brief! I will be frank! Mr B.: but for the opening paragraphs of your recentest, which lies before me, I know your writings only at second hand, a lacuna in my own life story which the present happy circumstances gives occasion for me to amend. Take no offence at this remissness: for one thing, I came to your country, as did your novels to mine, not very long since, and neither visitor sojourns heart-on-sleeve. A late good friend of mine (himself a Nobel laureate in literature) once declared to me, when I asked him why he would not read his contemporaries –

But Germaine, Germaine, this is not germane! as my ancestor and namesake Mme de Staël must often have cried to herself. I can do no better than to rebegin with one of her own (or was it Pascal’s?) charming openers: ‘Forgive me this too long letter; I had not time to write a short.’ And you yourself – so I infer from the heft of your oeuvre, stacked here upon my ‘early American’ writing desk, to which, straight upon the close of this postscript, I will address me, commencing with your earliest and never ceasing till I shall have overtaken as it were the present point of your pen – you yourself are not, of contemporary authors, the most sparing . . .

To business! Cher Monsieur (is it French or German-Swiss, your name? From the lieutenant who led against the Bastille in Great-great-great-great-grand-mère’s day, or the late theologian of our own? Either way, sir, we are half-countrymen, for all you came to light in Maryland’s Dorset and I in England’s: may this hors d’oeuvre keep your appetite for the entrée whilst I make short work of soup and salad!) . . .

Salad of laurels, sir! Sibyl-greens, Daphne’s death-leaves, honorific if worn lightly fatal if swallowed! I seriously pray you will take it, this ‘highest honour that Marshyhope can bestow’; I pray you will not take it seriously! O this sink, this slough, this Eastern Shore of Maryland, this marshy County Dorchester – whence, to be sure, you sprang, mallow from the marsh, as inter faeces etc. we are born all. Do please forgive – whom? How should you have heard of me, who have not read you and yet nominated you for the M.U.Litt D.? I have exposed myself already; then let me introduce me: Germaine Pitt I, née Gordon, Lady Amherst, late of that other Dorset (I mean Hardy’s) and sweeter Cambridge, now ‘Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English’ (to my ear, the only resident speaker of that tongue) and Acting (!) Provost of Make-Believe University’s Factory of Letters, as another late friend of mine might have put it: a university not so much pretentious as pretending, a toadstool blown overnight from this ordurous swamp to broadcast doctorates like spores, before the stationer can amend our letterhead!

I shall not tire you with the procession of misfortunes which, since the end of the Second War, has fetched me from the ancestral seats of the Gordons and the Amhersts – where three hundred years ago is reckoned as but the day before yesterday, and the 17th-Century Earls of Dorset are gossiped of as if still living – to this misnamed shire (try to explain, to your stout ‘down-countian,’ that –chester<castra=camp, and that thus Dorchester, etymologically as well as by historical precedent, ought to name the seat rather than the county! As well try to teach Miss Sneak my secretary why Mr and Dr need no stops after), which sets about the celebration this July of its tercentenary as if 1669 were classical antiquity. Nor shall I with my passage from the friendship – more than friendship! – of several of the greatest novelists of our century, to the supervisal of their desecration in Modern Novel 101-102: a decline the sadder for its paralleling that of the genre itself; perhaps (God forfend) of Literature as a whole; perhaps even (the prospect blears in the eyes of these . . . yes . . . colonials!) of the precious Word. These adversities I bear with what courage I can draw from the example of my favourite forebear, who, harassed by Napoleon, abused by her lovers, ill-served by friends who owed their fortunes to her good offices, nevertheless maintained to the end that animation, generosity of spirit, and brilliance of wit which make her letters my solace and inspiration. But in the matter of the honorary doctorate and my – blind – insistence upon your nomination therefore, I shall speak to you with a candour which, between a Master of Arts and their lifelong Mistress, I must trust not to miscarry; for I cannot imagine your regarding a distinction so wretched on the face of it otherwise than with amused contempt, and yet upon your decision to accept or decline ride matters of some (and, it may be, more than local) consequence.

Briefly, briefly. A tiny history of ‘Redneck Tech’ has been a seven-year battle between the most conservative elements in the state – principally local, for, as you know, Mason and Dixon’s line may be said to run north and south in Maryland, up Chesapeake Bay, and the Eastern Shore is more Southern than Virginia – and most ‘liberal’ (mainly not native, as the natives do not fail to remark), who in higher latitudes would be adjudged cautious moderates at best. The original college was endowed by a local philanthropist, now deceased: an excellent gentleman whose fortune, marvellous to tell, derived from pickles . . . and whose politics were so Tory that, going quite crackers in his final years, the dear fellow fancied himself to be, not Napoleon but George III, still fighting the American Revolution as his ‘saner’ neighbours still refight your Civil War. His Majesty’s board of trustees was composed exclusively of his relatives, friends and business associates – several of whom, however, were of more progressive tendencies, and sufficiently influential in this Border State to have some effect on the affairs of the institution even after it joined the state university complex. Indeed, it was they who pressed most vigorously, against much opposition, to bring the college under state administration in the first place, hoping thereby to rescue it from parochial reaction; and the president of the college during these first stages of its history was a man of respectable academic credentials and reasonably liberal opinions, their appointee: the historian Joseph Morgan.

To console the Tories, however, one John Schott – formerly head of a nearby teachers college and a locally famous right-winger – was appointed provost of the Faculty of Letters and vice-president of (what now was awkwardly denominated) Marshyhope State University College. A power struggle ensued at once, for Dr Schott is as politically ambitious as he is ideologically conservative, and had readily accepted what might seem a less prestigious post because he foresaw, correctly, that MSUC was destined for gigantic expansion, and he sensed, again correctly, opportunity in the local resentment against its ‘liberal’ administration.

In the years thereafter, every forward-looking proposal of President Morgan’s, from extending visitation privileges in the residence halls to defending a professor’s right to lecture upon the history of revolution, was opposed not only be conservative faculty and directors of the Tidewater Foundation (as the original college’s board of trustees renamed itself) but by the regional press, state legislators, and county officials, all of whom cited Schott in support of their position. The wonder is that Morgan survived for even a few semesters in the face of such harassment, especially when his critics found their Sweet Singer in the person of one A. B. Cook VI, self-styled Laureate of Maryland, of whom alas more later – I daresay you know of that formidable charlatan and his mind-abrading doggerel, e.g.:

Which same tower, presently under construction, was the gentle Morgan’s undoing. He had aided by the reasonable T. F. trustees, more enlightened state legislators, and that saving remnant of civilised folk tied by family history and personal sentiment to the shire of their birth – managed after all to weather storms of criticism and effect some modest improvements in the quality of instruction at Marshyhope. Moreover, despite grave misgivings about academic gigantism, Morgan believed that the only hope for real education in such surroundings was to make the college the largest institutional and economic entity in the area, and so had led the successful negotiation to make Marshyhope a university centre: not a replica of the state university’s vast campus on the mainland, but a smaller, well-funded research centre for outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate students from throughout the university system: academically rigorous, but loosely structured and cross-disciplinary. So evident were the economic blessings of this coup to nearly everyone in the area, Morgan’s critics were reduced to grumbling about the radical effects that an influx of some seven thousand ‘outsiders’ was bound to have on the Dorset Way of Life – and Schott & Co were obliged to seek fresh ground for their attack.

They found it in the Tower of Truth. If the old isolation of Dorchester was to be sacrificed any road on the altar of economic progress (so their argument ran), why stop at seven thousand students – a kind of academic elite at that, more than likely long-haired radicals from Baltimore or even farther north? Why not open the doors to all our tidewater sons and daughters, up to the number of, say, seven times seven thousand? Fill in sevenfold more marshy acreage; make seven times over the fortunes of wetland realtors and building contractors; sextuple the jobs available to Dorchester’s labour force; build on Redman’s Neck a veritable City of Learning, more populous (and prosperous) by far than any of the peninsula’s actual municipalities! And from its centre let there rise, as a symbol (and advertisement) of the whole, Marshyhope’s beacon to the world: a great white tower, the Tower of Truth! By day the university’s main library, perhaps, and (certainly) the seat of its administration, let it be by night floodlit and visible from clear across the Chesapeake – from (in Schott’s own pregnant phrase) ‘Annapolis at least, maybe even Washington!’

In vain Morgan’s protests that seven thousand dedicated students, housed in tasteful, low-profile buildings on the seven hundred acres of farmland already annexed by MSUC, represented the maximum reasonable burden on the ecology and sociology of the county, and the optimal balance of economic benefits and academic manageability; that Schott’s ‘Tower of Truth’, like the projected diploma mill it represented, would violate the natural terrain; that the drainage of so much marsh would be an ecological disaster, the influx of so huge a population not a stimulus to the Dorset Way of Life but a cataclysmic shock; that both skyscrapers and ivory towers were obsolete ideals; that even if they weren’t, no sane contractor would attempt such a structure on the spongy ground of a fresh filled fen, et cetera. In veritable transports of bad faith, the Schott/Cook party rhapsodised that Homo sapiens himself – especially in his rational, civilised, university-founding aspect – was the very embodiment of ‘anti-naturalness’: towering erect instead of creeping on all fours, opposing reason to brute instinct, aspiring ever to what was deemed beyond his grasp, raising from the swamp primordial great cities, lofty cathedrals, towers of learning. How were the fenny origins invoked of Rome! How learning was rhymed with yearning, Tow’r of Truth with Flow’r of Youth! How was excoriated, in editorial and Rotary Club speech, ‘the Morgan theory’ (which he never held) that the university should be a little model of the actual world rather than a lofty counterexample: lighthouse to the future, ivory tower to the present, castle keep of the past!

Cook’s rhetoric, all this, sweetly resounding in our Chambers of Commerce, where too there were whispered libels against the luckless Morgan: that his late wife had died a dozen years past in circumstances never satisfactorily explained, which however had led to Morgan’s ‘resignation’ from his first teaching post, at Wicomico Teachers College; that his absence from the academic scene between that dismissal (by Schott himself, as ill-chance would have it, who damningly refused to comment on the matter, declaring only that ‘every man deserves a second chance’) and his surprise appointment by Harrison Mack II as first president of Tidewater Tech was not unrelated to that dark affair. By 1967, when Morgan acquiesced to the Tower of Truth in hopes of saving his plan for a manageable, high-quality research centre, the damage to his reputation had been done, by locker-room couplets of unacknowledged but unmistakeable authorship:

In July of last he resigned, ostensibly to return to teaching and research, and in fact is a visiting professor of American History this year at the college in Massachusetts named after my late husband’s famous ancestor – or was until his disappearance some weeks ago. John Schott became acting president – and what a vulgar act is his! – and yours truly, who has no taste for administrative service even under decent chiefs like Morgan, but could not bear to see MSUC’s governance altogether in Boeotian hands, was prevailed upon to act as provost of the Faculty of Letters.

How came Schott to choose me, you ask, who am through these hopeless marshes but (I hope) the briefest of sojourners? Surely because he rightly distrusts all his ordinary faculty, and wrongly supposes that, visitor and woman to boot, I can be counted upon passively to abet his accession to the actual presidency of MSUC – from which base (read ‘tow’r’ and weep for Marshyhope, for Maryland!) he will turn his calculating eyes to Annapolis, ‘maybe even Washington’! Yet he does me honour by enough distrusting my gullibility after all to leave behind as mine his faithful secretary-at-least: Miss Shirley Stickles, sharp of eye and pencil if not of mind, to escape whose surveillance I am brought to penning by hand this sorry history of your nomination.

Whereto, patient Mr B., we are come! For scarce had I aired against my tenancy the provostial chamber (can you name another university president who smokes cigars?) when there was conveyed to me, via his minatory and becorseted derrière-garde, my predecessor’s expectation, not only that I would appoint at once a nominating committee for the proposed Litt.D. (that is, a third member, myself being already on the committee ex officio and Schott having appointed, by some dim prerogative, a second: one Harry Carter, former psychologist, present nonentity and academic vice-president, Schott’s creature), but that, after a show of nomination weighing, we would present to the board of regents as our candidate the ‘Maryland Laureate’ himself, Mr Andrew Cook!

Schott’s strategy is clear: to achieve some ‘national visibility,’ as they say, with his eyesore of a Tower; a degree of leverage (inhonoris causa!) in the state legislature with his honorary doctorates (the LL.D., of course, will go to the governor, or the local congressman); and the applause of the regional right with his laurelling of the hardy rhymer of ‘marsh mallow’ and ‘beach swallow’ – a man one could indeed simply laugh at, were there no sinister side to his right-winged wrongheadedness and his rape of Mother English.

Counterstrategy I had none; nor motive, at first, beyond mere literary principle. Unacquainted with your work (and that of most of your countrymen), my first candidates were writers most honoured already in my own heart: Mrs Lessing perhaps, even Miss Murdoch; or the Anthony Powell or Burgess. To the argument (advanced at once by Dr Carter) that none of these has connexion with MSUC, I replied that ‘connexions’ should have no connexion with honours. Yet I acceded to the gentler suasion of my friend, colleague, and committee appointee Mr Ambrose Mensch (whom I believe you know?): Marshyhope being not even a national, far less an international, institution, it were presumptuous of us to think to honour as it were beyond our means (literally so, in the matter of transatlantic air fares). He then suggested such Americans as one Mr Styron, who has roots in Virginia, and a Mr Updike, formerly of Pennsylvania. But I replied, cordially, that once the criterion of mere merit was put by, to honour a writer for springing from a neighbouring state made no more sense that to do so for his springing from a neighbouring shire, or civilization. Indeed the principle of ‘appropriateness’, on which we now agreed if on little else, was really Carter’s ‘connexion’ in more palatable guise: as we were in fact a college of the state university and so far specifically regional, perhaps we could after all do honour without presumption only to a writer, scholar, or journalist with connexion to the Old Line State, preferably to the Eastern Shore thereof?

On these friendly deliberations between Mr Mensch and myself, Dr Carter merely smiled, prepared in any case to vote negatively on all nominations except A. B. Cook’s, which he had put before us in the opening minutes of our opening session. I should add that, there being in the bylaws of the college and of the faculty as yet no provision for the nomination of candidates for honorary degrees, our procedure was ad hoc as our committee; but I was given to understand, by Sticklish insinuation, that if our nomination were not unanimous and soon forthcoming, Schott would empower his academic vice-president to form a new committee; further, that if our choice proved displeasing to the administration, the Faculty of Letters could expect no budgetary blessings next fiscal. Schott himself, with more than customary tact, merely declared to me his satisfaction, at this point in our discussions, that we had decided to honour a native son . . .

‘I.e., the Fair-Land Muse himself,’ Mr Mensch dryly supposed on hearing this news (the epithet from Cook’s own rhyme for Maryland, in its local two-syllable pronunciation). I then conveyed to him, and do now to you, in both instances begging leave not to reveal my source, that I had good reason to believe that beneath his boorish, even ludicrous, public posturing, Andrew Burlingame Cook VI (his full denomination!) is a dark political power, in ‘Mair’land’ and beyond: not a kingmaker, but a maker and unmaker of kingmakers: a man behind the men behind the scenes, with whose support it was, alas, not unimaginable after all that John Schott might one day cross the Bay to ‘Annapolis, maybe even Washington.’ To thwart Cook’s nomination, then, and haply thereby to provoke his displeasure with our acting president, might be to strike a blow, at least a tap, for decent government!

I speak lightly, sir (as did Germaine de Staël even in well-founded fear of her life), but the matter is not without gravity. This Cook is a menace to more than the art of poetry, and any diminution of his public ‘cover’, even by denying him an honour he doubtless has his reasons for desiring, is a move in the public weal.

And now I believe, what I would not have done a fortnight past, that with your help – i.e., your ‘aye’ – he may be denied. ‘Of course,’ Mr Mensch remarked to me one evening, ‘there’s always my old friend B . . .’ I asked (excuse me) whom that name might name, and was told: not only that you were born and raised hereabouts, made good your escape, and from a fit northern distance set your first novels in this area, but that my friend himself – our friend – was at that moment under contract to write a screenplay of your newest book, to be filmed on location in the county. How would your name strike Carter, Schott and company? It just might work, good Ambrose thought, clearly now warming to his inspiration and wondering aloud why he hadn’t hit on it before – especially since, though he’d not corresponded with you for years, he was immersed in your fiction; is indeed on leave from teaching this semester to draft that screenplay.

In sum, it came (and comes) to this: John Schott’s appointment to the presidency of MSU is quietly opposed, in our opinion, by moderate elements on the board of regents and the Tidewater Foundation, and it can be imagined that, among the more knowledgeable of these elements, this opposition extends to the trumpeting false laureate as well. Their support comes from the radical right and, perversely, the radical left (that minority of two or three bent on destroying universities altogether as perpetuators of bourgeois values). A dark-horse nominee of the right colouration might just slip between this Scylla and this Charybdis.

Very casually we tried your name on Harry Carter, and were pleased to observe in his reaction more suspicious curiosity than actual opposition. This curiosity, moreover, turned into guarded interest when Ambrose pointed out (as if the thought had just occurred to him) that the ‘tie-in’ at our June commencement of the filming of your book and the county’s Tercentennial (itself to involve some sort of feature on ‘Dorchester in Art and Literature’) would no doubt occasion publicity for Marshyhope U. and the Tower of Truth. He, Ambrose – he added with the straightest of faces – might even be able to work into the film itself some footage of the ceremonies, and the Tower . . .

This was last week. Our meeting ended with a sort of vote: two-nothing in favour of your nomination, Dr Carter abstaining. To my surprise, the acting president’s reaction, relayed through both Dr Carter and Miss Stickles, is cautious non disapproval, and today I am authorised to make the invitation.

You are, then, sir, by way of being a compromise candidate, who will, I hope, so far from feeling therein compromised, come to the aid of your friend, your native county, and its ‘largest single economic [and only cultural] entity’ by accepting this curious invitation. Moreover, by accepting it promptly, before the opposition (some degree of which is to be expected) has time to rally. That Schott even tentatively permits this letter implies that A. B. Cook VI has been sounded out and, for whatever mysterious reasons, chooses not to exercise his veto out of hand. But Ambrose informs me, grimly, that there is a ‘Dr Schott’ in some novel of yours, too closely resembling ours for coincidence, and not flatteringly drawn: should he get wind of this fact (Can it be true? Too delicious!) before your acceptance has been made public.

Au revoir, then, friend of my friend! I hold your first novel in my hand, eager to embark upon it; in your own hand you may hold some measure of our future here (think what salubrious effect a few well-chosen public jibes at the ‘Tow’r of Truth’ and its tidewater laureate might have, televised live from Redmans Neck on Commencement Day!). Do therefore respond at your earliest to this passing odd epistle, whose tail like the spermatozoon’s far out-measures its body, the better to accomplish its single urgent end, and – like Molly Bloom at the close of her great soliloquy (whose author was, yes, a friend of your friend’s friend) – say to us yes, to the Litt.D. yes to MSU yes, and yes Dorchester, yes Tidewater, Maryland yes yes yes!

Dear Reader, and

Gentles all: LETTERS is now begun, its correspondents introduced and their stories commencing to entwine. Like those films whose credits appear after the action has started, it will now pause.

If ‘now’ were the date above, I should be writing this from Buffalo, New York, on a partly sunny Sunday mild for that area in that season, when Lake Erie is still frozen and the winter’s heaviest snowfall yet ahead. On the 61st day of the 70th year of the 20th century of the Christian calendar, the human world and its American neighbourhood, having survived, in the main, the shocks of ‘1968’ and its predecessors, stood such-a-way: Clay Shaw was acquitted on a charge of involvement in the assassination of President John Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan was pleading in vain to be executed for assassinating Senator Robert Kennedy, and James Earl Ray was about to be convicted of assassinating the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Ex-President Dwight Eisenhower was weakening toward death after abdominal surgery in February; ex-President Lyndon Johnson, brought down by the Viet Nam War, had retired to Texas; his newly inaugurated successor, Richard M. Nixon, was in Paris conferring with French President de Gaulle and considering the Pentagon’s new antiballistic missile program. The North Vietnamese were pressing a successful offensive toward Saigon while the Paris peace conference – finally begun in January after the long dispute over seating arrangements – entered Week Six of its four-year history. Everywhere university students were rioting: the Red Guard was winding up Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China; the University of Rome was closed; martial law had been imposed here and there in Spain, tear gas and bayonets in Berkeley and Madison; in Prague students were burning themselves alive to protest Soviet occupation of their country. Hostility between the Russians and the Chinese was on the verge of open warfare at the border of Sinkiang Province; along Israel’s borders with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, things once again had crossed that verge. The USS Pueblo inquiry, souvenir of one war ago, was still in progress. The Apollo-9 spacecraft was counting down for launch toward its moon-orbiting mission, the French-British Concorde for the first supersonic transport flight, both to be accomplished on the following day. Ribonuclease, the ‘key to life,’ had just been synthesized for the first time in a chemical laboratory; in another, also for the first time, a human egg was successfully fertilized outside the human body. The economy of the United States was inflating at a slightly higher annual rate than the 4.7% of 1968, which had been the highest in seventeen years; the divorce rate was the highest since 1945. Having affirmed the legality of student protest ‘within limits,’ our Supreme Court was deciding on the other hand to permit much broader use of electronic surveillance devices by law-enforcement agencies. Every fourth day of the year, on the average, an airliner had been hijacked: fifteen so far. Before the month expired, so would Mr Eisenhower; and before the year, Senator Everett Dirksen, Levi Eshkol, Ho Chi Minh and Mary Jo Kopechne, with difficult consequences for Senator Edward Kennedy. Tom Mboya would be assassinated in Nairobi, Sharon Tate and her friends massacred in California, large numbers of Southeast Asians in Southeast Asia. Sirhan Sirhan would be sentenced to death, James Earl Ray to 99 years’ imprisonment; Charles Manson and Family would be arrested and charged with the Tate killings, but the Green Beret murder trails would be dropped when the CIA forbade its implicated agents to testify. Ave Fortas would resign from the US Supreme Court and be replaced by Warren Burger, whose court (in opposition to President Nixon) would order immediate desegregation of Southern schools and soften the penalties for possession of marijuana; the US Court of Appeals would reverse the 1968 conviction of Dr Benjamin Spock and his alleged co-conspirators; and Judge Julius Hoffman would begin the trial of the Chicago Seven for inciting riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Russian-Chinese border fighting would be ‘resolved’ by talks between Aleksei Kosygin and Chou En-lai, and Chairman Mao would declare the Cultural Revolution accomplished. While the Paris peace talks reached an impasse, the cost to the United States of the Viet Nam War would reach 100 billion dollars, fresh US atrocities would be reported, the draft lottery would begin, the first contingent of American troops would be withdrawn from South Viet Nam, the Defence Department would deny, untruthfully, the presence and activity of US forces in Laos, the student riots, strikes, and building seizures would spread to every major campus in the nation, and a quarter-million demonstrators, the largest such crowd in the 193 years of the Republic, would march in Washington on the occasion of the ‘Moratorium’. US forces in Spain would practice putting down a hypothetical anti-Franco uprising; U Thant would declare the Mideast to be in a state of war; the British Army would take over the policing of Northern Ireland after a resurgence of warfare between Catholics and Protestants; China would explode thermonuclear test weapons in the atmosphere; the US and Russia would reply with underground thermonuclear explosions of their own, in the Aleutians and Siberia, and begin arms-limitation conferences in Helsinki. President Ayub would resign in Pakistan, Georges Pompidou would succeed Charles de Gaulle in France, Golda Meir the late Levi Eshkol in Israel, and a military junta the deposed president of Bolivia. Nixon would lift the ban on arms sales to Peru (and meet with President Thieu on Midway, and exercise his broader ‘bugging’ rights against political dissenters, and postpone the fall desegregation deadline for Southern schools, and close the Job Corps camps, and visit South Viet Nam, and greet the returning Apollo-11 astronauts aboard the USS Hornet). Those latter, and their successors in Apollo-12, would have left the first human footprints on the moon and fetched home a number of its rocks to prove it, despite which evidence a great many Americans would half-believe the whole exploit to have been faked by their government and the television networks; the Mariner spacecrafts 6 and 7 would photograph canal-less, lifeless Mars; Russia’s Venus 5 and 6 would reach their namesake planet and reveal it also to be devoid of life. The New York State legislature would defeat a liberalized abortion bill. Complete eyes would join hearts and kidneys on the growing list of successfully transplanted human parts. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare would recommend an absolute ban on the use of DDT. Unemployment, inflation, prime interest, and first class postage rates would rise in the United States, the stock market plunge; 900 heroin deaths, mostly of young people, would be reported in New York City; the Netherlands would temporarily shut off public water when US nerve gas accidentally poisoned the Rhine. Dorchester County, Maryland, would celebrate its Tercentenary; fire would melt a wax museum at Niagara Falls, and the American Falls itself would be turned off for engineering surveys. At least six more airliners would be hijacked; Thor Heyerdahl in Ra I would embark upon the Atlantic, along with tropical storms Anna, Blanche, Carol, Debbie, Eve, Francelia, Gerda et al.; in East Pakistan a child would be swallowed by a python; the National Committee on Violence would describe the 1960s as one of the most violent decades in United States history, but the French wine-growers association would declare ’69 a vintage year.

But every letter has two times, that of its writing and that of its reading, which may be so separated, even when the post office does its job, that very little of what obtained when the writer wrote will still when the reader reads. And to the units of epistolary fictions yet a third time is added: the actual date of composition, which will not likely correspond to the letterhead date, a function more of plot or form than of history. It is not March 2, 1969: when I began this letter it was October 30, 1973: an inclement Tuesday morning in Baltimore, Maryland. The Viet Nam War was ‘over’; its peacemakers were honoured with the Nobel Prize; the latest Arab-Israeli war, likewise ‘over,’ had pre-empted our attention, even more so the ‘energy crisis’ it occasioned, and the Watergate scandals and presidential-impeachment moves – from which neither of those other crises perfectly diverted us. The campuses were quiet; the peacetime draft had ended; détente had been declared with Russia and proposed with China – unthinkable in 1969! – but the American defence budget was more enormous than ever. In Northern Ireland the terrorism continued; the generals had taken over in Greece and Chile, and Juan Perón was back in Argentina; Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray were still in jail, joined by Charles Manson and Lieutenant Calley of the My Lai massacre. The Apollo space program was finished; there would not likely be another human being on the moon in this century. We were anticipating the arrival of the newly discovered comet Kohoutek, which promised to be the most spectacular sight in the sky for many decades. Meanwhile the US Supreme Court had struck down all anti-abortion laws but retreated from its liberal position on pornography, and the retrials of the Chicago Seven had begun. The prime interest rate was up to 10%, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, after a bad year, up to 980, first class postage up to eight cents an ounce. Airport security measures had virtually eliminated skyjacking except by Palestinian terrorists; the ‘fuel shortage’, in turn, was occasioning the elimination of many airline flights. Plans for the 1976 US Bicentennial were floundering.

Now it’s not 10/30/73 any longer, either. In the time between my first setting down ‘March 2, 1969’ and now, ‘now’ has become January 1974. Nixon won’t go away; neither will the ‘energy crisis’ or inflation-plus-recession or the dreadfulnesses of nations and their ongoing history. The other astronomical flop, Kohoutek, will return in 75,000 years, as may we all. By the time I reach Yours Truly . . .

The plan of LETTERS calls for a second Letter to the Reader at the end of the manuscript, by when what I’ve ‘now’ recorded will seem already as remote as ‘March 2, 1969.’ By the time LETTERS is in print, ditto for what shall be recorded in that final letter. And – to come at last to the last of a letter’s times – by the time your eyes, Reader, review these epistolary fictive a‘s-to-z‘s, the ‘United States of America’ may be setting about its Tri- or Quadricentennial, or be still floundering through its Bi-, or be a mere memory (may it have become again, in that case, like the first half of one’s life, at least a pleasant memory). Its citizens and the planet’s, not excepting yourself and me, may all be mainly just a few years older. Or perhaps you’re yet to have been conceived, and by the ‘now’ your eyes read now, every person now alive upon the earth will be no longer, most certainly not excepting.

Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst?):

Not many invitations could please me more, ordinarily, than yours of March 8. Much obliged, indeed.

By coincidence, however, I accepted in February a similar invitation from the main campus of the State University at College Park (it seems to be my year down there), and I feel that two degrees in the same June from the same Border State would border upon redundancy. So I decline, with thanks, and trust that the ominous matters you allude to in your remarkable postscript can be forestalled in some other wise.

Why not award the thing to our mutual acquaintance Ambrose Mensch? He’s an honourable, deserving oddball and a bona fide avant-gardist, whose ‘career’ I’ve followed with interest and sympathy. A true ‘doctor of letters’ (in the Johns Hopkins Medical School sense), he is a tinkerer, an experimenter, a slightly astigmatic visionary, perhaps even a revolutionizer of cures – and patient Literature, as your letter acknowledges, if not terminal, is not as young as she used to be either.

P.S.: ‘I have made this longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter’: Pascal, Letters provinciales, XVI. Perhaps Mme de Staël was paraphrasing Pascal?

P.P.S.: Do the French not customarily serve the salad after the entrée?

Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst):

Ever since your letter of March 8, I have been bemused by two coincidences (if that is the word) embodied in it, of a more vertiginous order than the simple coincidence of the College Park invitation, which I had already accepted, and yours from Marshyhope, which I felt obliged therefore to decline in my letter to you of last Sunday.

The first coincidence is that, some months before the earlier invitation – last year, in fact, when I began making notes toward a new novel – I had envisioned just such an invitation to one of its principal characters. Indeed, an early note for the project (undated, but from mid-1968) reads as follows:

A man (A–?) is writing letters to a woman (Z–?). A is ‘a little past the middle of the road,’ but feels that ‘the story of his life is just beginning,’ in medias res. Z is (a) Nymph, (b) Bride, and (c) Crone; also Muse: i.e., Belles Lettres. A is a ‘Doctor of Letters’ (honorary Litt. D.): degree awarded for ‘contribution to life of literature.’ Others allege he’s hastening its demise; would even charge him with malpractice. Etc.

Then arrived in the post the College Park invitation in February and yours in March. I was spooked more by the second than the first, since it came not only from another Maryland university, but from – well, consider this other notebook entry, under the heading ‘Plot A: Lady ——- & the Litt. D.’:

A (British?) belletrist ‘of a certain age,’ she has been the Great Good Friend of sundry distinguished authors, perhaps even the original of certain of their heroines and the inspiration of their novels. Sometimes intimates that she invented their best conceptions, her famous lovers merely transcribing as it were her conceits, fleshing out her ideas – and not always faithfully (i.e., ‘doctoring’ her letters to them). Etc.

This circa September 1968. Then, two weeks ago, your letter, with its extraordinary postscript . . .

Hence my bemusement. For autobiographical ‘fiction’ I have only disdain; but what’s involved here strikes me less as autobiography than as a muddling of the distinction between Art and Life, a boundary as historically notorious as Mason and Dixon’s line. That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history – disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favour of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving a détente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover.

So, my dear Lady Amherst: this letter – my second to you, ninth in the old New England Primer – is an In-vi-ta-ti-on which, whether or not you see fit to accept it, I pray you will entertain as considerately as I hope I entertained yours of the 8th instant: Will you consent to be A Character in My Novel? That is, may I – in the manner of novelists back in the heroic period of the genre – make use of my imagination of you (and whatever information about yourself it may suit your discretion to provide in response to certain questions I have in mind to ask you) to ‘flesh out’ that character aforenoted? Just as you, from my side of this funhouse mirror, seem to have plagiarized my imagination in your actual life story . . .

The request is irregular. For me it is unprecedented – though for all I know it may be routine to an erstwhile friend of Wells, Joyce, Huxley. What I’d like to know is more about your history; your connection with those eminent folk; that ‘fall’ you allude to in your postscript, from such connection to your present circumstances at MSUC; even (as a ‘lifelong mistress of the arts’ you will surely understand) more delicate matters. If I’m going to break another lance with Realism, I mean to go the whole way.

I am tempted to make your acquaintance directly, prevailing upon our mutual friend to do the honours; I’d meant to pay a visit to Dorchester anyhow in June, from College Park. But I recall and understand Henry James’s disinclination to hear too much of an anecdote the heart of which he recognized as a potential story. Moreover, in keeping with my (still vague) notion of the project, I should prefer that our connection be not only strictly verbal, but epistolary. Cf. James’s notebook exclamation: ‘The correspondences! The correspondences!’

Here’s what I can tell you of that project. For as long as I can remember I’ve been enamoured of the old tale-cycles, especially of the frame tale sort: The Ocean of Story, The Thousand and One Nights, the Pent-, Hept- and Decamerons. With the help of a research assistant I recently reviewed the corpus of frame-tale literature to see what I could learn from it, and started making notes toward a frame-tale novel. By 1968 I’d decided to use documents instead of told stories: texts-within-texts instead of tales-within-tales. Rereading the early English novelists, I was impressed with their characteristic awareness that they’re writing – that their fictions exist in the form, not of sounds in the ear, but of signs on the page, imitative not of life ‘directly,’ but of its documents – and I considered marrying one venerable narrative tradition to another: the frame-tale and the ‘documentary’ novel. By this time last year I had in mind ‘an open (love) letter to Whom It May Concern, from Yours Truly.’ By April, as grist for what final mill I was still by no means certain, I had half a work-bookful of specific formal notes and ‘incidental felicities’: e.g., ‘Bit 46’, from Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso: the choirs of the blessed, like sailors in formation of an aircraft-carrier deck or bandsmen at half time in an American football match, spell out with themselves on the billboard of Heaven diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram (‘love justice, [ye] who judge [on] earth’; or 47, an old English hornbook riddle in the Kabbalistic tradition of the Holy Unspeakable Name of God: ‘AEIOU His Great Name doth Spell;/Here it is known, but is not known in Hell.’

I could go on, and won’t. ‘The correspondences!’ I was ready to begin. All I lacked were – well, characters, theme, plot, action, diction, scene and format; in short, a story, a way to tell it, and a voice to tell it in!

Now I have a story, at least in rough prospectus, precipitated by this pair of queer coincidences. Or if not a story in Henry James’s sense, at least a narrative method in Scheherazade’s.

But it is unwise to speak much of plans still tentative. Will you be my ‘Lady A’, my heroine, my creation?

And permit me the honour of being, as in better-lettered times gone by, your faithful

LETTERS: an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual. They will write always in this order: Lady Amherst, Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, A. B. Cook, Jerome Bray, Ambrose Mensch, the Author. Their letters will total 88 (this is the eighth), divided unequally into seven sections according to a certain scheme: see Ambrose Mensch’s model, postscript to Letter 86 (Part S, p.770). Their several narratives will become one; like waves of a rising tide, the plot will surge forward, recede, surge farther forward, recede less far, et cetera to its climax and dénouement.

On with the story.