Letters (105 page)

It was my further pleasure to reorchestrate the venerable conceit, old as the genre of the novel, that the fiction is not a fiction:
G.G.B.
pretends to be a computer-edited and -printed, perhaps computer-authored, transcript of tapes recorded by the goat-boy and—under the title
R.N.S.: The Revised New Syllabus,
etc.—laid on the Author by Giles’s son for further editing and publication.

I have before me your letters of March 2 and April 1. Their imputation of plagiarism, their allegation that I somehow pirated an extraterrestrial scripture from you and published a distorted version of it as fiction, their ominous demands for reparation, and the rest, I take in the spirit of that lengthy satire. Like those book reviewers who choose to mimic (and attempt to surpass) the author under review, you have seen fit to address me in the manner of my novel, as though you were one of its characters nursing a grievance against your author.

Such mimicries and allegations are best left unacknowledged:
Claw a churl by the breech,
an Elizabethan proverb warns,
and get a handful of shite.
But your passing invocations of Napoleon, George III, Mme de Staël, Bellerophon and the Gadfly—these echo provocatively, not to say uncannily, some concerns of my work in progress; and I am intrigued by your distinction between the fiction of science and the science of fiction. Finally, it interests me that the world may actually contain a person who raises goats and devises “revolutionary” computer programs to analyze, imitate, revolutionize, and perfect the form of the Novel—or is it the form of Revolution?

Inasmuch as my current, nowise revolutionary story includes a character rather like that person (derived from the putative editor of
Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus),
I am curious to hear more from you on the subject of your LILYVAC 5-Year Plan, for example. In exchange, if you’re interested, I offer what I’ve learned since the publication of
G.G.B.
about actual computer applications in such areas as literary structural analysis and the generation of, say, hypothetical plots: information laid on me by workers in the field of artificial intelligence who happen to have read or heard of my novel.

To be sure, none of what I’ve learned may be news to you; or you may not care to share your investigations with me. But if you’re willing, please address me at my university office, which reliably forwards my mail. And do let’s keep the letters “straight”: the 700-plus pages of
Giles Goat-Boy
have surfeited their author with that particular vein of “transcendent parody” and (literally, of course)
sophomoric
allegory.

Dear Jacob Horner,

Fact or fiction, your letter to me of May 15—vigorously declining my invitation to you to play a role, as it were, in another fiction of mine—I accept with sympathy and respect. You will hear no more from me; nor shall I otherwise attempt, though I’m mighty curious, to learn how goes
Der Wiedertraum.

For that notion, at least, and the Anniversary View of History, and the principle of Alphabetical Priority (I mean the
priority
of that principle, which I ought to have listed first), I thank you. I presume that they are not copyrighted, and that you will not object to my making use of them with this acknowledgment of their source.

July 20, 1969

A. B. Cook VI
Chautaugua Road, Maryland

Dear Mr. Cook,

Actually, I am as dismayed as gratified by your long letter to me of a month ago and its even lengthier enclosures. Gratified of course by your ready response to my inquiry concerning your ancestors; by your providing me with copies of those remarkable letters from Andrew Cook IV to his unborn child; by your diverting account of the subsequent genealogy down to yourself; by your supererogatory offer—nay, resolve—to enrich me yet further with the materials of your abortive
Marylandiad:
the posthumous adventures, as it were, of A.B.C. IV. But dismayed, sir, by your misconstruction of my letter and by your breathtaking assertion that we collaborated on my
Sot-Weed Factor
novel—indeed, that we have had any prior connection whatever!

Paper is patient,
observes the Jewish proverb, and verily: elsewise that sheaf of 75% rag 32c 16 lb. 8½ x 11’s on which your secretary transcribed your telephoned-Dictaphoned account of our “meeting,” our “conversation,” our “collaboration,” would have rebelled against the pica’d propositions Royaled themupon. We are not acquainted, sir! Until you answered my letter, I was not even certain of your factual existence—which, given the several transsubstantiations of your reply between “Barataria” and me, remains still more than usually inferential. We have never met, never heretofore conversed, much less collaborated on anything! The “actual” poet laureate of Maryland I understand to be a colorful fellow named Mr. Vincent Godfrey Burns, who I imagine must be less than delighted by your pretension to his office. And—ahem, sir!—my invitation to you was not to play the role of
Author
in my novel-in-letters; merely to be a model, one way or another and perhaps, for one of its seven several correspondents: an epistolary echo of Ebenezer Cooke the sot-weed factor, no more.

That invitation, at risk of offending you, I believe I had really better withdraw. I return with thanks the enclosures of yours of 18 June and earnestly request that you
not
favor me with their sequelae (or anything else) in future. For the suggestion that I take as my ground theme the notion of First and Second Revolutions, in whatever sense, I here thank you, even though it was not exactly news. Also for your plausible relation of Chautauqua and Chautaugua: there are other, homelier etymologies, I have learned since—“fish-place,” for example—but the principle nonetheless applies.

Do please let that proximate place-name be the one bridge between us henceforward, as it has in fact been hitherto. Let us both turn now from letters to TV: to watch the images of men first stepping upon the moon; to ponder the strange tale piece-by-piecing from Chappaquiddick of Senator Kennedy, a drowned young woman, a bridge more dark and ominous than mine and

4 encl

July 27, 1969, 7 Sleepers’ Day

Jerome B. Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, New York 14752

Dear Mr. Bray:

Can you perhaps make use, in your NUMBERS project, of, for example, the
Oxford English Dictionary’s
definition III 18b of that term (“Metrical periods or feet; hence lines, verses”)? Or the Kabbalistic tradition that the Torah was a septateuch before it became a pentateuch, one of its original books having gone the way of the 10 lost tribes, another shrunk to 2 verses in the Book of Numbers? Or the consideration (which occurred to me on receipt of your letter of July 8) that
NUMBERS
is a 7-letter word arranged symmetrically about your initial; that its 5th letter, or
Phi-point,
is also the 5th of the alphabet; that even more things in the world come in 7’s than come in 5’s; that by perfectly imitating the pattern of mythic heroism one may become not a mythic hero but merely a perfect imitation; that one might cunningly aspire neither to perfect nor to revolutionize the flawed genre of the Novel, say, but to imitate perfectly its flaws? (There is a bug in the unicorn caterpillar family, I believe, which mimics the appearance of a leaf partially eaten by unicorn caterpillars.)

I hope you can, because while I accept your declining of an invitation I didn’t quite make—to “be a character” in my story in progress—your letters have suggested a number of things to me possibly useful in that work—e.g., that the word
letters
is a 7-letter word with properties of its own; that every text implies a countertext; that a “navel-tale” within the main tale ought to be located not centrally but eccentrically—at a point, say, five- or six-sevenths of the way through; that such a tale might appropriately concern itself with the classical wish to transcend one’s past accomplishments and achieve literal or figurative immortality; that such a tale might therefore appropriately take as its central figure one of the classical mythic heroes. Et cetera. Thanks.

P.S.: I recollect that Bellerophon does not get to heaven. His mount Pegasus does, stung by Zeus’s gadfly, who apparently already dwelt there: the same insect whom Hera earlier dispatched to torment poor Io, and after whom Socrates was nicknamed. Perhaps that gadfly is your actual hero?

P.P.S.: Finally, I recall that the sort of letters Hamlet bid Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry from Denmark to England, which, unknown to them consigned the bearer to death, are called “Bellerophontic letters after the ones your man innocently delivered from the king of Tiryns to the king of Lycia. Be my guest: but N.R.P.S.V.P.

9 August 1969

Ah John,

Novelist Nabokov ne’er conceived for his Lolita so portentous a catalogue of motels as Ambrose and I have couched in since my last, or reserved for couching in the nights ahead: old nymph and her young debaucher! Forgetting Scajaquada, as I’d prefer, can you believe (not necessarily in this order) the Lord Amherst, the Colonial Court, the Regency, the Windsor Arms, the Gulliver’s Travels, the Kissing Bridge, and the Memory Lane? All (except Toronto’s Windsor) within a Niagara Falls radius of Buffalo—a radius we will extend early next week to Toronto and Stratford—and so, perhaps, not unknown to you. May your nights in them have been agreeable as mine!

For if the Movie is experiencing a hiatus (filming’s to resume across the river in Fort Erie on the 15th), the drama of Germaine Pitt’s sore affair with Ambrose Mensch clearly approaches some sort of climax: easier for me to savour than to characterise, yet doubtless easier for me to characterise than for any save us to savour. By the reckoning you’ll recall, it is “our” stage, this “6th” of our connexion, which I judge to have commenced sometime between the Full Buck Moon of Monday week last and last Saturday’s Scajaquada Scuffle. I had wondered what “we” would be like, if indeed we rereached “ourselves”: well, we’re All Right Jack, and not only by contrast with the madness of the past few months. Indeed, this first week of August has reminded me in some ways of our maiden month of March, except that A.’s behaviour has been more a gentleman’s and less an annuated adolescent’s.

But my last, I believe, left the beleaguered lovers on the verge of the Battle of Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek, on 2 August 1814. (More precisely, my letter ended with a certain sick surmise—but never mind! I still believe myself to have been unbelievably ensnared and at least sexually abused by… “André Castine”… on that Friday night, 1 August. We understand the quotes, who will never, never understand the evening! If I do not sound here like a woman more or less assaulted in body and ravished altogether in spirit one week since, that is because age and experience have evidently taught me to contain the unassimilable, and because—I think coincidentally—the seven days since have been such balm to my sore psyche. I will speak no more of that rose garden!)

Of the details and outcome of the 1814 skirmish, not much is clear: it was a raid, not a battle, between the more important engagements at Chippewa, Lundy’s Lane, and Fort Erie. Some British and Canadian troops ferried over from the Ontario shore to attack the U.S. encampment along Scajaquada Creek, a staging area and supply depot for American movements against Canada. Both the raiders and the raided suffered casualties; some Yankee supplies were destroyed; the attackers withdrew per plan.

Our “reenactment” last Saturday evening was similarly obscure and inconclusive but, I daresay, more complex. With no further History to go on than the above, Ambrose and Reg Prinz had sharked up the following scenario, which like Freudian “dreamwork” was to echo simultaneously such disparate matters as that minor military action, the mike-boom incident at Long Wharf in Cambridge of 19 July last, the ongoing hostilities between Author and Director, and that vague circumambient business they’re calling the Mating Season or Mating Flight—which I take to refer to, at least to include, the sexual casuistries of Prinz/Bea/Ambrose/Germaine, with that horny maniac J. Bray hovering over all.