Free Letters by John Barth Page B

my récits concrets, my tapes and slides and assemblages and histoires trouvées? No matter: yours not to admire, but to be admired! I know a little of your history; I admire it. I know a bit more of your struggle with our horse’s ass of an acting president, John

    who does not even caricature very well…; I admire it. I know what I hear of your kindness to poor old Harrison Mack in his last year or so…; ditto, perhaps most of all.
    2. Be-ne-fi-ci-al it has been to my somewhat battered spirit to work with you on the ad hoc nominating committee for the MSUC Litt.D. My curriculum vitae, as you must know from your provostial files, has been on the margins of the academic as well as of the literary establishment; I’ve used the campuses, and been by them used, only in times of material or spiritual want: a chronic but intermittent and seldom intense condition. Enough for this postpostscript to say that Affair E had ended, painfully, last summer: as sore a business as Aeneas’s jilting Dido, but not, I trust, so fatal. Imagine an Aeneas who has ceased to love the queen, yet who for various reasons does not cut his anchor cables and run for Rome, but stays on in Carthage, in the very palace! Too distracted to compose (I was anyhow done with avant-garde contraptions, was looking for a way back to aboriginal narrative, a route to the roots), I lost myself with relief in the easier gratifications of teaching, reading, committee work, and the search for a project to reorient me with my muse: to bridge the aforementioned gap between Whence and Whither.
    Thus lost, what I found instead was a muse to reorient me with my projects—a role you were serenely unaware of playing. That you had personally known, even been on more or less intimate terms with, several old masters of modernist fiction as well as their traditionalist counterparts, made you for me Literature Incarnate, or The Story Thus Far, whose next turning I’d aspired to have a hand in. That you were… a few years my senior (who have been 40 since I was 20, and shall continue to be till 60) aroused me the more: for so is Literature! Your casualest remarks I read as portents and fetched to the Lighthouse to examine for their augury. “Did you know,” you asked me once over post-committee coffee in the Faculty Club, “that James Joyce was terribly interested in the cinema, and had a hand in opening the first movie-house in Dublin? But of course, as his eyesight failed…” And you added, “Curious that Jorge Borges, our other great sightless modernist, has always been attracted to the cinema too; I believe he’s even done filmscripts, hasn’t he?” Yet you had no idea that I was at that moment wrestling with the old rivalry between page and screen, making notes for an unfilmable filmscript, and being tempted by Reg Prinz’s invitation to do a screenplay of a certain old friend’s new book! What’s more, one of the principals of that book itself (at least in my screenplay notes) is a woman much resembling yourself, who has a tempestuous affair with a brash American some calendar years her junior and some light-years her social inferior! If our connection was not plotted in heaven, dear Germaine, it’s because our Author lives elsewhere. May you too find it be-ne-fi-ci-al!
    3. As I hope you found my attempt at con-so-la-ti-on last month at Harrison Mack’s funeral, when, it seemed to me, our relationship escalated to a third stage. For one thing, I touched you—even embraced you for the first time, under pretext of consoling a bereft colleague. You were startled! But for all you knew, such unwonted familiarity might be customary among Americans: another manifestation of our aggressive informality, like my suddenly addressing you as “Germaine” instead of “Lady Amherst” or (à la Schott) “Mrs. Pitt.” Yet it’s an English proverb, not an American, that the time to pay court to a widow is en route home from the funeral. If you were not quite rewidowed