Here’s what I know about the book so far. Its working title is LETTERS. It will consist of letters (like this, but with a plot) between several correspondents, the capital-A Author perhaps included, and preoccupy itself with, among other things, the role of epistles — real letters, forged and doctored letters — in the history of History. It will also be concerned with, and of course constituted of, alphabetical letters: the atoms of which the written universe is made. Finally, to a small extent the book is addressed to the phenomenon of literature itself, the third main sense of our word letters: Literature, which a certain film nut is quoted as calling “that moderately interesting historical phenomenon, of no present importance.”
What else. LETTERS is a seven-letter word; the letters in LETTERS are to be from seven correspondents, some recruited from my earlier stories (a sure sign, such recycling, that an author approaches 40). They’ll be dated over the seven months from March through September 1969, though they may also involve the upcoming U.S. Bicentennial (a certain number of years hence), the War of 1812, the American Revolution, revolutions and recyclings generally. I’ve even determined how many letters will be required (88, arranged and distributed in a certain way: a modest total by contrast with the 175 of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for example, not to mention the 537 of Clarissa)—but I’m not yet ready to declare what the book’s about!
However, experience teaches us not to worry overmuch about that problem. We learn, as Roethke says, by going where we have to go; and among the things we may learn, like Aeneas, is where all along we have been headed.
Two further formal or procedural considerations. (A) At a point 6/7ths of the way through the book — that is, in the neighborhood of its climaxes — I want there dutifully to be echoed the venerable convention of the text-within-the-text: something classical-mythological, I think, to link this project with its predecessor and to evoke the origins of fiction in the oral narrative tradition. I have in mind to draft this little off-central text first and let the novel accrete around it like a snail shell. The myth of Bellerophon, Pegasus, and Chimera has been much in my imagination lately (In the myth, you remember, just at or past the midpoint of his heroical career, Bellerophon grows restless, dissatisfied that he has not after all got to heaven by slaying the Chimera; he wonders what he might manage by way of encore to that equivocal feat. There towers Mount Olympus, still beyond his reach; there grazes the winged horse, turned out to pasture and, like his master, going to fat…), but I can’t seem to get old Pegasus off the ground! Any suggestions?
Which question fetches us to (B) It appeals to me to fancy that each of the several LETTERS correspondents, explicitly or otherwise, and whatever his/her response to the Author’s solicitations (like the foregoing), will contribute something essential to the project’s plan or theme. So far, this has worked out pretty well. Never mind what your predecessors have come up with, and never mind that in a sense this “dialogue” is a monologue; that we capital-A Authors are ultimately, ineluctably, and forever talking to ourselves. If our correspondence is after all a fiction, we like, we need that fiction: it makes our job less lonely.
So, old fellow toiler up the slopes of Parnassus: Have I your permission to recycle “Ambrose Mensch” out of the Funhouse and into LETTERS? And how does all this strike you? R.S.V.P.!
As ever,
— And, friend, how do you fare? I have in the body of this letter stuck deliberately to business. But as you know, I know (by letters only) your admirable Lady Amherst; and via that correspondence — which I initiated but have not done right by — I know a great deal that isn’t my business, as well as one or two things (e.g., your adventures with Mr. Prinz) that sort of are. I won’t presume to remark on either, though I have my opinions. Except of course to say I’m sorry to hear that your mother’s dying and your brother’s ill. And look here, Ambrose: your Ex (excuse me, but I recollect her amiably from college days, when she typed all our fledgling manuscripts) — has that chap Jerome Bray really got her in his clutches?
U: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Replying to the latter’s telephone call of the previous night.
Chautauqua, New York
August 24, 1969
Old ally,
Understood. My letter to you of 8/3 awaited your return from Canada to the house I once helped you build, and the distressful urgencies chez toi kept you from replying till last night. My sympathy, old altered ego: to you, to Peter, to your sister-in-law.
