two coincidences (if that is the word) embodied in it, of a more vertiginous order than the simple coincidence of the College Park invitation, which I had already accepted, and yours from Marshyhope, which I felt obliged therefore to decline in my letter to you of last Sunday.
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
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
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