• I myself had passed Dante’s mezzo del cammin di nostra vita and begun the second half of my projectible life-span, actuarially and otherwise. A 20-year first marriage had ended in divorce, and at age 40 I had married again (the second union, as of this writing, happily older than its predecessor and going for the distance). In those first 20 years of adulthood I had sired and co-parented three children, and by 1973 was managing them through college. I had contrived to ascend the American academic ladder from teaching-assistantship to endowed-professorship while at the same time writing and publishing my first half-dozen volumes of fiction, and my literary offspring had earned some degree of critical notice — sometimes hedged, like the quotes above. Indeed, the first and fifth of them had been bridesmaid finalists for the National Book Award in fiction, and the sixth a bigamous bride: A divided jury named Chimera co-winner of the 1973 prize.
• All things considered, a not-inappropriate time to take stock, as the USA was warming up to do — perhaps via a Bicentennial novel that would concern itself with (and be the first fruit of) second halves and “second revolutions,” in my country’s history4 as well as in my personal and professional life. What I aimed to do — when by 1973 those aims had clarified themselves — was write a seventh novel that would address these bicentenary, second-revolutionary themes and at the same time be a sequel to all six of its forerunners, carrying representative characters from each into the second cycles of their several stories — without, however, requiring that its readers be familiar with those earlier works.
• Moreover, two decades of reading, writing, and teaching literature had bemused me with the three main senses of our English word letters, to wit:
1. Alphabetical characters, those 26 atoms that in their infinite supply and innumerable but finite recombinations comprise the written universe.
2. Epistolary missives, that homely but splendid technology of human telecommunication in the 18th and 19th centuries especially — the golden era of general bourgeois literacy and, not coincidentally, of the novel as a popular medium of art and entertainment. The English novel, in particular, had from the first an almost proto-Postmodern awareness of itself as words on paper, a document imitating other sorts of documents, especially letters; even where its form was not epistolary, its plot often turned on letters mislaid, misdelivered, misread or miswritten, intercepted or purloined. By 1973, telephony had all but supplanted the writing of personal letters, as film- and television-watching had all but supplanted novel-reading — Adieu, dear media! Such later technologies as e-mail lack the distinctive element of individual penmanship (I kiss your handwriting, love, in lieu of your dear hand); even telefaxed longhand isn’t her ink, on her personal stationery, a souvenir of herself…. And
3. the third sense of “letters,” Literature: dear dwindling diversion, sometimes made of letters made of letters by men and women of letters, its measureless inventory of passions, situations, speculations, flights of fancy, heartbreaks/ha-ha’s/ho-hums all ultimately reducible to a couple-dozen squiggles of ink on paper.
“Work all of this in,” I instructed my muse, “in a certain arrangement of eighty-eight epistles from seven correspondents over seven months of the seventh year before Seventeen Seventy-Six’s two hundredth anniversary — and have the thing ready for publication by that date, okay?”
She obliged, except in that final particular. “I’m not a demand feeder,” she reminded me, and took her own sweet time lactating LETTERS: seven years, appropriately, from the first work-notes to the novel’s first publication in 1979, by when the Bicentennial was yesterday’s newspaper and an even meaner decade waited in the wings. Six books later, as in 1994 I write this foreword letter by letter (never since unaware, at least subliminally, of every l, e, t, t, e, r, & s I scrawl), LETTERS is the fit midpoint of my bibliography, perhaps of the road of my life as well.
I like that, and am gratified to see the old girl here second-cycled into print.
SABBATICAL
Sabbaticaclass="underline" A Romance, written between 1978 and 1981 after my seven-year involvement with the novel LETTERS, was indeed a sabbatical from that extended, intricated labor. The project’s original working title was Sex Education and Sabbatical; I had in mind an odd Siamese twin of a book comprising a fantastical playscript (about a postmodern romance between a skeptical spermatozoon and a comparably wary ovum) followed by a realistical novel involving a middle-aged male Homo sapiens, recently retired from the CIA, and his somewhat younger professorial wife, newly pregnant with, perhaps, the consummation of that playscript romance — which she may decide to abort. For better or worse, as happens with a fair percentage of twin pregnancies, the weaker sibling expired in utero (to be resurrected, more or less, in The Tidewater Tales: A Novel [1987]). The survivor is the work in hand, narrated from a viewpoint that I believe myself to have invented: the first-person-duple voice of a well-coupled couple.
The story was suggested by the curious death in Chesapeake Bay, my home waters, of one Mr. John Arthur Paisley, an early-retired high-ranking operative of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who, in late September 1978, disappeared from his sloop Brillig during an overnight solo cruise in fair weather on this normally tranquil estuary. The unmanned sloop was found aground soon after, all sails set, lunch half prepared in the galley, no sign of foul play, et cetera; the body of its owner/skipper, levitated by the gases of decomposition, surfaced a week later, 40-odd pounds of scuba-weights belted to the waist, a 9mm bullet hole behind the left ear. In those halcyon Cold War years of CIA/KGB huggermugger, when such more or less deranged intelligence chiefs as the Soviet Union’s Lavrenti Beria and the USA’s James Jesus Angleton saw or suspected moles within moles within moles, “the Paisley case” received much local and some national and international attention, duly echoed in the novel. Had the fellow been done in by the KGB because he had discovered their Mole in our agency? By the CIA because he was the Mole? By one or the other because he was only apparently retired from counterintelligence work in order to scan covertly from his sailboat the high-tech snooping gear suspected to be concealed by the Soviets in their U.S. embassy vacation compound, just across the wide and placid Chester River from where I write these words? Et cetera. A few less intrigue-driven souls, myself among them, imagined that the chap had simply done himself in, for whatever complex of personal reasons and despite certain odd details and spookish unresolved questions (see novel) — but by the end of the American 1970s one had learned that paranoia concerning the counterintelligence establishments was often outstripped both by paranoia within those establishments and by the facts, when and if they emerged.
INDEED, MY U.S.-HISTORY homework through that decade for the LETTERS novel, together with our war in Vietnam, cost me considerable innocence concerning the morality of our national past and present, especially with respect to foreign policy and to such agencies as J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Allen Dulles’s CIA, whose clandestine, not infrequently illegal operations I found to be rich in precedent all the way back to George Washington’s administration. Given our political geography, a fair amount of that activity turns out to have taken place in and around my tidal birthwaters (see novels).