Letters

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 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…