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.!
As ever,
— 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?
U: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Replying to the latter’s telephone call of the previous night.
Chautauqua, New York
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?
I must trust your excellent Lady A. to see to it you don’t get burned. Speaking of Conditions: is it premature (or presumptuous) of me to add, to my thanks and my best wishes to you both, my congratulations?
As ever,
7
~ ~ ~
E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Explaining her fortnight’s silence. The Burning of Washington. Two more deaths and a memorial service. Preparations for the Bombardment of Fort McHenry and for her wedding.
“Mensch’s Folly”
Saturday, 13 September 1969
Dear Mr B.,
Enclosed, if I remember to enclose it when this is done, is a copy of my transcript of Ambrose’s taped letter of 1 September to (the late) “Author Morton King,” with whom we are no longer concerned. It will explain to you, more or less, a vertiginous business of 6’s and 7’s that I myself intend to think no more of, though it still directs our lives as did astronomy the ancient Mayans’.
Today, for example, is not really Saturday, 13 September; it is Wednesday 10th. But having written you faithfully for 21 sixth days straight (21 Sabbaths if you’re Jewish or 7th-Day Adventist) and then — for very good reason! — having missed the past two Saturdays together with another menstrual period, I’ve so much and mattersome to catch you up on that I’m starting this letter three days early. And I shall be lucky, even so, to get it up to the “present” and posted by its letterhead date.