(Bellerophon, slayer of the Chimera) who falls from mythic irreality into the present-day Maryland marshes—I find myself back in the Old Line State.
Just as Eben Cooke put aside his Marylandiad to write The Sot-Weed Factor —and the “editor” of Giles Goat-Boy put aside his novel The Seeker to edit The Revised New Syllabus, and J. Bray’s LILYVAC computer put aside its Concordance to propose the revolutionary novel NOTES —so I put aside, in 1968, in Buffalo, a Marylandiad of my own in favor of the novel LETTERS, whereof Mensch’s Perseid and Bray’s Bellerophoniad were to be tales-within-the-tale. Then, in ’69, ’70, and ’71, I put by LETTERS in pursuit of a new chimera called Chimera: serial novellas about Perseus, Bellerophon, and Scheherazade’s younger sister. Now (having put by Buffalo for Baltimore) it’s back to LETTERS, to history, to “realism”… and to the revisitation of a certain marsh where once I wandered, dozed, dreamed.
But though I have returned to Maryland, I shall not to Cooke’s Marylandiad. One must take care what one dreams. And there are projects whose fit fate is preemption: works meant ever to be put aside for works more pressing; dreams whose true and only dénouement is the dreamer’s waking in the middle, half tranced, understanding where he is but not at once why he’s there.
LETTERS: an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual. They will write always in this order: Lady Amherst, Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, A. B. Cook, Jerome Bray, Ambrose Mensch, the Author. Their letters will total 88 (this is the eighth), divided unequally into seven sections according to a certain scheme: see Ambrose Mensch’s model, postscript to Letter 86 (Part S, p. 770). Their several narratives will become one; like waves of a rising tide, the plot will surge forward, recede, surge farther forward, recede less far, et cetera to its climax and dénouement.
On with the story.
N: The Author to Lady Amherst. Politely declining her invitation.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
March 16, 1969
Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst?):
Not many invitations could please me more, ordinarily, than yours of March 8. Much obliged, indeed.
By coincidence, however, I accepted in February a similar invitation from the main campus of the State University at College Park (it seems to be my year down there), and I feel that two degrees in the same June from the same Border State would border upon redundancy. So I decline, with thanks, and trust that the ominous matters you allude to in your remarkable postscript can be forestalled in some other wise.
Why not award the thing to our mutual acquaintance Ambrose Mensch? He’s an honorable, deserving oddball and a bona fide avant-gardist, whose “career” I’ve followed with interest and sympathy. A true “doctor of letters” (in the Johns Hopkins Medical School sense), he is a tinkerer, an experimenter, a slightly astigmatic visionary, perhaps even a revolutionizer of cures—and patient Literature, as your letter acknowledges, if not terminal, is not as young as she used to be either.
Cordially,
P.S.: “I have made this longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter”: Pascal, Letters provinciates, XVI. Perhaps Mme de Staël was paraphrasing Pascal?
P.P.S.: Do the French not customarily serve the salad after the entrée?
E: The Author to Lady Amherst. A counterinvitation.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
March 23, 1969
Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst):
Ever since your letter of March 8, I have been bemused by
Just as Eben Cooke put aside his Marylandiad to write The Sot-Weed Factor —and the “editor” of Giles Goat-Boy put aside his novel The Seeker to edit The Revised New Syllabus, and J. Bray’s LILYVAC computer put aside its Concordance to propose the revolutionary novel NOTES —so I put aside, in 1968, in Buffalo, a Marylandiad of my own in favor of the novel LETTERS, whereof Mensch’s Perseid and Bray’s Bellerophoniad were to be tales-within-the-tale. Then, in ’69, ’70, and ’71, I put by LETTERS in pursuit of a new chimera called Chimera: serial novellas about Perseus, Bellerophon, and Scheherazade’s younger sister. Now (having put by Buffalo for Baltimore) it’s back to LETTERS, to history, to “realism”… and to the revisitation of a certain marsh where once I wandered, dozed, dreamed.
But though I have returned to Maryland, I shall not to Cooke’s Marylandiad. One must take care what one dreams. And there are projects whose fit fate is preemption: works meant ever to be put aside for works more pressing; dreams whose true and only dénouement is the dreamer’s waking in the middle, half tranced, understanding where he is but not at once why he’s there.
LETTERS: an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual. They will write always in this order: Lady Amherst, Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, A. B. Cook, Jerome Bray, Ambrose Mensch, the Author. Their letters will total 88 (this is the eighth), divided unequally into seven sections according to a certain scheme: see Ambrose Mensch’s model, postscript to Letter 86 (Part S, p. 770). Their several narratives will become one; like waves of a rising tide, the plot will surge forward, recede, surge farther forward, recede less far, et cetera to its climax and dénouement.
On with the story.
N: The Author to Lady Amherst. Politely declining her invitation.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
March 16, 1969
Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst?):
Not many invitations could please me more, ordinarily, than yours of March 8. Much obliged, indeed.
By coincidence, however, I accepted in February a similar invitation from the main campus of the State University at College Park (it seems to be my year down there), and I feel that two degrees in the same June from the same Border State would border upon redundancy. So I decline, with thanks, and trust that the ominous matters you allude to in your remarkable postscript can be forestalled in some other wise.
Why not award the thing to our mutual acquaintance Ambrose Mensch? He’s an honorable, deserving oddball and a bona fide avant-gardist, whose “career” I’ve followed with interest and sympathy. A true “doctor of letters” (in the Johns Hopkins Medical School sense), he is a tinkerer, an experimenter, a slightly astigmatic visionary, perhaps even a revolutionizer of cures—and patient Literature, as your letter acknowledges, if not terminal, is not as young as she used to be either.
Cordially,
P.S.: “I have made this longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter”: Pascal, Letters provinciates, XVI. Perhaps Mme de Staël was paraphrasing Pascal?
P.P.S.: Do the French not customarily serve the salad after the entrée?
E: The Author to Lady Amherst. A counterinvitation.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
March 23, 1969
Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst):
Ever since your letter of March 8, I have been bemused by
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