by John Barth
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 honored with the Nobel Prize; the latest Arab-Israeli war, likewise “over,” had preempted 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 defense budget was more enormous than ever. In Northern Ireland the terrorism continued; the generals had taken over in Greece and Chile, and Juan Peron was back in Argentina; Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray were still in jail, joined by Charles Manson and Lieutenant Galley 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 U.S. Supreme Court had struck down all antiabortion 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 U.S. 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, to 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
Yours truly,
I: The Author to Whom It May Concern. Three concentric dreams of waking.
3/9/69: I woke half tranced, understanding where I was but not at once who, or why I was there, or for how long I’d slept. By the sun—and my watch, when I thought to check it—it was yet midsummer midafternoon, a few hours into Cancer, hotter and hazier than when I’d dozed off. The slack tide had turned, was just commencing its second flow; but the marsh was still in full siesta, breathless. Two turkey buzzards circled high over a stand of loblolly pines across the creek from those in whose steaming shade I lay. The only other sign of life, besides the silent files of spartina grass, was the hum of millions upon millions of insects—assassin flies, arthropods, bees above all, and beetles, dragonflies, mosquitoes—going about their business, which, in the case of one Aedes sollicitans, involved drawing blood from the back of my right hand until I killed her.
The movement woke me further: I recognized that before consulting my wristwatch I’d felt for a pocketwatch—a silver Breguet with “barleycorn” engine-turning on the case, steel moon hands, and a white enameled face with the seconds dial offset at the VII, the maker’s name engraved in secret cursive under the XII, and my father’s monogram, HB, similarly scribed before the appropriate Roman numeral IV—a watch which I did not possess, had never possessed, which could not with that monogram be my father’s, which did not so far as I know exist! Reached for it (in the watch pocket of the vest I didn’t wear, didn’t own) with more reflexive a motion than then turned my left wrist. I’d perspired in my sleep, whereinto I’d fallen (whence such locutions in—what year was it?) in midst… in midst of revisiting the Maryland marshes at the midpoint of my life; perspired the more now, more awake, at feeling one foot still in distant time or dreams.
I knew “myself,” come briefly down under Mason and Dixon’s to visit certain cattailed, blue-crabbed, oystered haunts of—aye, there was the rub: I had been going to say “my youth,” but what that term referred to, like dim stars and ghost crabs, I could not resolve when I looked straight at it. And when I looked away—at a periwinkle, say, self-encapsulated on a nearby reed—from my mind’s eye-corner I could just perceive, not one, but several “youths,” all leading—but by different paths, in different ages!—to this point of high ground between two creeklets where I lay, stiff as if I’d slept for twenty decades or centuries instead of minutes. There was the neutral, sleep-wrapped, most familiar youth, neither happy nor unhappy, begun in Gemini 1930, raised up in sunny ignorance through Great Depression, Second War, and small-town Southern public schools. I knew that chap, all right: dreamer of sub-sea-level dreams from the shores of high transmontane lakes; his was the history most contiguous with the hour I’d waked to.
But beside it, like a still-sleeping leg that its wakened twin can recognize, was another history, a prior youth, to whom that pocket-watch and vest and a brave biography belonged. They shared one name’s initial: bee-beta-beth, the Kabbalist’s letter of Creation, whence derived, like life itself from the marsh primordial, both the alphabet and the universe it described by its recombinations. Beyond that, and their confluence in the onstreaming Now, they had little in common, for this youth’s youth was all bravura, intrigue and derring-do, sophistication and disguise. Coeval of the nation in whose founding his father had played a certain role, he had grown up between its two wars of independence, come to disbelieve in both father and fatherland, striven to disunite the but slightly united states—and then (a lurid memory here of bomb burst, rocket glare: not the clearest of illuminations) at the midpoint of his wayward life had seen a different pattern in the past, changed heart again, retreated from fatherland to Mother Marsh in vast perplexity to sort things out, dozed off for a moment in the resinous shade…
Then what was this third, faint-bumbling B, most shadowy of all, but obscured more by mythic leagues of time than by self-effacement or disguise? And not retreated to the midday marsh, but fallen into it as though from heaven, become a blind, lame, vatic figure afloat on the tepid tide, reciting a suspect version of his history, dozing off in midexposition…?
I woke half tranced, understanding where I was but not at once why I was there. Then the dream came clear. It’s Sunday afternoon, March 9, ’69, 157th anniversary of President Madison’s disclosure of the notorious “Henry Letters” to Congress in 1811, cool and cloudy in Buffalo, New York. I have breakfasted early, read through the Sunday Times, taken a restless midafternoon nap—and dreamed once again of waking in the Maryland marshes.
No doubt the dream, above recorded, had been prompted by a recent invitation to visit that state in June for my maiden honorary degree. Its content was clear: my ancient wish to write the comic epic that Ebenezer Cooke, 17th-Century Laureate of Maryland, put a
side to write his Sot-Weed Factor, and which I myself put aside for the novel LETTERS: a Marylandiad. Its hero would live the first half of his life in the first three dozen years of the republic (say, 1776-1812) and the second half in its “last” (say, 1940—1976), with a 128-year nap between, during which—unlike Rip Winkle’s case—the country ages but the sleeper doesn’t. Enjoying the celebrated midlife crisis, he wanders alone at midday (make it 21 June 1812 or thereabouts) into the marshes, “devouring his own soul,” etc., dozes off, and wakes as it seems to him a very short while later. Begin perhaps with his waking, half tranced, with that odd sense of an additional past, a double history, one contiguous to “now” and one Revolutionary.
But in this latest dream there was a third…
Relate: Greece is to Rome as Rome is to the U.S.: translatio studii, “westward the course of empire,” “manifest destiny.” Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau. Iliad: Aeneid::Aeneid:Marylandiad, the second an imitation of the first, the third a parody of the second.
Back to LETTERS: notes on Ambrose Mensch’s story about Perseus, Andromeda, Medusa.
Work in: “2nd Revolution” (1812 War called Second War of Independence). Eben Cooke’s Sot-Weed Redivivus (1730). Roman economy slave-based, like early U.S.; Romans “invented” satire (also, especially under Augustus, bureaucracy, civil service, the mercantile middle class, and red tape). Ebenezer Cooke an “Augustan” poet. Rome built on marshes between those seven hills. Crank explanation of Empire’s fall: anopheles mosquito from those marshes. Sleeping sickness. Cooke in Sot-Weed Redivivus advises Marylanders to drain marshes. Philip Freneau traces Indians from Carthaginians; ditto Cooke in The Sot-Weed Factor (1698).
Marshes: associated with both decay and fertility, female genitalia (cf. Freudians on Medusa), death and rebirth, miasma (pestilence, ague, rheumatism, sinusitis), evil, damnation, stagnation (e.g. Styx, Avernus; also Ezekiel 47:11). Behemoth sleeps in cover of reeds (Job 40:11). Marsh ibis sacred to Thoth, inventor of writing. Reed pens and styli; papyri. East Anglia fenlands associated with eccentricity, independent-spiritedness, fertility, dialects, odd customs. “The Marsh King” (Alfred the Great, 848?-900). 12th-Century Chinese story-cycle Shui-liu Chuan: “Men of the Marshes.” Maryland is “Border State”: tidewater marsh also, between land and sea. Irish bog-peat: not only sphagnum but shrub Andromeda.
Back to Perseus.
Great sleepers, arranged alphabetically: Arthur, Barbarossa, Brunhilde, Charlemagne, Francis Drake, Endymion, Epimenides, Finnegan, Herla, Honi the Circle Drawer, John the Divine, Peter Klaus, Lazarus, Mahdi, Merlin, Odin, Ogier the Dane, Oisin, old Rip (fell asleep just before Revolution, woke after), Roderick the Goth, Sebastian of Portugal, the Seven Ephesians, Siegfried, Sleeping Beauty, Tannhauser, William Tell, Thomas of Erceldoune, Wang Chih.
Postscript 3/9/74: I wake half tranced, understanding where I am and then, aha, why I’m here: in Baltimore, whereto I’d not contemplated moving at all in 1969. Once again the fiction has been not autobiographic but mildly prophetic. In 1960, in the draft of a story about Ambrose Mensch, I placed a nonexistent point of land on the south bank of Choptank River just downstream from the bridge at Cambridge, Maryland; in 1962 the Corps of Engineers redredged the ship channel, dumped the spoil where the old East Cambridge seawall was, and voila! Having decided in 1968 that the “Author” character in LETTERS would be offered an honorary doctorate of letters from a Maryland university, I receive in 1969 just such an invitation in the mail. And presuming in 1969 to imagine, in notes for Jerome Bonaparte Bray’s story Bellerophoniad, a “hero” (Bellerophon, slayer of the Chimera) who falls from mythic irreality into the present-day Maryland marshes—I find myself back in the Old Line State.
Just as Eben Cooke put aside his Marylandiad to write The Sot-Weed Factor—and the “editor” of Giles Goat-Boy put aside his novel The Seeker to edit The Revised New Syllabus, and J. Bray’s LILYVAC computer put aside its Concordance to propose the revolutionary novel NOTES—so I put aside, in 1968, in Buffalo, a Marylandiad of my own in favor of the novel LETTERS, whereof Mensch’s Perseid and Bray’s Bellerophoniad were to be tales-within-the-tale. Then, in ’69, ’70, and ’71, I put by LETTERS in pursuit of a new chimera called Chimera: serial novellas about Perseus, Bellerophon, and Scheherazade’s younger sister. Now (having put by Buffalo for Baltimore) it’s back to LETTERS, to history, to “realism”… and to the revisitation of a certain marsh where once I wandered, dozed, dreamed.
But though I have returned to Maryland, I shall not to Cooke’s Marylandiad. One must take care what one dreams. And there are projects whose fit fate is preemption: works meant ever to be put aside for works more pressing; dreams whose true and only dénouement is the dreamer’s waking in the middle, half tranced, understanding where he is but not at once why he’s there.
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.
N: The Author to Lady Amherst. Politely declining her invitation.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
March 16, 1969
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 honorable, 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.
Cordially,
P.S.: “I have made this longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter”: Pascal, Letters provinciates, XVI. Perhaps Mme de Staël was paraphrasing Pascal?
P.P.S.: Do the French not customarily serve the salad after the entrée?
E: The Author to Lady Amherst. A counterinvitation.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
March 23, 1969
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 favor 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.
