Letters Read online

  Copyright © 1979 by John Barth

  All rights reserved

  This book or parts thereof must not be reproduced

  in any form without permission.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by Longman Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Designed by Helen Barrow

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Barth, John.

  Letters.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.B284Le 1979 [PS3552.A75] 813’.5’4

  ISBN 0-399-12425-X

  79-13503

  Printed in the United States of America

  Third Impression

  for Shelly

  L E T T E R S

  1: L

  A: Lady Amherst to the Author. Inviting him to accept an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Marshyhope State University. An account of the history of that institution.

  B: Todd Andrews to his father. The death and funeral of Harrison Mack, Jr.

  C: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His life since The End of the Road. The remarkable reappearance, at the Remobilization Farm, of Joseph Morgan, with an ultimatum.

  D: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The origins of the Castines, Cookes, and Burlingames.

  E: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews. Requesting counsel in an action of plagiarism against the Author. His bibliography and biography. Enclosures to the Author, to George III, and to Todd Andrews.

  F: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly (and Lady Amherst). A de-cla-ra-ti-on and an ex-hor-ta-ti-on. With several postscripts.

  G: The Author to the Reader. LETTERS is “now” begun.

  I: The Author to Whom It May Concern. Three concentric dreams of waking.

  N: The Author to Lady Amherst. Politely declining her invitation.

  E: The Author to Lady Amherst. A counterinvitation.

  2: E

  N: Lady Amherst to the Author. Rejecting his counterinvitation.

  O: Lady Amherst to the Author. Reconsidering.

  L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Confessing her latest love affair and the excesses of its current stage.

  D: Lady Amherst to the Author. Trouble at Marshyhope. Her early relations with several celebrated novelists. Her affair with André Castine, and its issue. Her marriage to Lord Jeffrey Amherst. Her widowing and reduction to academic life.

  Y: Todd Andrews to the Author. Acknowledging the latter’s invitation and reviewing his life since their last communication. The Tragic View of things, including the Tragic View.

  T: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. Progress and Advice.

  R: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of A. B. Cooke III: Pontiac’s conspiracy.

  O: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of H. C. Burlingame IV: the first American Revolution.

  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.

  W: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly and Lady Amherst. THE AMATEUR, or, A Cure for Cancer, by Arthur Morton King.

  S: The Author to Todd Andrews. Soliciting the latter’s cooperation as a character in a new work of fiction.

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

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

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

  3: T

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

  I: Lady Amherst to the Author. More trouble at Marshyhope. Her relations with the late Harrison Mack, Jr., or “George III.”

  M: Lady Amherst to the Author. Three miracles in three days. Ambrose’s adventures with the film company. The Fourth Stage of their affair begins.

  E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her introduction to the Menschhaus.

  E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Not pregnant. The “prenatal” letters of A. B. Cook IV.

  S: Todd Andrews to his father. His life’s recycling. Jane Mack’s visit and confession. 10 R.

  I: Jacob Horner to the Author. Declining to rewalk to the end of the road.

  L: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. His own history to the present writing: the French Revolution, Joel Barlow in Algiers, “Consuelo del Consulado,” Burr’s Conspiracy, Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy. The Pattern.

  S: Jerome Bray to Drew Mack. LILYVAC’s LEAFY ANAGRAM.

  H: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. A reflection upon History. His defeat by the Director at Ocean City: an Unwritable Sequence. Magda celebrates a certain anniversary.

  S: The Author to Jacob Horner. The story of a story called What I Did Until the Doctor Came.

  4: T

  P: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage of her affair. She calls on A. B. Cook VI in Chautaugua. Ambrose’s Perseus project, and a proposition.

  I: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage continues. Filmmaking at Niagara Falls and Old Fort Erie. Dismaying encounters at the Remobilization Farm.

  S: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her conversation with “Monsieur Casteene.” A fiasco on Chautaugua Lake. A Visit to Lily Dale, N.Y., Spiritualist Capital of America.

  T: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Marshyhope Commencement debacle, and its consequences.

  O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage concludes; the Fifth begins. Magda’s confession. The Gadfly fiasco reenacted: an Unfilmable Sequence.

  E: Todd Andrews to his father. Further evidence that his life is recycling: 11 R.

  T: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. Der Wiedertraum under way.

  L: A. B. Cook VI to the Author. Eagerly accepting the Author’s invitation. The Cook/Burlingame lineage between Andrew Cook IV and himself. The Welland Canal Plot.

  E: Jerome Bray to his parents and foster parents. His betrayal by Merope Bernstein. His revenge and despair.

  I: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. Anniversary of the bees’ descent. Encounters with Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank. He identifies his condition with Perseus’s, and despairs.

  E: The Author to A. B. Cook VI. A request for information and an invitation to participate in the work in progress.

  5: E

  L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Despair at Ambrose’s infidelity. Their Fifth Stage.

  A: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Dorchester County Tercentenary and Mating-Season Sequences. Ambrose’s concussion, and its cause.

  R: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Battle of Niagara. Surgery for Magda. Lady Amherst desperate.

  Y: Lady Amherst to the Author. Odd business in Buffalo.

  V: Todd Andrews to his father. His Second Dark Night of the Soul. 13 R.

  I: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His discovery that he is in love.

  S: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The first of A. B. Cook IV’s “posthumous” letters summarized: the deaths of Joel Barlow and Tecumseh.

  &: A. B. Cook VI to his son. A. B. Cook IV’s second posthumous letter: Washington burned, Baltimore threatened.

  A: Jerome Bray to the Author. The Gadfly Illuminations.

  C: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. A lull on Bloodsworth Island.

  L: The Author to Jerome Bray. Admonition and invitation.

  F: The Author to Jacob Horner. Accepting the latter’s declining of his invitation of May 11 and thanking him for several contributions to the current project.

  A: The Author to A. B. Cook VI. Expressing dismay at the latter’s presumption and withdrawing the invitation of June 15.

  C: The Author to Jerome Bray. Some afterthoughts on numbers, letters, and the myth of Bellerophon and the Chimera.

  6: R

  N: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage of her affa
ir. The Scajaquada Scuffle.

  O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage continues. The Fort Erie Magazine Explosion and Second Conception scenes.

  V: Lady Amherst to the Author. Distress at Mensch’s Castle.

  E: Todd Andrews to his father. 13 R, a visit from Polly Lake, a call from Jeannine.

  N: Todd Andrews to the Author. A series of 21’s and an intention to bequeath.

  O: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His rescue of Marsha Blank from Comalot Farm, and present anxiety in her behalf.

  U: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His last Progress and Advice session before “Saint Joseph’s” deadline.

  D: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The third posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: the Battle of New Orleans and Napoleon’s surrender to Bellerophon.

  R: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The fourth posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: plans for the rescue of Napoleon from St. Helena.

  E: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The fifth and final posthumous letter of A. B. Cook IV: Napoleon “rescued.”

  C: Jerome Bray to Bea Golden. Inviting her to star in the first epic of Numerature.

  H: Jerome Bray to his parents. An ultimatum.

  H: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. His final such letter: the plan of his abandoned Perseus story, conformed to the plan of his own life.

  I: Ambrose Mensch to the Author. A left-handed letter following up a telephone call. Alphabetical instructions from one writer to another.

  T: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Soliciting his advice and assistance in the LETTERS project.

  U: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Replying to the latter’s telephone call of the previous night.

  7: S

  E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Explaining her fortnight’s silence. The Burning of Washington. Two more deaths and a memorial service. Preparations for the Bombardment of Fort McHenry and for her wedding.

  L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her wedding day and night. The Dawn’s Early Light sequence and the Baratarian disasters. Her vision of the Seventh Stage.

  F: Todd Andrews to his father. His last cruise on the skipjack Osborn Jones.

  I: Draft codicil to the last will and testament of Todd Andrews.

  S: Jacob Horner to Todd Andrews. The end of Der Wiedertraum.

  A: A. B. Cook VI to his son. A summons to Fort McHenry and to the Second 7-Year Plan.

  M: A. B. Cook VI to his son and/or prospective grandchild. With a postscript to the Author from H. C. Burlingame VII. Each explaining A. B. Cook VI’s absence from the yacht Baratarian.

  O: Jerome Bray to his grandmother. His business finished, he prepares to ascend to her.

  M: Ambrose Mensch to Arthur Morton King (and Lady Amherst). Proposing marriage to Lady Amherst. She accepts.

  A: Ambrose Mensch to Whom It May Concern (in particular the Author). Water message #2 received. His reply. A postscript to the Author.

  A: The Author to Germaine Pitt and Ambrose Mensch. An alphabetical wedding toast.

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

  A: Lady Amherst to the Author. Inviting him to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from Marshyhope State University. An account of the history of that institution.

  Office of the Provost

  Faculty of Letters

  Marshyhope State University

  Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

  8 March 1969

  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 enrollment 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,

  Yours sincerely,

  Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)

  Acting Provost

  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 sentence (my initial sentence) 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 circumstance 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-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 gossipped 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 parallelling 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 therefor, 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.