Letters

And permit me the honor of being, as in better-lettered times gone by, your faithful

Author

2

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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, attributed to fictitious parents (Theodore Giles of Boston and Harriette, née Preston), and regarded jokingly by the household as a native American… But Germaine herself much admired Americans; spoke of them on her deathbed as “l’avant-garde du genre humain, l’avenir du monde”; was in correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris about moving to her property in Leroysville, New York, to escape Napoleon — and herself nicknamed her idiot child by her peasant lover Petit Nous: “Little Us”…

We British are great stoics; we French, famously unsentimental. But I cannot reflect on these things dry-eyed. I have no children (and no novels, and no estates), but my years have been hardly less vicissitudinous than my namesake’s; more so than anyone supposes; more so than I myself can believe. In our place and time a woman my age may expect, for better or worse, three or four decades yet to live; in this country especially, she may look and dress half her age, play tennis daily, dance all night, take lovers and the Pill…

Today, sir, I am very tired; those decades to come weigh me down like a heavy sentence. Today I could wish to be a middle-aged widow of the lower class in a Mediterranean village: already wrinkled, fallen-breasted, gone in the teeth, dressed in black, supernumerary, waiting to die.

Well.

Your letter to me of 16 March, declining our honorary degree, was cordial, if disappointing and problematical (the matter is far from resolved). Your follow-up letter of the 23rd was similarly cordial but, at least as I then regarded it, impertinent; hence my peremptory no of Saturday last. My reasons were several, over and above the vexing problem of thwarting John Schott and A. B. Cook; but I was in no humour just then to set them forth. I shall do so now.

In latter March (as promised in my initial letter), I read your Floating Opera novel, having been introduced earlier by Ambrose Mensch to the alleged original of your character Todd Andrews. I enjoyed the story — the first novel of an ambitious young man — but I felt a familiar uneasiness about the fictive life of real people and the factual life of “fictional” characters — familiar because, as I’m sure I have intimated, I’ve “been there before.” I could not look forward to being there again: yet again more or less artfully misportrayed for purposes not my own, however commendable; yet again “immortalised” like the victims of Medusa or the candid cameraman: picking their noses, scratching their backsides. Too, there was to be considered the fallen state of Literature, in particular of the Novel, most especially of trade fiction publishing in your country, as I learn about it from Ambrose Mensch. No, no, it was an impertinence, your suggestion that I offer my life for your literary inspection, as women used to offer their handbags for Isaac Babel’s!