Word: letterings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Edward Lashman, director of external projects, yesterday declined comment on Fierra's letter...
This problem might have been papered over with a vivid, engrossing surface, but Barth seems to have taken pains to make his letter writers as unattractive and self-absorbed as possible. He is one of them, thus dryly joining the ranks of the fictitious who think themselves actual, and five of the others either figure in or are suggested by his earlier books. The seventh is Lady Amherst, a fiftyish British widow who has fetched up on the Eastern Shore as a visiting lecturer at a jerk water Maryland college. As the new girl in the book, she commands initial...
...chief virtue of the old epistolary novel was suspense; the tense was present, and the letter writers did not know what would happen once they put down their quills. Barth strips the form of any forward thrust. His interest is not in progress or advancement but in recapitulation. The letters are governed by a "Deeper Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles...
...Letter from the author of Letters...
...still did not have the agreement of that doughty little man in Saigon, President Thieu. Nixon was determined to prevail. "Brutality is nothing," he said to me. "You have never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn't go along, believe me." Haig delivered a scorching letter from Nixon to Thieu on Jan. 16. Its crucial paragraph read: "I have irrevocably decided to initial the Agreement on Jan. 27, 1973, in Paris. I will do so, if necessary, alone. In that case I shall have to explain publicly that your Government obstructs peace. The result will...