Letters (8 page)
The multitudinous and ingenious therapies of the Doctor’s staff restored us to the path of destiny (rather, revealed to us we had never left it) and prompted us to read
The Revised New Syllabus,
which did the rest. To the Farm we owe the pleasure of remeeting a former teacher (Mr. Jacob Horner, instructor in prescriptive grammar during our student nights at Wicomico Teachers College, now administrative assistant of the Farm, whom it will be our pleasure to engage as syntactical analyst in the
NOVEL
project when the 5-Year Plan is implemented) and the establishing of 2 invaluable associations: with M. Casteene, like ourself descended from French and Indian nobility, and eager to coordinate his historical enterprises and our own; and with H.R.H. Harrison Mack’s Tidewater Foundation, which we discovered (from M. Casteene) to be among the enlightened philanthropies on which the Remobilization Farm depends for support—and to which we turned in turn when we were ourself remobilized in 1965.
We straightway resigned our post at Fredonia (students the country over were by this time becoming impossible to teach in any case) and established ourself at Lily Dale to begin our
Concordance to the R.N.S.,
supporting ourself as best we could by raising goats for fudge and slaughter and piloting the excursion boat
Gadfl_ III
(named for my lost father; never mind) on nearby Chautauqua Lake. In 1966, as your files will show, on the advice of M. Casteene we applied to Mr. Mack and were awarded a modest grant by the Tidewater Foundation for construction of a preliminary computer facility to aid in the
Concordance
—whose implications we ourself scarcely realized to be as revolutionary as intuited by M. Casteene and Mr. Mack’s son, Drew.
That same year (we mean 1966/67) we suffered 1 grave setback and reaped 2 unexpected windfalls. The setback was publication on August 5 of the spurious
G.G.B.,
our manuscript edition of
R.N.S.
having been pirated from Wetlands Press by a carefully placed anti-Bonapartist eager to ingratiate himself with the New York trade publishers. We had counted on royalties from that work to set us free of the goats and
Gadf_y
… But no matter: He or she shall pay for her/his piracy, as shall in time the 1 who took our initials with our text and published the
Syllabus
not even as a ciphered message in the guise of fiction, much less as plain and passed truth, but as mere entertainment!
Had the blow fallen a year or 2 earlier, during our vulnerable period, we might have succumbed. But we were supported in our adversity by the foundation grant, by the ready progress of the
Concordance
program, and by the 2 windfalls aforementioned. The 1st (too personal to detail in this letter) was our meeting of and subsequent association with Ms. Merope Bernstein, a brilliant student of political economy, entomology, and computer science at Brandeis U., who, dissatisfied as we with the academic establishment, had dropped out in her final semester to do fieldwork in militant ecology. We met at an anti-DDT pray-in-and-spray-out on the grounds of the old Chautauqua Institution on the evening of August 15, 1966, our 31st birthday and the most beautiful evening of our life. We can say no more.
The 2nd windfall was the unexpected turn taken by our researches this past spring, when we completed the
Concordance
program and reviewed the initial computer printouts. You will recall that even in our 1st application we intimated (and could have no more than intimated, so tentative were our own speculations at that time) that the
Concordance
was to be “novel,” even “revolutionary”: the “Bellerophonic Prospectus” which we submitted to the foundation through Mr. Mack merely suggested that the circuitry of our proposed LILYVAC should be capable of mimicking prose styles on the basis of analyzed samples, and even of composing hypothetical works by any author on any subject. In our fall 1966 programming, stung by the spurious
Giles,
we made provisions for experiments in this line, thinking that publication of such canards as an
End of the Road Continued
or a
Sot-Weed Redivivus
or a
Son of Giles
might expose, confound, and neutralize our enemies; might even force reparations to aid our great work and set us free of the goats and RESET So successful was our circuitry and program design (despite the modest, even primitive, facility that is LILYVAC I), the 1st printouts, we are happy to report, transcended these petty possibilities.
We say
transcended,
rather than
exceeded,
because like a gift from the Grand Tutor, what LILYVAC gave us was not exactly what we had petitioned for, its superior “eyes” having espied in our data what ours had not. It did indeed produce a few pages of mimicry, in the format of letters written by our enemies and others; it even synopsized, as if in farewell to our
Concordance
project, a scripture to be called
Revised New Revised New Syllabus.
But the burden of its message to us was, not to abandon these enterprises, but to incorporate them into the grander project herewith set forth, to be code-named
NOVEL
.
The details are too sensitive to entrust to the ordinary post; we shall confide them to the foundation through Mr. Drew Mack on a “need-to-know” basis. But bear in mind that we are not an
homme de lettres;
that
The Shoals of Love, The Was_,
and
Backwater Ballads
were
not mere novels,
but documents disguised in novel format for the purpose of publicly broadcasting private messages to our parents—who, we now have reason to believe, have not been deaf to those cunning, painful ciphers, and may be replying to us in kind through LILYVAC.
Bear in mind also and therefore that any description of our revolutionized project is perforce cryptic and multireferential; when we say
NOVEL,
for example, we refer at once to at least 5 things:
(a)
(what we take to be) a document in the guise of an extended fiction of a revolutionary character;
(b)
a 5-year plan for the composition of that document;
(c)
a 5-year plan for effecting, in part by means of that document, certain novel and revolutionary changes in the world;
(d)
the title of
a
(also known as
RN)
and the code name of
b
and
c;
and
(e)
the code name for this Novel Revolution itself and the 5 several years of its implementation, which Ms. Bernstein and we have abstracted from LILYVAC’s printout instructions as follows.:
1. 1966/67 (Year
N
[already completed in essence, without our knowing the true significance of our labors]): Programming of LILYVAC I to mimic prose styles on the basis of analyzed specimens. Composition of hypothetical fictions. Neutralization of leading anti-Bonapartists and exaction of reparations for plagiarism [these last have yet to be achieved]. Poisoned entrails.
2. 1967/68 (Year
O
): Programming of LILYVAC II [i.e., the modifications and extensions of LILYVAC I to be made this fall with Tidewater Foundation funds, contingent on renewal of our grant] with data for The Complete and Final Fiction:
e.g.
analyses of all extant fiction, its motifs, structures, strategies, etc. Production of an abstract model of the perfect narrative, refined from such crudities as are now available,
e.g.
the “Swan-Geese” formula cited earlier. Toad that under cold stone days and nights has 31 sweltered venom sleeping got.
3. 1968/69 (Year
V
): 1st trial printouts of
RN
and analysis of same. Fillet of a fenny snake.
4. 1969/70 (Year
E
): Completion of analysis. Eye of newt. Reprogramming of LILYVAC II (or construction of LILYVAC III) for composition of Final Fiction
RN
.
5. 1970/71 (Year
L
): Final print-out of
NOVEL (i.e., RN).
Revelation of true identity. Rout of impostors and pretenders. Assumption of throne of France. Restoration of “Harrison Mack II” to throne of England. Destruction of all existing stocks of insecticides and prohibition of their manufacture forever. Toe of frog. Reunion with parents. Commencement of New Golden Age.
We have explained already that LILYVAC found it unnecessary actually to compose the hypothetical fictions, having adumbrated their possibility and demonstrated the capacity. Nor can it be said that the creature who appended his name to the false
Giles
has been neutralized: we have not got all the birds out of LILYVAC I, and its capacity, while exceeding what could have been expected of so modest a facility, falls short of our requirements for years
O
through
L
—a discrepancy which we look to the Tidewater Foundation to rectify. But he shall pay.
Moreover and finally, our spring work period was abbreviated by an almost successful attempt on the part of our enemies to assassinate us in late May of this year. In the guise of Chautauqua County officials and with the pretext of “fogging the woods around Lily Dale against lake-fli_s,” they laid a cloud of poison gas about the car in which Ms. Bernstein and we had parked, en route from our afternoon’s work, in order to review our draft of this very letter. Thanks to her quick action in rolling up the windows and taking the wheel, and the admirable traction of our loyal VW on marshy woodland lanes, we made good our escape. Ms. Bernstein, we are relieved to report, suffered no more than a few tears and sneezes; we on the other hand were gassed to unconsciousness for 24 hours, suffered delirium, nausea, poisoned entrails, and muscular spasms for the following week, and still experience occasional twitches and a sustained low-grade nervous disorder. They shall pay.
But we survived! (The innocent lake-blanks, alas, did not.) And, come August 15 and the commencement of our fall work period, we shall proceed with the implementation of Year
O,
for which nothing is wanted save sufficient funding for the redesign of LILYVAC I. And while such funding is available to us from several sources, the voice of History directs us to RESET Complimentary Close
JBB
Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly (and Lady Amherst).
A de-cla-ra-ti-on and an ex-hor-ta-ti-on. With several postscripts.
The Lighthouse, Mensch’s Castle
Erdmann’s Cornlot
Dorset, Maryland
March 3, 1969
F | Ambrose Mensch, Whom It Concerned |
T | Yours Truly (cc. Germaine Pitt) |
R | Your blank and anonymous letter to me of May 12, 1940 |
Dear Sir or Madam:
Fill in the blank: AMBROSE LOVES ______________.
A.
P.S. (to G.P.): Dear Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English and Acting Provost of the Faculty of Letters of Marshyhope State University College Germaine Gordon Pitt Lady Amherst: I love you! And I shall in your pursuit surely make an ass of
P.P.S.: Sixth love of my life, admirable GGPLA: here are the first five “Words of Five Syllables” in the old
New England Primer:
Ad-mi-ra-ti-on
Be-ne-fi-ci-al
Con-so-la-ti-on
De-cla-ra-ti-on
Ex-hor-ta-ti-on
They correspond, sort of, to this affair’s predecessors; also to the Story Thus Far (thus far unknown to you) of our relation, whereof we are come to Stage D already and shall by this letter be fetched E-ward.
In my student days, Lady, when science had still not purged itself of 19th-century pathos, the first principle of embryology was that Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: that the evolutionary history of the individual rehearses the ditto of his race. Law too lovely to be true! Which therefore I here take as first rule of my next fiction: its plot shall be the hero’s recapitulation, at the midpoint of his life, of his Story Thus Far, the exposition and complications of its first half, to the end of directing his course through the climax and dénouement of its second. My hero Perseus (or whoever), like a good navigator, will decide where to go by determining where he is by reviewing where he’s been. And inasmuch as my life here in the Lighthouse is itself a species of fiction, it follows that law of reenactment. On May 12, 1940, when I was ten, I found a note in a bottle along the Choptank River shore just downstream from where I write this: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, torn from a tablet and folded thrice; on a top line was penned in deep red ink TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN; on the next-to-bottom, YOURS TRULY. The lines between were blank—a blank I’ve been trying now for 29 years to fill! All my fictions, all my facts, Germaine, are replies to that
carte blanche;
this, like them, I’ll bottle and post into the broad Choptank, to run with the tide past cape and cove, black can, red nun, out of the river and the Bay, down to the oceans of the world. My Perseus story (if I write it) will echo its predecessors as middle-aged Perseus rehearses his prior achievements, before adding to their number; the house I live in is built from the stones of my family’s history, our past fiascos reconfigured. (And Marshyhope’s up-going Tower of Truth, worse luck for it, is rising on footers of those same false stones.) No wonder, then, dear G, if to my eyes these ABC’s from the
N.E.P.
spell
Q.E.D.
E.g.:
