Letters

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

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

5 April 1969

Mr John Barth, Esq.

Dept of English, A

SUNY/Buffalo

Dear Mr B.:

No!

I am not Literature! I am not the Great Tradition! I am not the aging Muse of the Realistic Novel! I am not

Yours,

Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)

Acting Provost

GGP(A)/ss

O: Lady Amherst to the Author. Reconsidering.

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

12 April 1969

Dear Mr B.:

On the 22nd of this month I shall turn… forty-five. Germaine de Staël, at that age, had borne four children — one by her husband, two by her lover Narbo

We British are great stoics; we French, famously unsentimental. But I ca

Today, sir, I am very tired; those decades to come weigh me down like a heavy sentence. Today I could wish to be a middle-aged widow of the lower class in a Mediterranean village: already wrinkled, fallen-breasted, gone in the teeth, dressed in black, supernumerary, waiting to die.

Well.

Your letter to me of 16 March, declining our honorary degree, was cordial, if disappointing and problematical (the matter is far from resolved). Your follow-up letter of the 23rd was similarly cordial but, at least as I then regarded it, impertinent; hence my peremptory no of Saturday last. My reasons were several, over and above the vexing problem of thwarting John Schott and A. B. Cook; but I was in no humour just then to set them forth. I shall do so now.

In latter March (as promised in my initial letter), I read your Floating Opera novel, having been introduced earlier by Ambrose Mensch to the alleged original of your character Todd Andrews. I enjoyed the story — the first novel of an ambitious young man — but I felt a familiar uneasiness about the fictive life of real people and the factual life of “fictional” characters — familiar because, as I’m sure I have intimated, I’ve “been there before.” I could not look forward to being there again: yet again more or less artfully misportrayed for purposes not my own, however commendable; yet again “immortalised” like the victims of Medusa or the candid cameraman: picking their noses, scratching their backsides. Too, there was to be considered the fallen state of Literature, in particular of the Novel, most especially of trade fiction publishing in your country, as I learn about it from Ambrose Mensch. No, no, it was an impertinence, your suggestion that I offer my life for your literary inspection, as women used to offer their handbags for Isaac Babel’s!

A life, at that, lately turned ’round such sharp, improbable corners (even in the little space between my first letter and your reply) that I can scarcely recognise it any longer as my own, far less understand or rationally approve it. For Mme de Staël — I think for history generally — April truly is the cruellest month, as my old friend and fellow cat-lover once wrote: the tumultuous month when Cain slew Abel, when Jesus (and Dante) descended into Hell; when Shakespeare and Cervantes an Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. (and Germaine de Staël’s beloved father) all died; when the Titanic sank and the American Revolution began and Napoleon abdicated and the crew of the H.M.S. Bounty mutinied and all the black slaves in New York rebelled; when both ill-starred Germaines (and “Petit Nous”) were born; and when, in 1794, that other, better Germaine wrote despairingly from Coppet to her lover Narbo

I am distraught, as even my penmanship attests. You found disconcerting, you say, certain “spooky” coincidences between my first letter to you and your notes toward a new novel. I find disconcerting, even alarming, some half-prophetic correspondences between your reply and the course of my current life: so much so that I am led (yet another manifestation of early middle-aged foolishness, no doubt) seriously to reconsider your proposal, or proposition. I have much to tell, no one to tell it to…

But you must swear to me, by the Muse we both honour, that you are not nor have lately been in communication with Ambrose Mensch, as he has sworn to me he is not with you. Can you, sir, will you so swear? To

Yours sincerely,

Germaine Pitt

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

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

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

19 April 1969

My dear B.,

L Street and its companions — five long vowelled avenues crosshatched through sand and weeds by a score of short consonantal streets — comprise what is euphemistically called, by its “developers,” the residential “development” of a large corn and tomato field belonging to Mack Enterprises, Inc. Lying athwart an ever shallower winding creek midway between Cambridge and Redmans Neck, at the vertiginous “Heights” of five to seven feet above mean low water, it consists presently of the low-rise brick apartment house at 24 L — tenanted by new MSUC faculty, married graduate students, and (as of a few weeks ago) myself — and three prefabricated “model homes,” unoccupied. The rest is scrub pine, weedy drainage ditches, wooden temporary street signs, and advertising brochures. Mrs Jane Mack, whose backward brainchild Dorset Heights is, confidently expects the burgeoning of Marshyhope U., and the consequent demand for low-cost housing in its proximity, to turn this paper polis into a town half the size of Cambridge by 1976 and to swell her already distended fortune: the capital for its next phase of construction she has borrowed against her expectation of a settlement in her favour, rather than her children’s, of her late husband’s disputed estate.

Jane and I have, you see, since Harrison Mack’s death, become — rather, rebecome — friends: more or less, and faute de mieux, and warily at that. The woman is civilised. She is uncommonly handsome for her sixty-some years; could almost pass for my coeval. She is very consciously in that line of shrewd Baltimorie