Letters

Mr. Todd Andrews

Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

Some fifteen years ago, when I was 24 and 25 (Eisenhower! Hurricane Hazel!), I wrote my first published novel, a little tidewater comedy called The Floating Opera. It involved, among other things, a showboat remembered from Aubrey Bodine’s photographs and an imaginary 54-year-old Maryland lawyer named Todd Andrews, who once in 1937, when he was 37, cheerfully attempted to blow himself up together with the Floating Opera and a goodly number of his fellow Eastern Shorers. You may have heard of the story.

At that time, as a budding irrealist, I took seriously the traditional publisher’s disclaimer—“Any resemblance between characters in this novel and actual persons living or dead,” etc. — and would have been appalled at the suggestion that any of my fictive folk were even loosely “drawn from life”: a phrase that still suggests to me some barbarous form of capital punishment. I wanted no models in the real world to hobble my imagination. If, as the Kabbalists supposed, God was an Author and the world his book, I criticized Him for mundane realism. Had it been intimated to me that there actually dwelt, in the “Dorset Hotel,” a middle-aged bachelor lawyer with subacute bacterial endocarditis, who rented his room by the day and spent his evenings at an endless inquiry into his father’s suicide…

No matter. Life is a shameless playwright (so are some playwrights) who lays on coincidence with a trowel. I am about the same age now as “Todd Andrews” was when he concluded that he’d go on living because there’s no more reason to commit suicide than not to: I approach reality these days with more respect, if only because I find it less realistic and more mysterious than I’d supposed. I blush to confess that my current fictive project, still tentative, looks to be that hoariest of early realist creatures, an epistolary novel — set, moreover and by God, in “Cambridge, Maryland,” among other more or less actual places, and involving (Muse forgive me) those most equivocal of ghosts: Characters from the Author’s Earlier Fictions.

There, I’ve said it, and quickly now before I lose my nerve, will you consent, sir, to my using your name and circumstances and what-all in this new novel, clearing the text of course with you before its publication et cetera and for that matter (since other “actual persons living or dead” may wander through this literary mail room) to my retaining you, at your customary fee, for counsel in the libel way?

Cordially,

P.S.: Do you happen to know a Lady Germaine Amherst (Germaine Lady Amherst? Germaine Pitt Lady Amherst? Lady Germaine Pitt-Amherst?)? What about a nut in Lily Dale, N.Y., named Jerome Bonaparte Bray, who believes himself to be the rightful king of France, myself to be an arrant plagiarist, and yourself to be his attorney?

H: The Author to Todd Andrews. Accepting the latter’s demurrer.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

Sunday, April 6, 1969

Todd Andrews

Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

How a letter written and presumably mailed by you in Cambridge on Good Friday could reach my office here in Buffalo on Holy Saturday is a mystery, considering the usual decorous pace of the U.S. mail. But on this pleasant Easter Sunday afternoon, having got through the Times betimes, I strolled up to the campus to check out some epistolary fiction from the library, found it closed for the holiday, stopped by my office, and voila: its postmark faint to the point of illegibility; its twin 6¢ FDR’s apparently uncanceled; the mystery of its delivery intact.

And its plenteous contents avidly received, sir, twice read already, and respectfully perpended. Be assured that I share your reservations; nevertheless, I forge away.

Be assured further that I will honor your request not to make use of your name and situation, or the confidences you share with me in your letter, without your consent. When I have a view of things at all, it is just your sort of tragic view — of history, of civilizations and institutions, of personal destinies — and I hope I live it out with similar scruple. Even given your eventual consent (which I still solicit), I would of course alter facts as radically as necessary for my purposes, as I did fifteen years ago when I invented a 54-year-old lawyer named Todd Andrews, and cut the Macks from whole cloth to keep him company. The boundary between fact and fiction, or life and art, if it is as arguable as a fine legal distinction, is as valuable: hard cases make good law.