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
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.
Office of the Provost
Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
12 April 1969
Dear Mr B.:
On the 22nd of this month I shall turn… forty-five. Germaine de Staël, at that age, had borne four children—one by her husband, two by her lover Narbonne, one by her lover Benjamin Constant—and was about to conceive her fifth and last, by a coarse young fellow half her age, whom her son Auguste (almost his coeval) called Caliban. The child, imbecilic last fruit of middle-aged passion, fatigue, and opium, would be named Giles,
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
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.
Office of the Provost
Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
12 April 1969
Dear Mr B.:
On the 22nd of this month I shall turn… forty-five. Germaine de Staël, at that age, had borne four children—one by her husband, two by her lover Narbonne, one by her lover Benjamin Constant—and was about to conceive her fifth and last, by a coarse young fellow half her age, whom her son Auguste (almost his coeval) called Caliban. The child, imbecilic last fruit of middle-aged passion, fatigue, and opium, would be named Giles,
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