DEAD LETTERS

THE RECIPE FOR John Earth’s novel “Letters” (Putnam; $16.95) is of scant elegance. The first step is to take any of a number of historical-literary compendiums and, after assiduous cross-reference, spangle a seven-hundred-and-seventy-two-page text with passages like the following:

It is the birthday of John Calvin, Giorgio de Chirico, James III of Scotland, Carl Orff, Camille Pissarro, Marcel Proust, James McNeill Whistler. The Allies are landing in Sicily, Apollo-11 has sprung a leak, Vice-President Fillmore has succeeded Zachary Taylor to the U.S. presidency, the first contingent of U.S. Marines is leaving Viet Nam, Ben Franklin is proposing a Colonial Union modeled after the Iroquois League of Six Nations, the Germans have begun their bombing of Britain and ratified the Versailles Treaty, Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is swamping again in rough seas and may not make it to Barbados, Korean truce negotiations have begun, the stock market continues its decline, and Woodrow Wilson has presented his League of Nations proposal to the U.S. Senate.

The purpose of these synchronic lists is to suggest that past and present, memory and dream, the material and the fictive are part of a single cat’s cradle. Our being, the fugitive shadows in our thoughts are one long Wiedertraum (Mr. Barth’s word), or dream redreamed. Everything connects in the pulsing spiderweb of time. Bertrand Russell asked with arch economy: What evidence is there that the entire past of the universe has not been fantasized by the mind in the latest fraction of a second? Borges can bring home this possibility in a single tranquil sentence.

Second step: You assume that the reader is perfectly familiar with the entirety of your previous works—that he has their plots, allusions, dramatis personae, and stylistic devices at his fingertips. You insert in every page more or less tricksy, more or less coy references to “The Floating Opera,” “The End of the Road,” “The Sot-Weed Factor,” “Giles Goat-Boy,” “Lost in the Funhouse,” and “Chimera.” In an ecstasy of mandarin narcissism, you go further. You have the main character in “Letters” discover, read, and comment upon all these previous stops in the hall of mirrors. And then, with a high-wire leap into the safety net of the self, you introduce into your new novel one Jacob Horner, a transparently autobiographical mask from an earlier and better book. Nay (to echo Professor Barth’s pastiche of Augustan epistolary idiom), you divide the said Horner into a dual form: Jacob Horner, the inmate of Remobilization Farm, pens letters to Jacob Horner, the inmate of Remobilization Farm, in autistic abandon. A character from one’s own previous novel re-dreams himself. Alas, Pirandello was here first, and with mastery.

Third step: Being an unquestionably learned professor of English and American literature, and having more than a passing familiarity with European letters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, you bake your huge brick (“Letters” is longer than “The Idiot,” “Ulysses,” or “The Magic Mountain”) with carefully prepared academic straw; i.e., it becomes a palimpsest of literary-historical-stylistic sources and allusions. Underlying this tome are Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa,” Goethe’s “Werther,” and that greatest, coldest of epistolary fictions Laclos’s “Liaisons Dangereuses.” Passage after passage is carpentered of quotations, of double-acrostic allusions, of acronymic play on names, incidents, and citations out of English and American literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot. Defoe, Swift, and Johnson abound in what is primarily a pastiche of an eighteenth-century epistolary novel. But so do the Metaphysicals, Shakespeare, and the American humorists. When April is come, it is, of course, “the cruellest month;” when genealogies are detailed, interminably, they astutely echo the dark catalogues of inheritance in Faulkner, notably in “The Bear.” But the warp and woof are not only literary in the strict sense. They are wound around arcane spools of biography. It is scarcely possible to make sense of “Letters” without close knowledge of the life, loves, and opinions of Mme. de Staël and her tormented lover Benjamin Constant. Intimacy with the erotic peregrinations of Lord Byron is equally requisite. (Mme. de Staël and Byron met.) Knowing the vital role of Napoleon in the lives and imaginings of George Noel and Corinne, one proceeds to a formidably erudite set of allusions to Napoleon’s putative flight to the United States in 1815, to Jérôme Bonaparte’s actual American sojourn, and to Yankee witnesses or descendants of this illustrious visitation. Re-animations of historical-literary figures are nothing new or illicit. But Barth is out of luck. Titans have been there before him, and on his exact ground. The Mme. de Staël-Byron world, on the lustrous banks of Lake Geneva, weaves its phantom spell in Nabokov’s “Ada;” “Werther” is reborn, with the vitality of complete self-control, in Thomas Mann’s “Lotte in Weimar.”

In themselves, such ingredients will make a more or less indigestible classroom soufflé. Nary a page here, sirrah, unworthy of exegesis, gloss, footnotes, hermeneutics, explication, semiotic analysis, psychohistorical and seminar-cabalistic commentary. Let timbrels sound in the warrens of academe, for not only is Professor Barth’s text a cento of echoes but these echoes are frequently doubly, triply teasing. Ambrose Mensch proposes to “do a verbena.” Ah! Transposition of Proust’s famous faire cattleya, signifying “to make love.” Freshman stuff, that. But wait: it is not to Proust that Dr. Barth now directs us. He asks in a parenthesis, “Do you know Maupassant’s tale ‘La Fenêtre,’ about the verbena-scented lady who invites her suitor to her country château?” Scuttle of footsteps from the classroom to the stacks, where, indeed, a complete edition of Maupassant’s tales awaits us. End of chase? Not at all. “Verbena-scented” ought to ring a bell. Egad, sir, we’ve cottoned on. That haunting tale “An Odor of Verbena,” from Faulkner’s collection “The Unvanquished.” Of course. How could we have been so slow? John Barth, Alumni Centennial Professor of English and Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University, member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (all this and more on the flap), sits smiling.

John Barth has been an exceedingly clever, if self-indulgent, writer. His ear for parody, pastiche, rifacimento, satiric takeoff is exceptional. His knowledge of literature and of history, of the War of 1812 and of the development of American film, of the fauna and flora of Maryland is awesome. Crass though it so often is, his verbalization of sexuality and of the erotic pulse in human flesh carries intense conviction. No doubt he will again write better books, but in this one the virtuosities of perception and verbal technique end in mountainous waste. If Professor Barth does not wish to curtail his own prolixity, was there no one with the nerve or affection required to tell the author that a book one-third as long and stripped of its blatant mechanics of self-reference would have been funny and effective? The sadness of the whole affair goes well beyond the particular case. It involves the current climate of “big time” publishing—the hunt, at once arrogant and spineless, for the “blockbuster.” It engages the absence of an authoritative body of reviewing, especially of “big-name fiction.” How many harried reviewers can have had the time to plow through, let alone give critical thought to, this “new comic masterpiece”? (Blurb writers have to say such things.) Yet it is only where criticism is stringent and unashamed that literature is honored. Narcissism is, just now, the fashionable tag attached to the American situation. Much in that ascription is obviously modish and oversimplified. But to a degree at once precise and grotesque “Letters” seems to document such a view.

Letter to the Author: Dear John Barth, In France—where (as is said by one of your favorite masters, the Sterne Laurence) they order these matters better—there is a proverb: A bad book is the death of a good forest.