Final Fridays (5 page)
Authors: John Barth
“Irritating and magnificent,” says the critic Zack Bowen of the story's ground-plan and overall conceit.
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I like that, too.
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I like that, too.
Gore Vidal, on the other hand (Or was it Tom Wolfe? One of those knee-cappers, anyhow, who write so entertainingly on other matters but often get literature all wrong), in a general diatribe against fictive Fabulism, Postmodernism, you name it, has declared that the
movement “culminates in John Barth's novel
LETTERS
, which even its author admits is unreadable.”
movement “culminates in John Barth's novel
LETTERS
, which even its author admits is unreadable.”
Author admitteth no such thing. Author happeneth to believe the novel enormously readable, as well as enormous in other respects. Complex? Well, yes. Complicated? For sure. Designed and constructed with a certain rigor? You bet: As in pro football and the knitting of argyle socks, rigor in novel-writing is the zest of complexity; the aim is to bring it off with brio, panache, even graceâ“passionate virtuosity,” I've heard it calledânever dropping the ball or a stitch. Not for every taste, no doubt; but in the author's opinion (15 years now after the novel's first publication) there is in
LETTERS
sufficient humor, range of passions, historical seriousness, and bravura theater to make it a rousing read
despite
its elegant construction, if “despite” is how it need be.
LETTERS
sufficient humor, range of passions, historical seriousness, and bravura theater to make it a rousing read
despite
its elegant construction, if “despite” is how it need be.
But let's hope it needn't.
Â
HERE'S HOW THE thing came to be written:
⢠Although its action takes place through seven months of 1969 (seven years before the U.S. Bicentennial, which some Americans at the decade's turn, myself included, were beginning to note the approach of), it was in 1973 that the novel itself moved from accumulated project-notes to the front burner of my concerns. That's the year when the American 1960s really ended: with the Israeli/Egyptian Yom Kippur War and the consequent Arab oil embargo; with the humiliating wind-down of our Vietnamese misadventure, which had fueled and focused countercultural protest; with the leveling off and subsequent erosion of
U.S. economic prosperity, which had grown with all but uninterrupted vigor through the generation since Pearl Harborâan erosion that, for the Baby Boomers at least, continues yet. Not a bad benchmark, in short, '73, for the beginning of the end of “the American Century,” as under the Nixon/Kissinger administration the nation ground unenthusiastically toward its 200th birthdayâan event that I'd had my eye on, novel-wise, for some while already. This for the reason that
U.S. economic prosperity, which had grown with all but uninterrupted vigor through the generation since Pearl Harborâan erosion that, for the Baby Boomers at least, continues yet. Not a bad benchmark, in short, '73, for the beginning of the end of “the American Century,” as under the Nixon/Kissinger administration the nation ground unenthusiastically toward its 200th birthdayâan event that I'd had my eye on, novel-wise, for some while already. This for the reason that
⢠I myself had passed Dante's
mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
and begun the second half of my projectible life-span, actuarially and otherwise. A 20-year first marriage had ended in divorce, and at age 40 I had married again (the second union, as of this writing, happily older than its predecessor and going for the distance). In those first 20 years of adulthood I had sired and co-parented three children, and by 1973 was managing them through college. I had contrived to ascend the American academic ladder from teaching-assistantship to endowed-professorship while at the same time writing and publishing my first half-dozen volumes of fiction, and my literary offspring had earned some degree of critical noticeâsometimes hedged, like the quotes above. Indeed, the first and fifth of them had been bridesmaid finalists for the National Book Award in fiction, and the sixth a bigamous bride: A divided jury named
Chimera
co-winner of the 1973 prize.
mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
and begun the second half of my projectible life-span, actuarially and otherwise. A 20-year first marriage had ended in divorce, and at age 40 I had married again (the second union, as of this writing, happily older than its predecessor and going for the distance). In those first 20 years of adulthood I had sired and co-parented three children, and by 1973 was managing them through college. I had contrived to ascend the American academic ladder from teaching-assistantship to endowed-professorship while at the same time writing and publishing my first half-dozen volumes of fiction, and my literary offspring had earned some degree of critical noticeâsometimes hedged, like the quotes above. Indeed, the first and fifth of them had been bridesmaid finalists for the National Book Award in fiction, and the sixth a bigamous bride: A divided jury named
Chimera
co-winner of the 1973 prize.
⢠All things considered, a not-inappropriate time to take stock, as the USA was warming up to doâperhaps via a Bicentennial novel that would concern itself with (and be the first fruit of) second halves and “second revolutions,” in my country's history
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as well as in my personal and professional life. What I aimed to doâwhen by 1973 those aims had clarified themselvesâwas write a seventh novel that would address these bicentenary, second-revolutionary themes and at the same time be a sequel to all six of its forerunners, carrying representative characters from each into the second cycles of their several storiesâwithout, however, requiring that its readers be familiar with those earlier works.
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as well as in my personal and professional life. What I aimed to doâwhen by 1973 those aims had clarified themselvesâwas write a seventh novel that would address these bicentenary, second-revolutionary themes and at the same time be a sequel to all six of its forerunners, carrying representative characters from each into the second cycles of their several storiesâwithout, however, requiring that its readers be familiar with those earlier works.
⢠Moreover, two decades of reading, writing, and teaching literature had bemused me with the three main senses of our English word
letters
, to wit:
letters
, to wit:
1. Alphabetical characters, those 26 atoms that in their infinite supply and innumerable but finite recombinations comprise the written universe.
2. Epistolary missives, that homely but splendid technology of human telecommunication in the 18th and 19th centuries especiallyâthe golden era of general bourgeois literacy and, not coincidentally, of the novel as a popular medium of art and entertainment. The English novel, in particular, had from the first an almost proto-Postmodern awareness of itself as words on paper, a document imitating other sorts of documents, especially
letters; even where its form was not epistolary, its plot often turned on letters mislaid, misdelivered, misread or miswritten, intercepted or purloined. By 1973, telephony had all but supplanted the writing of personal letters, as film- and television-watching had all but supplanted novel-readingâAdieu, dear media! Such later technologies as e-mail lack the distinctive element of individual penmanship (I kiss your handwriting, love, in lieu of your dear hand); even telefaxed longhand isn't
her
ink, on
her
personal stationery, a souvenir of herself.... And
letters; even where its form was not epistolary, its plot often turned on letters mislaid, misdelivered, misread or miswritten, intercepted or purloined. By 1973, telephony had all but supplanted the writing of personal letters, as film- and television-watching had all but supplanted novel-readingâAdieu, dear media! Such later technologies as e-mail lack the distinctive element of individual penmanship (I kiss your handwriting, love, in lieu of your dear hand); even telefaxed longhand isn't
her
ink, on
her
personal stationery, a souvenir of herself.... And
3. the third sense of “letters,” Literature: dear dwindling diversion, sometimes made of letters made of letters by men and women of letters, its measureless inventory of passions, situations, speculations, flights of fancy, heartbreaks/ha-ha's/ho-hums all ultimately reducible to a couple-dozen squiggles of ink on paper.
“Work all of this in,” I instructed my muse, “in a certain arrangement of eighty-eight epistles from seven correspondents over seven months of the seventh year before Seventeen Seventy-Six's two hundredth anniversaryâand have the thing ready for publication by that date, okay?”
She obliged, except in that final particular. “I'm not a demand feeder,” she reminded me, and took her own sweet time lactating
LETTERS
: seven years, appropriately, from the first work-notes to the novel's first publication in 1979, by when the Bicentennial was yesterday's newspaper and an even meaner decade waited in the
wings. Six books later, as in 1994 I write this foreword letter by letter (never since unaware, at least subliminally, of every l, e, t, t, e, r, & s I scrawl),
LETTERS
is the fit midpoint of my bibliography, perhaps of the road of my life as well.
LETTERS
: seven years, appropriately, from the first work-notes to the novel's first publication in 1979, by when the Bicentennial was yesterday's newspaper and an even meaner decade waited in the
wings. Six books later, as in 1994 I write this foreword letter by letter (never since unaware, at least subliminally, of every l, e, t, t, e, r, & s I scrawl),
LETTERS
is the fit midpoint of my bibliography, perhaps of the road of my life as well.
I like that, and am gratified to see the old girl here second-cycled into print.
SABBATICALSabbatical: A Romance
, written between 1978 and 1981 after my seven-year involvement with the novel
LETTERS
, was indeed a sabbatical from that extended, intricated labor. The project's original working title was
Sex Education and Sabbatical
; I had in mind an odd Siamese twin of a book comprising a fantastical playscript (about a postmodern romance between a skeptical spermatozoon and a comparably wary ovum) followed by a realistical novel involving a middle-aged male
Homo sapiens
, recently retired from the CIA, and his somewhat younger professorial wife, newly pregnant with, perhaps, the consummation of that playscript romanceâwhich she may decide to abort. For better or worse, as happens with a fair percentage of twin pregnancies, the weaker sibling expired
in utero
(to be resurrected, more or less, in
The Tidewater Tales: A Novel
[1987]). The survivor is the work in hand, narrated from a viewpoint that I believe myself to have invented: the first-person-duple voice of a well-coupled couple.
, written between 1978 and 1981 after my seven-year involvement with the novel
LETTERS
, was indeed a sabbatical from that extended, intricated labor. The project's original working title was
Sex Education and Sabbatical
; I had in mind an odd Siamese twin of a book comprising a fantastical playscript (about a postmodern romance between a skeptical spermatozoon and a comparably wary ovum) followed by a realistical novel involving a middle-aged male
Homo sapiens
, recently retired from the CIA, and his somewhat younger professorial wife, newly pregnant with, perhaps, the consummation of that playscript romanceâwhich she may decide to abort. For better or worse, as happens with a fair percentage of twin pregnancies, the weaker sibling expired
in utero
(to be resurrected, more or less, in
The Tidewater Tales: A Novel
[1987]). The survivor is the work in hand, narrated from a viewpoint that I believe myself to have invented: the first-person-duple voice of a well-coupled couple.
The story was suggested by the curious death in Chesapeake Bay, my home waters, of one Mr. John Arthur Paisley, an early-retired high-ranking operative of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who, in late September 1978, disappeared from his sloop
Brillig
during an overnight solo cruise in fair weather on this normally tranquil
estuary. The unmanned sloop was found aground soon after, all sails set, lunch half prepared in the galley, no sign of foul play, et cetera; the body of its owner/skipper, levitated by the gases of decomposition, surfaced a week later, 40-odd pounds of scuba-weights belted to the waist, a 9mm bullet hole behind the left ear. In those halcyon Cold War years of CIA/KGB huggermugger, when such more or less deranged intelligence chiefs as the Soviet Union's Lavrenti Beria and the USA's James Jesus Angleton saw or suspected moles within moles within moles, “the Paisley case” received much local and some national and international attention, duly echoed in the novel. Had the fellow been done in by the KGB because he had discovered their Mole in our agency? By the CIA because he
was
the Mole? By one or the other because he was only apparently retired from counterintelligence work in order to scan covertly from his sailboat the high-tech snooping gear suspected to be concealed by the Soviets in their U.S. embassy vacation compound, just across the wide and placid Chester River from where I write these words? Et cetera. A few less intrigue-driven souls, myself among them, imagined that the chap had simply done himself in, for whatever complex of personal reasons and despite certain odd details and spookish unresolved questions (see novel)âbut by the end of the American 1970s one had learned that paranoia concerning the counterintelligence establishments was often outstripped both by paranoia
within
those establishments and by the facts, when and if they emerged.
Brillig
during an overnight solo cruise in fair weather on this normally tranquil
estuary. The unmanned sloop was found aground soon after, all sails set, lunch half prepared in the galley, no sign of foul play, et cetera; the body of its owner/skipper, levitated by the gases of decomposition, surfaced a week later, 40-odd pounds of scuba-weights belted to the waist, a 9mm bullet hole behind the left ear. In those halcyon Cold War years of CIA/KGB huggermugger, when such more or less deranged intelligence chiefs as the Soviet Union's Lavrenti Beria and the USA's James Jesus Angleton saw or suspected moles within moles within moles, “the Paisley case” received much local and some national and international attention, duly echoed in the novel. Had the fellow been done in by the KGB because he had discovered their Mole in our agency? By the CIA because he
was
the Mole? By one or the other because he was only apparently retired from counterintelligence work in order to scan covertly from his sailboat the high-tech snooping gear suspected to be concealed by the Soviets in their U.S. embassy vacation compound, just across the wide and placid Chester River from where I write these words? Et cetera. A few less intrigue-driven souls, myself among them, imagined that the chap had simply done himself in, for whatever complex of personal reasons and despite certain odd details and spookish unresolved questions (see novel)âbut by the end of the American 1970s one had learned that paranoia concerning the counterintelligence establishments was often outstripped both by paranoia
within
those establishments and by the facts, when and if they emerged.
Â
INDEED, MY U.S.-HISTORY homework through that decade for the
LETTERS
novel, together with our war in Vietnam, cost me considerable innocence concerning the morality of our national past and present, especially with respect to foreign policy and to such agencies
as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and Allen Dulles's CIA, whose clandestine, not infrequently illegal operations I found to be rich in precedent all the way back to George Washington's administration. Given our political geography, a fair amount of that activity turns out to have taken place in and around my tidal birthwaters (see novels).
LETTERS
novel, together with our war in Vietnam, cost me considerable innocence concerning the morality of our national past and present, especially with respect to foreign policy and to such agencies
as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and Allen Dulles's CIA, whose clandestine, not infrequently illegal operations I found to be rich in precedent all the way back to George Washington's administration. Given our political geography, a fair amount of that activity turns out to have taken place in and around my tidal birthwaters (see novels).
During the long course of writing
LETTERS
, I happened to move with my new bride back to those birthwaters after a 20-year absence, to teach at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, and to begin for the first time ardently exploring, in our cruising sailboat, the great estuarine system that I had grown up on, in, and around. It was sobering, in those high-tension times, to see the red hammer-and-sickle banner flying above the aforementioned Soviet embassy retreat across the river, and to note on our charts (abounding in Danger Zones and Prohibited Areas) the 80-plus Pentagon facilities scattered about this fragile tidewaterlandâincluding the Pentagon itself, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Edgewood Arsenal's chemical and biological weapons development facilities, not to mention several CIA “safe houses” and the headquarters of the Agency proper. Sobering too to sail past the odd nuclear missile submarine off Annapolis, packing firepower enough to wreck a continent, and to know that among one's fellow pleasure-sailors and anchorage-mates would be a certain number of federal employees including the occasional admiral, active or retired, taking a busman's holiday, and the occasional Agency spook, ditto, perhaps ditto. And sobering finally to be cruising the pleasant waters that a British task force had invaded during the War of 1812, burning Washington, bombarding Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and inspiring our national anthemâwaters increasingly stressed by agricultural run-off ever since the first European settlers cleared the forests to farm “sot-weed” in the 17th century; by military dumping
and residential development through the 20th; and by history, more or less, over that whole span.
LETTERS
, I happened to move with my new bride back to those birthwaters after a 20-year absence, to teach at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater, and to begin for the first time ardently exploring, in our cruising sailboat, the great estuarine system that I had grown up on, in, and around. It was sobering, in those high-tension times, to see the red hammer-and-sickle banner flying above the aforementioned Soviet embassy retreat across the river, and to note on our charts (abounding in Danger Zones and Prohibited Areas) the 80-plus Pentagon facilities scattered about this fragile tidewaterlandâincluding the Pentagon itself, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Edgewood Arsenal's chemical and biological weapons development facilities, not to mention several CIA “safe houses” and the headquarters of the Agency proper. Sobering too to sail past the odd nuclear missile submarine off Annapolis, packing firepower enough to wreck a continent, and to know that among one's fellow pleasure-sailors and anchorage-mates would be a certain number of federal employees including the occasional admiral, active or retired, taking a busman's holiday, and the occasional Agency spook, ditto, perhaps ditto. And sobering finally to be cruising the pleasant waters that a British task force had invaded during the War of 1812, burning Washington, bombarding Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, and inspiring our national anthemâwaters increasingly stressed by agricultural run-off ever since the first European settlers cleared the forests to farm “sot-weed” in the 17th century; by military dumping
and residential development through the 20th; and by history, more or less, over that whole span.
Sabbatical
glances at all that, perhaps even attempts here and there to stare it down, but it's really only marginally about the Wonderlandish machinations of the CIA/KGB and the American heritages represented (in the novel) by Francis Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe. First and finally, the story is what its subtitle declares it to be: a romance, in the several senses of that term.
glances at all that, perhaps even attempts here and there to stare it down, but it's really only marginally about the Wonderlandish machinations of the CIA/KGB and the American heritages represented (in the novel) by Francis Scott Key and Edgar Allan Poe. First and finally, the story is what its subtitle declares it to be: a romance, in the several senses of that term.
âPostscript, possibly evidencing that truth is more Postmodern than fiction:
Â
After
Sabbatical's
first publication in 1982, I learned from certain ex-colleagues of his and readers of mine that the unhappy Mr. Paisley had toward the end grown fond of declaring that “in life, as on the highway, fifty-five is enough” (his age at death). Moreoverâand more poignantly, sober-ingly, vertiginouslyâI was informed by his son that the late Agency operative had been a fan of my novels, especially
The Floating Opera
and
The Sot-Weed Factor
âwhich it pleases me to imagine his having enjoyed in happier times as he and Brillig sailed the Chesapeake.
Sabbatical's
first publication in 1982, I learned from certain ex-colleagues of his and readers of mine that the unhappy Mr. Paisley had toward the end grown fond of declaring that “in life, as on the highway, fifty-five is enough” (his age at death). Moreoverâand more poignantly, sober-ingly, vertiginouslyâI was informed by his son that the late Agency operative had been a fan of my novels, especially
The Floating Opera
and
The Sot-Weed Factor
âwhich it pleases me to imagine his having enjoyed in happier times as he and Brillig sailed the Chesapeake.
Â
R.I.P., sir: Having surfaced in
Sabbatical
as in the Bay (and resurfaced in this novel's successor,
The Tidewater Tales
), you shall not float through my fiction again.
Sabbatical
as in the Bay (and resurfaced in this novel's successor,
The Tidewater Tales
), you shall not float through my fiction again.
“In the Beginning”: The Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle, and the Jesus Paradox
Turning now to a bit of proto-Postmodernism: Though far from being a Biblical scholar myself, I was successfully tempted by the bona fide Biblicist David Rosenberg to contribute the following essay on Genesis and Matthew to his anthology
Communion
1
âhaving perused which, the distinguished journalist Bill Moyers persuaded me in 1996 to take part in one episode of his 10-part PBS series
Genesis
:
2
a lively round-table conversation with Moyers; the novelists Rebecca Goldstein, Mary Gordon, Oscar Hijuelos, Charles Johnson, and Faye Kellerman; and the theologian Burton Visotzky, on the subject of “The First Murder,” Cain's offing of his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Whereafter I happily retired from amateur scriptural exegesis.
Communion
1
âhaving perused which, the distinguished journalist Bill Moyers persuaded me in 1996 to take part in one episode of his 10-part PBS series
Genesis
:
2
a lively round-table conversation with Moyers; the novelists Rebecca Goldstein, Mary Gordon, Oscar Hijuelos, Charles Johnson, and Faye Kellerman; and the theologian Burton Visotzky, on the subject of “The First Murder,” Cain's offing of his brother Abel in Genesis 4. Whereafter I happily retired from amateur scriptural exegesis.
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