Читаем Letters полностью

Me, I’m done with it, as with another fictive enterprise I’d begun to fancy, which I shan’t lay on you. What occurred to me as we spoke was that a project as sevenish as the one you describe in your letter ought to be your seventh book rather than your sixth: sixes are my thing. What’s more, your busiest reader hereabouts — my good Dame History — has caught up with your production and needs a quickie to tide her over while you do that long one. So, friend, here are your alphabetized instructions:

1. Author my Perseus/Medusa story and the Bellerophon/Chimera one you mentioned, both concerning midlife crises and Second Cycles that echo First. (I see these as novellas.)

2. Bring to light a third story, from entirely different material, but with enough echoes and connections so that you can graft the three together and

3. Call the chimerical result a novel, since everyone knows that the novella is that form of prose fiction too long to sell as a short story and too short to sell as a book. Good luck.

4. Draft then that epistolary Opus #7 you speak of (including or excluding any version of Yours Truly, in or out of the Funhouse he could almost wish he’d never left, it was so peaceful being lost in there), whose theme seems to me to want to be not “revolution”—what do you and I know about such things? — but (per our telephone talk) reenactment.

5. Epistle yourself to the penultimate seventh of that septpartite opus (Yrs. T. would make it the 6th 7th of that sixth seventh, but he excuses you from such programmaticism), where you’d thought to insert a classical-mythical text-within-the-text. Leave it out (you’ll already have published it as Opus #6)! And for that crucial, climactic, sexissimal keyhole…

6. Find or fashion a (skeleton) key that will unlock at once the seven several plot-doors of your story!

Q.E.D.

As for me: if and when my good right hand is back in service (typing with my left brings me closer than ever in his lifetime to my poor dead father, who wrestled one-armed with that marble all those years) and this movie done (we’ve but two more scenes to shoot), perhaps I’ll commence my Second Cycle — with a novel based on the movie that was meant to be based on your novels but went off in directions of its own. Or perhaps with a crab-and-oyster epic: a Marylandiad? In any case, I advise us both, as we shall not likely be being brief, at least to be bright. May your progression from letter to letter be consistently so; as for Y.T., he will be content if his regression be but brightly consistent: if, like Odysseus striving home from Troy, he can

7. Go from energetic dénouement [to] climactic beginning.

A.

T: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Soliciting his advice and assistance in the LETTERS project.

Chautauqua, New York

August 3, 1969

Ambrose Mensch

The Lighthouse

Erdmann’s Cornlot

“Dorset,” Maryland

Dear Ambrose,

Time was when you and I were so close in our growings-up and literary apprenticeships, so alike in some particulars and antithetical in others, that we served each as the other’s alter ego and aesthetic conscience; eventually even as the other’s fiction. By any measure it has been an unequal relation: my life, mercifully, has been so colorless in its modest success, yours so comparatively colorful in what you once called its exemplary failure, that I’ve had more literary mileage by far than you from our old and long since distanced connection.

Neither of us, I presume, regrets either that closeness or this distance. My guess is that you, too, ultimately shrug your shoulders at “the pinch of our personal destinies as they spin themselves out upon Fate’s wheel”—your pet line from William James in graduate-school days. This letter is not meant to alter that spinning; only to solicit a bit more of that unequal mileage and to wave cordially from Chautauqua Lake to Chesapeake Bay.

I have in mind a book-length fiction, friend, more of a novel than not, perhaps even a sizable one. Having spent the mid-1960’s fiddling happily with stories for electronic tape and live voice — a little reorchestration of the oral narrative tradition — I’m inclined now to make the great leap forward again to Print: more particularly, to reorchestrate some early conventions of the Novel. Indeed (I blush to report) I am smitten with that earliest-exhausted of English novel-forms, the epistolary novel, already worked to death by the end of the 18th Century. Like yourself an official honorary Doctor of Letters, I take it as among my functions to administer artificial resuscitation to the apparently dead.