Letters (128 page)

Monday A.M., 8/25/69

Imagine your writing hand put
hors de combat
by a blow from the palm of Fame! In my case, a 3-lb. bronze job—either a replica or the original snitched by the redcoats from the U.S. Navy Monument during the burning of Washington in 1814—wielded here last night during the Burning of Washington sequence by R. Prinz, who I’m happy to say got as good as he gave: I smithereened his eyeglasses, and very nearly his head, with the pen of History, ditto. More to come.

So I’m following up my Saturday night’s phone call with a left-handed letter typed in A. B. Cook’s caretaker’s cottage, kindly lent Milady A. and me till noon today. Cook and caretaker, together with the navy aforementioned, are searching the Prohibited Area of Bloodsworth Island for Jerome Bonaparte Bray, possibly blown last night to Kingdom Come by a combination of lightning and thitherto unexploded naval ordnance. Choppers, air sleds, marsh buggies, patrol boats! Round about us the filmists film themselves cleaning up the ruins of Washington. Their Director has abandoned his messed-up mistress, one Merope Bernstein, and withdrawn alone to NYC, where no doubt he’ll respectacle himself for next month’s Battle of Baltimore. Germaine and I shall withdraw likewise, after lunch today, to Cambridge, to check out my dexter carpals (presently Ace-Bandaged) and my oncophiliac ménage.

My friend History (formerly Britannia, a.k.a. Literature) will pen you the details some Saturday.

Now:
re
your letter of August 3, and my call. Enclosed is my ground plan for that Perseus-Medusa story I told you of, together with more notes on golden ratio, Fibonacci series, and logarithmic spirals than any sane writer will be interested in. My compliments. All that remains is for you to work out a metaphorical physics to turn stones into stars, as heat + pressure + time turn dead leaves into diamonds. I have in mind Medusa’s petrifying gaze, reflected and re-reflected at the climax, not from Athena’s mirror-shield, but from her lover Perseus’s eyes: the transcension of paralyzing self-consciousness to productive self-awareness. And (it goes without saying) I have in mind too the transformation of dead notes into living fiction—for it also remains for you to write the story!

Me, I’m done with it, as with another fictive enterprise I’d begun to fancy, which I shan’t lay on you. What occurred to me as we spoke was that a project as sevenish as the one you describe in your letter ought to be your seventh book rather than your sixth: sixes are
my
thing. What’s more, your busiest reader hereabouts—my good Dame History—has caught up with your production and needs a quickie to tide her over while you do that long one. So, friend, here are your alphabetized instructions:

Q.E.D.

As for me: if and when my good right hand is back in service (typing with my left brings me closer than ever in his lifetime to my poor dead father, who wrestled one-armed with that marble all those years) and this movie done (we’ve but two more scenes to shoot), perhaps I’ll commence
my
Second Cycle—with a novel based on the movie that was meant to be based on
your
novels but went off in directions of its own. Or perhaps with a crab-and-oyster epic: a
Marylandiad?
In any case, I advise us both, as we shall not likely be being brief, at least to be bright. May your progression from letter to letter be consistently so; as for Y.T., he will be content if his regression be but brightly consistent: if, like Odysseus striving home from Troy, he can

August 3, 1969

Ambrose Mensch
The Lighthouse
Erdmann’s Cornlot
“Dorset,” Maryland

Dear Ambrose,

Time was when you and I were so close in our growings-up and literary apprenticeships, so alike in some particulars and antithetical in others, that we served each as the other’s alter ego and aesthetic conscience; eventually even as the other’s fiction. By any measure it has been an unequal relation: my life, mercifully, has been so colorless in its modest success, yours so comparatively colorful in what you once called its exemplary failure, that I’ve had more literary mileage by far than you from our old and long since distanced connection.

Neither of us, I presume, regrets either that closeness or this distance. My guess is that you, too, ultimately shrug your shoulders at “the pinch of our personal destinies as they spin themselves out upon Fate’s wheel”—your pet line from William James in graduate-school days. This letter is not meant to alter that spinning; only to solicit a bit more of that unequal mileage and to wave cordially from Chautauqua Lake to Chesapeake Bay.

I have in mind a book-length fiction, friend, more of a novel than not, perhaps even a sizable one. Having spent the mid-1960’s fiddling happily with stories for electronic tape and live voice—a little reorchestration of the oral narrative tradition—I’m inclined now to make the great leap forward again to Print: more particularly, to reorchestrate some early conventions of the Novel. Indeed (I blush to report) I am smitten with that earliest-exhausted of English novel-forms, the
epistolary novel,
already worked to death by the end of the 18th Century. Like yourself an official honorary Doctor of Letters, I take it as among my functions to administer artificial resuscitation to the apparently dead.

Here’s what I know about the book so far. Its working title is
LETTERS.
It will consist of letters (like this, but with a plot) between several correspondents, the capital-A Author perhaps included, and preoccupy itself with, among other things, the role of epistles—real letters, forged and doctored letters—in the history of History. It will also be concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made. Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our word
letters:
Literature, which a certain film nut is quoted as calling “that moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance.”

What else.
LETTERS
is a seven-letter word; the letters in
LETTERS
are to be from seven correspondents, some recruited from my earlier stories (a sure sign, such recycling, that an author approaches 40). They’ll be dated over the seven months from March through September 1969, though they may also involve the upcoming U.S. Bicentennial (a certain number of years hence), the War of 1812, the American Revolution, revolutions and recyclings generally. I’ve even determined how many letters will be required (88, arranged and distributed in a certain way: a modest total by contrast with the 175 of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
for example, not to mention the 537 of
Clarissa)
—but I’m not yet ready to declare what the book’s
about!

However, experience teaches us not to worry overmuch about
that
problem. We learn, as Roethke says, by going where we have to go; and among the things we may learn, like Aeneas, is where all along we have been headed.

Two further formal or procedural considerations.
(A)
At a point 6/7ths of the way through the book—that is, in the neighborhood of its climaxes—I want there dutifully to be echoed the venerable convention of the text-within-the-text: something classical-mythological, I think, to link this project with its predecessor and to evoke the origins of fiction in the oral narrative tradition. I have in mind to draft this little off-central text first and let the novel accrete around it like a snail shell. The myth of Bellerophon, Pegasus, and Chimera has been much in my imagination lately (In the myth, you remember, just at or past the midpoint of his heroical career, Bellerophon grows restless, dissatisfied that he has not after all got to heaven by slaying the Chimera; he wonders what he might manage by way of encore to that equivocal feat. There towers Mount Olympus, still beyond his reach; there grazes the winged horse, turned out to pasture and, like his master, going to fat…), but I can’t seem to get old Pegasus off the ground! Any suggestions?

Which question fetches us to
(B)
It appeals to me to fancy that each of the several
LETTERS
correspondents, explicitly or otherwise, and whatever his/her response to the Author’s solicitations (like the foregoing), will contribute something essential to the project’s plan or theme. So far, this has worked out pretty well. Never mind what your predecessors have come up with, and never mind that in a sense this “dialogue” is a monologue; that we capital-A Authors are ultimately, ineluctably, and forever talking to ourselves. If our correspondence is after all a fiction, we like, we
need
that fiction: it makes our job less lonely.

So, old fellow toiler up the slopes of Parnassus: Have I your permission to recycle “Ambrose Mensch” out of the Funhouse and into
LETTERS?
And how does all this strike you? R.S.V.P.!

—And, friend, how do you fare? I have in the body of this letter stuck deliberately to business. But as you know, I know (by letters only) your admirable Lady Amherst; and via that correspondence—which I initiated but have not done right by—I know a great deal that isn’t my business, as well as one or two things (e.g., your adventures with Mr. Prinz) that sort of are. I won’t presume to remark on either, though I have my opinions. Except of course to say I’m sorry to hear that your mother’s dying and your brother’s ill. And look here, Ambrose: your Ex (excuse me, but I recollect her amiably from college days, when she typed all our fledgling manuscripts)—has that chap Jerome Bray really got her in his clutches?

August 24, 1969

Old ally,

Understood. My letter to you of 8/3 awaited your return from Canada to the house I once helped you build, and the distressful urgencies
chez toi
kept you from replying till last night. My sympathy, old altered ego: to you, to Peter, to your sister-in-law.

See here: there was no call to call. My letter was nothing urgent—a trial balloon, not a cry for help. But perhaps the urgency was on your end; on the phone you sounded, with every good reason, strung out to the limit.

Therefore, while I look forward to the promised letter amplifying your remarkable suggestions and too-generous offers of your own invention, I’ve no mind at all to accept the latter—certainly at least not before you’re calmly sure you’ll never use that Perseus material yourself, and not unless I can present you with some
quid
for so handsome a
quo.
J. L. Borges (whose birthday today is, along with Beardsley’s and Beerbohm’s) maintains that “originality” is a delusion—that we writer chaps are all more or less faithful amanuenses of the human spirit. So be it: but let it be the
human
spirit, not one particular fellow human’s!

So I shall perpend with thanks, but put by for the present, your suggestion that I make a chimerical book out of Perseus, Bellerophon & Something Else before tackling
LETTERS,
though I acknowledge its fitness and am much impressed by the conceit.

On the other hand, I accept at once and gratefully your other suggestion: that the ground theme be not so much revolution or recycling as reenactment: the attractions, hazards, rewards, and penalties of a “2nd cycle” isomorphic with the “1st.” It’s what I’d thought
around
without thinking
of:
a kind of key—to what treasure remains to be seen. And your remark that I cannot rescue Ambrose Mensch from the Funhouse because he’s no longer there I take for good news amid all your bad. At least I understand, to the heart, your impulse at the midpoint of your life to “empty yourself before commencing its second half. Surely that’s what midpoints and the Axis Mundi are all about.

But the coincidence of that midpoint with your family griefs, and with what looks to be the climax of that crazy business between you and Reg Prinz, gives me pause. As I work and play through this bright hot Sunday (St. Bartholomew’s Day) on my upland lake, I anxiously imagine you-all down there in Tidewaterland “reenacting” today on their anniversary—which is also the traditional date of Muhammad’s flight and John Gilpin’s ride—the “Bladensburg Races” and the burning of Washington. Are you not, in your condition, playing with fire?