The first coincidence is that, some months before the earlier invitation — last year, in fact, when I began making notes toward a new novel — I had envisioned just such an invitation to one of its principal characters. Indeed, an early note for the project (undated, but from mid-1968) reads as follows:
A man (A——?) is writing letters to a woman (Z——?). A is “a little past the middle of the road,” but feels that “the story of his life is just beginning,” in medias res. Z is (a) Nymph, (b) Bride, and (c) Crone; also Muse: i.e., Belles Lettres. A is a “Doctor of Letters” (honorary Litt.D.): degree awarded for “contribution to life of literature.” Others allege he’s hastening its demise; would even charge him with malpractice. Etc.
Then arrived in the post the College Park invitation in February and yours in March. I was spooked more by the second than the first, since it came not only from another Maryland university, but from — well, consider this other notebook entry, under the heading “Plot A: Lady____ & the Litt.D.”:
A (British?) belletrist “of a certain age,” she has been the Great Good Friend of sundry distinguished authors, perhaps even the original of certain of their heroines and the inspiration of their novels. Sometimes intimates that she invented their best conceptions, her famous lovers merely transcribing as it were her conceits, fleshing out her ideas — and not always faithfully (i.e., “doctoring” her letters to them). Etc.
This circa September 1968. Then, two weeks ago, your letter, with its extraordinary postscript…
Hence my bemusement. For autobiographical “fiction” I have only disdain; but what’s involved here strikes me less as autobiography than as a muddling of the distinction between Art and Life, a boundary as historically notorious as Mason and Dixon’s line. That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history — disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favor of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a détente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover.
So, my dear Lady Amherst: this letter — my second to you, ninth in the old New England Primer—is an In-vi-ta-ti-on which, whether or not you see fit to accept it, I pray you will entertain as considerately as I hope I entertained yours of the 8th instant: Will you consent to be A Character in My Novel? That is, may I — in the manner of novelists back in the heroic period of the genre — make use of my imagination of you (and whatever information about yourself it may suit your discretion to provide in response to certain questions I have in mind to ask you) to “flesh out” that character aforenoted? Just as you, from my side of this funhouse mirror, seem to have plagiarized my imagination in your actual life story…
The request is irregular. For me it is unprecedented — though for all I know it may be routine to an erstwhile friend of Wells, Joyce, Huxley. What I’d like to know is more about your history; your connection with those eminent folk; that “fall” you allude to in your postscript, from such connection to your present circumstances at MSUC; even (as a “lifelong mistress of the arts” you will surely understand) more delicate matters. If I’m going to break another lance with Realism, I mean to go the whole way.
I am tempted to make your acquaintance directly, prevailing upon our mutual friend to do the honors; I’d meant to pay a visit to Dorchester anyhow in June, from College Park. But I recall and understand Henry James’s disinclination to hear too much of an anecdote the heart of which he recognized as a potential story. Moreover, in keeping with my (still vague) notion of the project, I should prefer that our connection be not only strictly verbal, but epistolary. Cf. James’s notebook exclamation: “The correspondences! The correspondences!”
Here’s what I can tell you of that project. For as long as I can remember I’ve been enamored of the old tale-cycles, especially of the frame-tale sort: The Ocean of Story, The Thousand and One Nights, the Pent-, Hept-, and Decamerons. With the help of a research assistant I recently reviewed the corpus of frame-tale literature to see what I could learn from it, and started making notes toward a frame-tale novel. By 1968 I’d decided to use documents instead of told stories: texts-within-texts instead of tales-within-tales. Rereading the early English novelists, I was impressed with their characteristic awareness that they’re writing—that their fictions exist in the form, not of sounds in the ear, but of signs on the page, imitative not of life “directly,” but of its documents — and I considered marrying one venerable narrative tradition to another: the frame-tale and the “documentary” novel. By this time last year I had in mind “an open (love) letter to Whom It May Concern, from Yours Truly.” By April, as grist for what final mill I was still by no means certain; I had half a workbookful of specific formal notes and “incidental felicities”: e.g., “Bit #46,” from Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso: the choirs of the blessed, like sailors in formation on an aircraft-carrier deck or bandsmen at halftime in an American football match, spell out with themselves on the billboard of Heaven DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM (“Love justice, [ye] who judge [on] earth”); or #47, an old English hornbook riddle in the Kabbalistic tradition of the Holy Unspeakable Name of God: “AEIOU His Great Name doth Spell;/Here it is known, but is not known in Hell.”
I could go on, and won’t. “The correspondences!” I was ready to begin. All I lacked were — well, characters, theme, plot, action, diction, scene, and format; in short, a story, a way to tell it, and a voice to tell it in!
Now I have a story, at least in rough prospectus, precipitated by this pair of queer coincidences. Or if not a story in Henry James’s sense, at least a narrative method in Scheherazade’s.
But it is unwise to speak much of plans still tentative. Will you be my “Lady A,” my heroine, my creation?
And permit me the honor of being, as in better-lettered times gone by, your faithful
Author
2
~ ~ ~
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, Annex B
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.