A: The Author to Germaine Pitt and Ambrose Mensch. An alphabetical wedding toast.
L: The Author to the Reader. LETTERS is “now” ended. Envoi.
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A: Lady Amherst to the Author. Inviting him to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from Marshyhope State University. An account of the history of that institution.
Office of the Provost
Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
8 March 1969
Mr John Barth, Esq., Author
Dear sir:
At the end of the current semester, Marshyhope State University will complete the seventh academic year since its founding in 1962 as Tidewater Technical College. In that brief time we have grown from a private vocational-training school with an initial enrollment of thirteen students, through annexation as a four-year college in the state university system, to our present status (effective a month hence, at the beginning of the next fiscal year) as a full-fledged university centre with a projected population of 50,000 by 1976.
To mark this new elevation, at our June commencement ceremonies we shall exercise for the first time one of its perquisites, the awarding of honorary degrees. Specifically, we shall confer one honorary doctorate in each of Law, Letters, and Science. It is my privilege, on behalf of the faculty, (Acting) President Schott, and the board of regents of the state university, to invite you to be with us 10 A.M. Saturday, 21 June 1969, in order that we may confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa. Sincerely hopeful that you will honour us by accepting the highest distinction that Marshyhope can confer, and looking forward to a favourable reply, I am,
Yours sincerely,
Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)
Acting Provost
GGP(A)/ss
P.S.: A red-letter day on my personal calendar, this — the first in too long, dear Mr B., but never mind that! — and do forgive both this presumptuous postscriptum and my penmanship; some things I cannot entrust to my “good right hand” of a secretary (a hand dependent, I have reason to suspect, more from the arm of our esteemed acting president than from my arm, on which she’d like nothing better, if I have your American slang aright, than to “put the finger”) and so must pen as it were with my left, quite as I’ve been obliged by Fate and History — my own, England’s, Western Culture’s — to swallow pride and
But see how in the initial sentence (my initial sentence) I transgress my vow not to go on about myself, like those dotty women “of a certain age” who burden the patience of novelists and doctors — their circumstantial ramblings all reducible, I daresay, to one cry: “Help! Love me! I grow old!” Already you cluck your tongue, dear Mr-B.-whom-I-do-not-know (if indeed you’ve read me even so far): life is too short, you say, to suffer fools and frustrates, especially of the prolix variety. Yet it is you, sir, who, all innocent, provoke this stammering postscript: for nothing else than the report of your impatience with just this sort of letters conceived my vow to make known my business to you tout de suite, and nothing other than that vow effected so to speak its own miscarriage. So perverse, so helpless the human heart!
And yet bear on, I pray. I am…what I am (rather, what I find to my own dismay I am become; I was not always so…): old schoolmarm rendered fatuous by loneliness, indignified by stillborn dreams, I prate like a “coed” on her first “date”—and this to a man not merely my junior, but… No matter.
I will be brief! I will be frank! Mr B.: but for the opening paragraphs of your recentest, which lies before me, I know your writings only at second hand, a lacuna in my own life story which the present happy circumstance gives occasion for me to amend. Take no offence at this remissness: for one thing, I came to your country, as did your novels to mine, not very long since, and neither visitor sojourns heart-on-sleeve. A late good friend of mine (himself a Nobel laureate in literature) once declared to me, when I asked him why he would not read his contemporaries—
But Germaine, Germaine, this is not germane! as my ancestor and namesake Mme de Staël must often have cried to herself. I can do no better than to rebegin with one of her own (or was it Pascal’s?) charming openers: “Forgive me this too long letter; I had not time to write a short.” And you yourself — so I infer from the heft of your oeuvre, stacked here upon my “early American” writing desk, to which, straight upon the close of this postscript, I will address me, commencing with your earliest and never ceasing till I shall have overtaken as it were the present point of your pen — you yourself are not, of contemporary authors, the most sparing…
To business! Cher Monsieur (is it French or German-Swiss, your name? From the lieutenant who led against the Bastille in Great-great-great-great-great-grand-mère’s day, or the late theologian of our own? Either way, sir, we are half-countrymen, for all you came to light in Maryland’s Dorset and I in England’s: may this hors d’oeuvre keep your appetite for the entrée whilst I make short work of soup and salad!)…
Salad of laurels, sir! Sibyl-greens, Daphne’s death-leaves, honorific if worn lightly, fatal if swallowed! I seriously pray you will take it, this “highest honour that Marshyhope can bestow”; I pray you will not take it seriously! O this sink, this slough, this Eastern Shore of Maryland, this marshy County Dorchester — whence, to be sure, you sprang, mallow from the marsh, as inter faeces etc. we are born all. Do please forgive — whom? How should you have heard of me, who have not read you and yet nominated you for the M.U. Litt.D.? I have exposed myself already; then let me introduce me: Germaine Pitt I, née Gordon, Lady Amherst, late of that other Dorset (I mean Hardy’s) and sweeter Cambridge, now “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” (to my ear, the only resident speaker of that tongue) and Acting (!) Provost of Make-Believe University’s Factory of Letters, as another late friend of mine might have put it: a university not so much pretentious as pretending, a toadstool blown overnight from this ordurous swamp to broadcast doctorates like spores, before the stationer can amend our letterhead!
I shall not tire you with the procession of misfortunes which, since the end of the Second War, has fetched me from the ancestral seats of the Gordons and the Amhersts — where three hundred years ago is reckoned as but the day before yesterday, and the 17th-Century Earls of Dorset are gossipped of as if still living — to this misnamed shire (try to explain, to your stout “down-countian,” that — chester < castra = camp, and that thus Dorchester, etymologically as well as by historical precedent, ought to name the seat rather than the county! As well try to teach Miss Sneak my secretary why Mr and Dr need no stops after), which sets about the celebration this July of its tercentenary as if 1669 were classical antiquity. Nor shall I with my passage from the friendship — more than friendship! — of several of the greatest novelists of our century, to the supervisal of their desecration in Modern Novel 101–102: a decline the sadder for its parallelling that of the genre itself; perhaps (God forfend) of Literature as a whole; perhaps even (the prospect blears in the eyes of these…yes…colonials!) of the precious Word. These adversities I bear with what courage I can draw from the example of my favourite forebear, who, harassed by Napoleon, abused by her lovers, ill-served by friends who owed their fortunes to her good offices, nevertheless maintained to the end that animation, generosity of spirit, and brilliance of wit which make her letters my solace and inspiration. But in the matter of the honorary doctorate and my — blind — insistence upon your nomination therefor, I shall speak to you with a candour which, between a Master of Arts and their lifelong Mistress, I must trust not to miscarry; for I cannot imagine your regarding a distinction so wretched on the face of it otherwise than with amused contempt, and yet upon your decision to accept or decline ride matters of some (and, it may be, more than local) consequence.