The Friday Book Page 23

  Here are the first seven pages of my “Perseid”:

  Speaking of LETTERS

  THE INTERVIEW is not my métier: I have never once regretted saying No to interview-requests, and have more than once regretted saying Yes. But when the novel LETTERS was finally done in 1979 and my publisher made a bet on its commercial success—a bet as unprofitable in the event as it was handsome at the time—I did my bit with the interviewers to help the book along. The best of the lot was a friend from Buffalo days, Angela Gerst, then working in Boston. Our conversation, in a considerably expanded version, first appeared in the Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine section and has since been reprinted here and there. It is more chatty but less efficient than this initial tapescript, from which it grew.

  GERST: You don’t enjoy interviews.

  BARTH: As a rule, no.

  G: Why do you suppose so many writers feel that way?

  B: No doubt because our business is the considered word, not the spontaneous. We care as much for the how as for the what gets said, in print. Talking with audiences can be enjoyable; talking tête-à-tête can be enjoyable. But talking tête-à-tête for the record…

  G: Yet you’ve agreed to this tête-à-tête for the record…

  B: The rules, as Jesus says about the Sabbath, are made for us, not we for them. I have a big new novel done, which I’m excited about and may now speak of without risking the muse’s disfavor. Finally, you’re both a former student of mine and an old friend. Shoot.

  G: Even so, you’ll want to review the transcript?

  B: To put it gently.

  G: My questions as well as your responses?

  B: Inevitably. Otherwise it all comes out late-Eisenhower. Another reason for interviewing rarely: It’s work.

  G: And you have a good many former students.

  B: Several thousand, after nearly three decades of full-time teaching. But not so many who are also friends. Of those, I’ve married one; I stay in reasonably close touch with half a dozen others at a time; and I read the published writings of a few dozen more, products of my seminars over the years at Penn State, Buffalo, Boston, and especially Johns Hopkins.

  G: You read only their published work?

  B: Absolutely. No hopeful typescripts once they’ve graduated. Otherwise I’d drown. My current students keep me adequately supplied in the hopeful-typescript way. Since they’re chosen for their ability—I mean the graduate students—their work is generally quite interesting, thank God. But it is advanced-apprentice typescript, and there are so many fine things one hasn’t read yet in print, and so many other agreeable things to do besides write, read, and teach…

  G: Such as?

  B: Sailing on the Chesapeake. Snorkeling in the Caribbean. Tennis, skiing, eating, drinking, sleeping, et cetera. Maintaining the property and a flotilla of small watercraft. Writing letters to my parents and in-laws and grown-up children. Listening to jazz—I used to play it, but don’t anymore—and Baroque music. Thinking, daydreaming, loafing. Avoiding harm to myself, my fellow humans, and the planet. Avoiding interviews except with former students who are also old friends.

  G: Shall we talk about the new novel?

  B: Yup.

  G: Let’s begin with its title.

  B: LETTERS. Seven caps, please. Subtitled An old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual. Eighty-seven lower-case letters plus an ampersand.

  G: “… each of which…”?

  B: Unavoidable. Whom doesn’t have enough letters.

  G: To total eighty-eight?

  B: And to put the g of imagines in the right position in a certain pattern, an alphabetical acrostic. Don’t ask. Perfectly clear in the novel.

  G: Seven authors?

  B: Seven correspondents, including the capital-A Author. Six of the seven happen to be men; The seventh—and most important—is a wonderful middle-aged British-Swiss gentlewoman and scholar: one Germaine Gordon Pitt, Lady Amherst, now widowed and reduced to teaching History of the Novel 101 in a third-rate American college—

  G: Anywhere in particular?

  B: Marshyhope State University, Redmans Neck, Maryland, 21612. An imaginary city of learning built in and upon the Dorchester County marshes, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

  G: I think I get the idea. Your first woman protagonist, not counting Scheherazade?

  B: Yup. And she’s a jim dandy, in her author’s opinion.

  G: What’s she like?

  B: Ms. Pitt traces her descent from Lord Jeffrey Amherst, of French-and-Indian War fame; also from an unrecorded dalliance between the aging Madame de Staël and her young friend Lord Byron. Highly unlikely, given Byron’s sexual pickiness, but all things are possible to the novelist. It isn’t true, by the way, that Lord Jeffrey Amherst distributed smallpox-infected blankets to the Indians to speed them to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

  G: I’m relieved to hear that.

  B: He only authorized the distribution of such blankets, in a letter to one of his officers at Fort Pitt who had proposed the stratagem. Our first adventure into bacteriological warfare. As for my Lady A: In better days she has been the Great Good Friend of a number of this century’s celebrated novelists. She has even been impregnated by a few of them, though all the pregnancies have failed to reach term for one reason or another. In 1969, the present time of the novel, she’s fifty and has a new young American lover, who does not always manifest his love with the dignity and courtesy she deserves. He’s a failed last-ditch provincial modernist and avant-gardist; a sort of marsh-country mandarin. But he is possessed of an unreasoning obsession to impregnate my heroine one last time and bear a child with her, despite her age and their unimpressive track records. You get the idea.

  G: I do.

  B: All twenty-four of her letters are to the Author, who for the most part does not reply. Who’s got time to answer all the mail? I do, but not the capital-A Author of LETTERS. That’s a pity, because Germaine Gordon Pitt is a remarkable woman, whom I’m proud to have conceived and brought to light. You’d like her.

  G: I hope so. Who are the other six correspondents? I mean the other five, after Lady Amherst and the Author?

  B: In order, after Lady A, whose letters open each of the novel’s seven sections: Todd Andrews (the lawyer-hero of my first novel, The Floating Opera): He’s sixty-nine now and reconsidering suicide, but for all new reasons. Jacob Horner of The End of the Road, whose Remobilization Farm is presently located in Fort Erie, Ontario, and has become a haven for U.S. Vietnam War escapees as well as for the immobilized. Andrew Burlingame Cook the Sixth, lineal descendant of Maryland’s Colonial virgin poet laureate in The Sot-Weed Factor; he is searching for his son, a Quebec terrorist, and for his ancestors, particularly from the time of the British Chesapeake invasion in the 1812 War. Washington burned! Baltimore threatened! Let’s see…

  G: Two more.

  B: Jerome Bonaparte Bray, putative editor of Giles Goat-Boy, who works with a peculiar computer in Lily Dale, New York, the Spiritualist Capital of America, and who himself may be a great big bug mimicking a postmodern writer…

  G: Mm hm.

  B: And Ambrose Mensch, from Lost in the Funhouse, currently Lady A’s lover aforementioned. Then there’s the Author, a self-effacing chap whose letters to the other six are generally polite requests for information. The several plots soon become one plot, of course: a good one, in my judgment.

  G: That is to say, in “the Author’s” judgment?

  B: In a sense, Angela. In a sense.

  G: Characters from all your previous books…

  B: I know: One shouldn’t. But it is a rule in our house that you needn’t have read or even have heard of the other books in order to enjoy this one. Important rule.

  G: LETTERS in both senses, then? Alphabetical letters and written messages?

  B: In the third sense, too: literature, which I’ve heard a film-freak call “that mildly interesting historical phenomenon, of no present im
portance.”

  G: You don’t agree.

  B: My interest in movies is not great, particularly since the filming of The End of the Road. But I often think about the strengths and limitations of print versus film, TV, and theater—and, for that matter, opera, ballet, cartoon strips, tape, and live voice. All the various ways of “telling” stories, which is my passion and vocation.

  G: Should we talk about that? The differences between media?

  B: Sure. It mostly goes without saying, but it doesn’t always go without doing. Certain things are easier to do in one medium than in another.

  G: Couple of examples?

  B: Metaphor: very clumsy in the visual media; very easy, almost inherent, in words, if you have the gift (Aristotle says it’s the only aspect of writing that can’t be taught). The whole universe inside our heads and under our skins: at your disposal in verbal narrative; only indirectly approachable in drama and film and the rest. Print, on the other hand, appeals directly to none of the physical senses. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I won’t natter on. But no doubt this is why even a second-rate film often moves us to physical tears and laughter, while even a great novel almost never does. Especially to tears. How many times have you wept real salt tears upon the printed page?

  G: My copy of Ulysses is pretty dry. But my Anna Karenina is all but unglued from having been wept into. Maybe you’re just hard-hearted.

  B: That may be. And yet great fiction can change our lives; turn us around corners. No movie ever did that to me. I might walk and talk a bit differently for a few minutes after leaving an effective film, but that’s about it. Novels have heft; films are filmy.

  G: What’s the heft of LETTERS? I mean what’s it about?

  B: All the foregoing, for one thing: I mean the three senses of letters, and the word-versus-image business, and Can the old girl bear one more offspring at this advanced hour of the world, and if so will it be a monster or what. Madame de Staël’s own fifth and last child was unfortunately imbecilic. She and her young husband called it Petit Nous, pretended it was American, and invented fictitious U.S. parents for it: “Mr. and Mrs. Giles, of Boston.”…

  G: Oy. What else?

  B: The doctoring of the documents of history, from the Isidorean Decretals to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. False letters, doctored letters, concealed or misdirected letters. Letters consigning the bearer to death (they’re called “Bellerophontic letters” in the trade). Letters crossed in the mails.

  G: What else?

  B: 1969. 1812. The genocide of aboriginal Americans. The French and American revolutions. Revolutions, recyclings, and reenactments generally. The compulsion to repeat: its hazards and possibilities. Um: “second cycles” in our lives and histories. The Tragic View of Everything, including of the tragic view.

  G: Anything else?

  B: Everything else. The passions of the human heart. Second chances. Lost loves, last loves. Language; the novel itself. God bless novels, Angela! Room to swing a cat in!

  G: You took a while writing this one. Sot-Weed and Giles, I believe, took four years apiece…

  B: Long enough to start from scratch and take a bachelor’s degree in anything.

  G: LETTERS evidently took longer. Chimera came out in ’72…

  B: It took my whole fucking forties, is what LETTERS took. Let’s say seven years, since the story runs to sevens, and it’s my seventh book. Long enough to conceive a child and see it into grade school! Or, Horace tells us in the Ars Poetica, long enough to write an epic.

  G: Is LETTERS an epic?

  B: I think of it as a medium-size principality. It’s fairly fat, but I’ve done fatter.

  G: Yet you’ve said you don’t like long novels.

  B: Other things equal, certainly not. Ars longa, et cetera. But one’s loyalty, as William Gass has said, is finally neither to oneself nor to one’s readers. It’s to the object: the project in the womb, excuse the metaphor. Some objects want to be terse little stories: I’ve published one ten words long. Some want to be novellas: that delicious, unmarketable literary space. Some want to be lean, Flaubertian novels. And some demand to be enormous creatures like Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, or the other Burton’s 1001 Nights, or Richardson’s Clarissa. The fact is, my LETTERS novel is efficient. But lean it isn’t, except as you might imagine a tidy giant. Tant pis. I think it’s terrific. Anyhow, it’s out of the house, and every cell in my body has replaced itself since I began it, and now I’m threatening fifty. Shall we change the subject?

  G: Earlier on, you mentioned house rules.

  B: Shop rules, actually. Like not recycling characters from your earlier works.

  G: What are some others in your shop?

  B: Oh… no titles or epigraphs taken from other literature. Why remind readers of things that they might be reading instead? No dedications. No autobiography, except in the Nabokovian way.

  G: What is that?

  B: His remark, in an interview, that while he deplores autobiographical fiction, he will on occasion bestow upon one of his invented characters a detail from his own life, “as one might award a medal.” I like that.

  G: It must be tiresome to be interrogated even about those occasional “medals.”

  B: Prurient curiosity. Irrelevant to the text even in the case of “confessional” fiction, from which muse spare us. An insult to the inventive capacity of us nonconfessional writers, and to the capacity of transmutation in the others, if they happen to be artists as well as confessors. Confessees? Once upon a time a chap in Virginia, I believe it was, pressed me publicly on the recurrence of adulterous triangles in my earlier novels. Had I myself been a vertex in such a triangle? “Only once,” I told him: “with your mother.” I’m glad you’re free of that sort of curiosity.

  G: Why no dedications?

  B: Clutters up the book, as a rule. But as Jesus said, et cetera. In fact, LETTERS is dedicated to Shelly: former student, present wife. And a first-class editor. So I discovered only last year, when after seven years of work-without-feedback I asked her to go through the next-to-last draft of LETTERS before final typing. Doesn’t miss a trick, or hardly any, even in a 1700-page script. I’m sure there are still problems in there, but a lot fewer than there would have been if Shell hadn’t leaned on it. It’s like discovering that the person you love is also rich. So I broke that particular shop rule, and may again in future, as I have broken others.

  G: Want to speak of the future?

  B: Only the Tragic View will do, and it not perfectly.

  G: I mean your “shop.” What’s next after LETTERS?

  B: Postscripts for a while, no doubt.

  G: What are you writing right now?

  B: Replies to your gentle questions. An appeal of our property-tax reassessment. An itinerary for a sailing cruise through the Virgin Islands next March. Remarks on postmodern American Fiction for a lecture-tour through Germany and Austria next June with Bill Gass and Jack Hawkes and our wives. Maybe a birthday letter to our first grandchild, due in Gemini.

  G: Seriously.

  B: Serious matters, every one.

  G: Fictively, then. What’s the next “object”?

  B: No more long novels, I think; after LETTERS I’m ready for a sabbatical from such sustained imposition upon civilized attention. I have a couple of literary ambitions not yet fulfilled, but those are shop secrets. The fact is, I’ve never known in advance what’s next in the works, or been frightened at the prospect of blank paper. Experience is calming, in that line. What artists do, even quite conscious artists, really is mysterious at bottom, even to them. And so we speak of the Muse. I’ve learned to trust her. The blank gets filled.

  G: So, when the postscripts are cleared away and it’s serious blank-paper time…

  B: I await her next visitation with impassioned, but serene, curiosity.

  Historical Fiction, Fictitious History,

  and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs,

  or, About About
ness

  WHILE making notes toward the novel that was to follow LETTERS, I wrote a few more Friday-pieces. This one was first delivered to the 1979 winter dinner-meeting of the Dorchester County Historical Society in Cambridge, Maryland. A spectacular blizzard, rare for my hometown, raged outside that evening and delayed the caterers’ delivery of the entree, but not the ministrations of the bar, with the amiable result that all hands were fairly sozzled before the dinner was served, not to mention the after-dinner talk. An amended version was subsequently published in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine for July 15, 1979, with the appropriate illustrative plates. The nature of the subject makes it unnecessary to reproduce those plates here: At that high-spirited historical-society dinner, in a much larger hall than I had anticipated, the much-larger audience than I had anticipated couldn’t see the plates either.

  My talk this evening will not quite be about what its title says it’s about: historical fiction, fictitious history, and Chesapeake Bay blue crabs.

  The fact is, I am about to publish a novel called LETTERS that happens to involve the Chesapeake Bay area and to some extent its history, particularly the late 1960s and the period of the 1812 War; and twenty years ago I published a novel called The Sot-Weed Factor, set mainly in Colonial Maryland. Both are more or less “historical” fiction, and for both I did a respectable amount of homework on the historical periods involved. But it was a novelist’s homework, not a historian’s, and novelists are the opposite of icebergs: Eight-ninths of what I once knew about this region’s history, and have since forgotten, is in plain view on the surface of those two novels, where it serves its fictive purposes without making the author any sort of authority. Since The Sot-Weed Factor isn’t finally “about” Colonial Maryland at all, any more than LETTERS is really “about” the burning of Washington in 1814 or the burning of Cambridge in 1967, I’m already uncertain which of their historical details are real and which I dreamed up.

  For example, I recall a fine anecdote about the first murder ever committed by white folks in Colonial Maryland. It happened not long after the original settlers disembarked from the Ark and the Dove in 1634: Fellow killed his wife, or vice-versa. No problem apprehending the murderer, who obligingly confessed at once. The trouble was, there were no courts to try him in, no statutes to try him under, and no jails to sentence him to. They had just got off the boat. So the Governor’s Council, by a rap of the gavel, turned itself into a board of inquest, took depositions, and found a true bill; then turned itself into a court, heard the case, and found the defendant guilty of murder; then turned itself into a legislative body and ruled that murder is against the law; then turned itself back into a court and sentenced the guilty party to hang; then commuted the sentence lest there be, in all this improvising, some miscarriage of justice. That solved their problem; my problem is an occupational hazard of storytellers: I can’t remember now how much of this story is history and how much is fiction.