Chautaugua Road, Maryland
Dear Mr. Cook,
Actually, I am as dismayed as gratified by your long letter to me of a month ago and its even lengthier enclosures. Gratified of course by your ready response to my inquiry concerning your ancestors; by your providing me with copies of those remarkable letters from Andrew Cook IV to his unborn child; by your diverting account of the subsequent genealogy down to yourself; by your supererogatory offer — nay, resolve — to enrich me yet further with the materials of your abortive Marylandiad: the posthumous adventures, as it were, of A.B.C. IV. But dismayed, sir, by your misconstruction of my letter and by your breathtaking assertion that we collaborated on my Sot-Weed Factor novel — indeed, that we have had any prior connection whatever!
Paper is patient, observes the Jewish proverb, and verily: elsewise that sheaf of 75 % rag 32c 16 lb. 8½ x 11’s on which your secretary transcribed your telephoned-Dictaphoned account of our “meeting,” our “conversation,” our “collaboration,” would have rebelled against the pica’d propositions Royaled themupon. We are not acquainted, sir! Until you answered my letter, I was not even certain of your factual existence — which, given the several transsubstantiations of your reply between “Barataria” and me, remains still more than usually inferential. We have never met, never heretofore conversed, much less collaborated on anything! The “actual” poet laureate of Maryland I understand to be a colorful fellow named Mr. Vincent Godfrey Burns, who I imagine must be less than delighted by your pretension to his office. And — ahem, sir! — my invitation to you was not to play the role of Author in my novel-in-letters; merely to be a model, one way or another and perhaps, for one of its seven several correspondents: an epistolary echo of Ebenezer Cooke the sot-weed factor, no more.
That invitation, at risk of offending you, I believe I had really better withdraw. I return with thanks the enclosures of yours of 18 June and earnestly request that you not favor me with their sequelae (or anything else) in future. For the suggestion that I take as my ground theme the notion of First and Second Revolutions, in whatever sense, I here thank you, even though it was not exactly news. Also for your plausible relation of Chautauqua and Chautaugua: there are other, homelier etymologies, I have learned since—“fish-place,” for example — but the principle nonetheless applies.
Do please let that proximate place-name be the one bridge between us henceforward, as it has in fact been hitherto. Let us both turn now from letters to TV: to watch the images of men first stepping upon the moon; to ponder the strange tale piece-by-piecing from Chappaquiddick of Senator Kennedy, a drowned young woman, a bridge more dark and ominous than mine and
Yours,
4 encl
C: The Author to Jerome Bray. Some afterthoughts on numbers, letters, and the myth of Bellerophon and the Chimera.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
July 27, 1969, 7 Sleepers’ Day
Jerome B. Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, New York 14752
Dear Mr. Bray:
Can you perhaps make use, in your NUMBERS project, of, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition III 18b of that term (“Metrical periods or feet; hence lines, verses”)? Or the Kabbalistic tradition that the Torah was a septateuch before it became a pentateuch, one of its original books having gone the way of the 10 lost tribes, another shrunk to 2 verses in the Book of Numbers? Or the consideration (which occurred to me on receipt of your letter of July 8) that NUMBERS is a 7-letter word arranged symmetrically about your initial; that its 5th letter, or Phi-point, is also the 5th of the alphabet; that even more things in the world come in 7’s than come in 5’s; that by perfectly imitating the pattern of mythic heroism one may become not a mythic hero but merely a perfect imitation; that one might cunningly aspire neither to perfect nor to revolutionize the flawed genre of the Novel, say, but to imitate perfectly its flaws? (There is a bug in the unicorn caterpillar family, I believe, which mimics the appearance of a leaf partially eaten by unicorn caterpillars.)
I hope you can, because while I accept your declining of an invitation I didn’t quite make — to “be a character” in my story in progress — your letters have suggested a number of things to me possibly useful in that work — e.g., that the word letters is a 7-letter word with properties of its own; that every text implies a countertext; that a “navel-tale” within the main tale ought to be located not centrally but eccentrically — at a point, say, five- or six-sevenths of the way through; that such a tale might appropriately concern itself with the classical wish to transcend one’s past accomplishments and achieve literal or figurative immortality; that such a tale might therefore appropriately take as its central figure one of the classical mythic heroes. Et cetera. Thanks.
Cordially,
P.S.: I recollect that Bellerophon does not get to heaven. His mount Pegasus does, stung by Zeus’s gadfly, who apparently already dwelt there: the same insect whom Hera earlier dispatched to torment poor Io, and after whom Socrates was nicknamed. Perhaps that gadfly is your actual hero?
P.P.S.: Finally, I recall that the sort of letters Hamlet bid Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry from Denmark to England, which, unknown to them consigned the bearer to death, are called “Bellerophontic letters after the ones your man innocently delivered from the king of Tiryns to the king of Lycia. Be my guest: but N.R.P.S.V.P.
6
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N: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Sixth Stage of her affair. The Scajaquada Scuffle.
Kissing Bridge Motel
(near) Buffalo, New York
9 August 1969
Ah John,
Novelist Nabokov ne’er conceived for his Lolita so portentous a catalogue of motels as Ambrose and I have couched in since my last, or reserved for couching in the nights ahead: old nymph and her young debaucher! Forgetting Scajaquada, as I’d prefer, can you believe (not necessarily in this order) the Lord Amherst, the Colonial Court, the Regency, the Windsor Arms, the Gulliver’s Travels, the Kissing Bridge, and the Memory Lane? All (except Toronto’s Windsor) within a Niagara Falls radius of Buffalo — a radius we will extend early next week to Toronto and Stratford — and so, perhaps, not unknown to you. May your nights in them have been agreeable as mine!
For if the Movie is experiencing a hiatus (filming’s to resume across the river in Fort Erie on the 15th), the drama of Germaine Pitt’s sore affair with Ambrose Mensch clearly approaches some sort of climax: easier for me to savour than to characterise, yet doubtless easier for me to characterise than for any save us to savour. By the reckoning you’ll recall, it is “our” stage, this “6th” of our connexion, which I judge to have commenced sometime between the Full Buck Moon of Monday week last and last Saturday’s Scajaquada Scuffle. I had wondered what “we” would be like, if indeed we rereached “ourselves”: well, we’re All Right Jack, and not only by contrast with the madness of the past few months. Indeed, this first week of August has reminded me in some ways of our maiden month of March, except that A.’s behaviour has been more a gentleman’s and less an annuated adolescent’s.