Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

On board Bellerophon, at sea

…I appeal to History. History will say that an enemy who waged war for 20 years against the English people came of his own free will, in his misfortune, to seek asylum under her laws. What more striking proof could he give of his esteem and his trust? But what reply was made in England to such magnanimity’? There was a pretense of extending a hospitable hand to that enemy, and when he had yielded himself up in good faith, he was sacrificed.

Our maroonment on that desolated rock, under the boorish Cockburn and his more boorish successors, we need not describe to 1 so long and even more ignobly gaoled. We, at least, had the consolation that our exile was both temporary and as it were voluntary: we needed no Perseus to save us; we could have escaped at any time, and waited 7 years only because that period was needed for us to exploit to best advantage our martyrdom, complete the development of that stage of our political philosophy set down in the Memorial of St. Helena, and execute convincingly the fiction of our death in 1821; also for our brother Joseph in Point Breeze, New Jersey, our officers at Champ d’Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, and our agents in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Barataria, Bloodsworth Island, and Rio de Janeiro to complete the groundwork for our American operations.

By means which we will not here disclose (but which must bear some correspondence to those by which Your Majesty effected his own escape from Windsor), we departed St. Helena in 1822 for my American headquarters—1st in a house not far from your own in the Maryland marshes, ultimately in western New York – an area to which our attention had been directed during our 1st Consulship by Mme de Staël (who owned 23,000 acres of St. Lawrence County) in the days before that woman, like Anteia or the wife of Potiphar, turned against us. Here, for the last century and ½, we have directed our operatives in the slow elaboration of our grand strategy, 1st conceived aboard Bellerophon, whereof the time has now arrived to commence the execution: a project beside which Jena, Austerlitz, Vim, Marengo, the 18th Brumaire, even the original Revolution, are as our ancient 18-pounders to an H-bomb, or our old field glass to the Mt. Palomar reflector: we mean the New, the 2nd Revolution, an utterly Novel Revolution!

“There will be no innovations in my time,” Your Majesty declared to Chancellor Eldon. But the truly revolutionary nature of our project, as examination of the “Bellerophonic” prospectus (en route to you under separate cover) will show, is that, as the 1st genuinely scientific model of the genre, it will of necessity contain nothing original whatever, but be the quintessence, the absolute type, as it were the Platonic Form expressed.

The plan is audacious but certain of RESET Nothing now is wanting for immediate implementation of its 1st phase save sufficient funding for construction of a more versatile computer facility at our Lily Dale base, and while such funding is available to us from several sources, the voice of History directs us to Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of RESET Adversaries, we shook the world; as allies, who could withstand us? What might we not accomplish?

In 1789 Your Majesty “recovered” from the strait-waistcoat of your 1st “madness,” put to rout those intriguing with your son to establish his regency, and until your 2nd and “final” betrayal by those same intriguers in 1811, enjoyed an unparalleled popularity with your subjects – as did we between Elba and St. Helena. Then let us together, from our 2nd Exiles, make a 2nd Return, as more glorious than our 1st as its coming, to a world impatient to be transfigured, has been longer. To the once-King of the Seas, the once-Monarch of the Shore once again extends his hand. Only grasp it and, companions-inarms such as this planet has not seen, we shall be Emperors of the world.

N. (ENCL. 3)

Enclosure #2

July 4, 1967

TO:

Mr. Todd Andrews, Executive Director, Tidewater Foundation, Marshyhope State University College, Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

FROM:

Jerome B. Bray, General Delivery, Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

RE:

Reapplication for Renewal of Tidewater Foundation Grant for Reconstruction of Lily Dale Computer Facility for Reimplementation of NOVEL Revolutionary Project

Sir:

Inasmuch as concepts, including the concepts Fiction and Necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterf_ies exist in our imaginations, along with Existence, Imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.

Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk now to a Luxembourg, a San Marino! Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, churchgoing. What is wanted to restore its ancient dominion is nothing less than a revolution; indeed, the Revolution is waiting in the wings, the 2nd Revolution, and will not stay for the Bicentennial of the 1st, than which it bids to be as more glorious as its coming, to a world impatient to be RESET Now of “science fiction” there is a surfeit; of scientific fiction, none. Attempts to classify “scientifically” the themes of existing fiction (e.g. Professor Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature) or even its dramatical morphology (e.g. the admirable reduction, by Professors Propp and Rosenberg, of the “Swan-Geese” folktale to the formula

– these are steps in the right direction, but halting as a baby’s, primitive as Ben Franklin and his kite – and made by scholars, to the end merely of understanding for its own sake! They are like the panderings of historians upon the Napoleonic Wars; whereas our own textual analyses (beginning with the grand Concordance of the Revised New Syllabus from which the Revolutionary NOVEL Project grew) are like the Emperor’s own examinations of military history – to the end, not merely of understanding, but of mastering and perfecting it, in order, like a cunning wrestler, to RESET We were born on August 15, 1933, in the Backwater Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and raised by 1 of the staff rangers in the absence of our true parents, who for reasons of state were obliged to keep their whereabouts hidden and were never able to communicate with their only child except by coded messages which not even Ranger Burlingame was privy to. These messages trace our descent “originally” from the abortive marriage in 1803 of our namesake the Emperor’s brother Jérôme and Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore; more immediately from their grandson Charles Joseph Bonaparte and the Tuscarora Indian Princess Kyuhaha Bray, Charles’s wife in the eyes of God and the Iroquois though not in the white man’s record books during his tenure as Indian Commissioner in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt. There being at present no bona fide Bonapartes more closely related than ourself to the late Emperor, we have in fact some just pretension to the throne of France – which it is not our concern to press here, but which we do not doubt was instrumental in eliciting support for our original Tidewater Foundation grant from Mr. Harrison Mack, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most RESET Under various assumed names, for our own protection, and in circumstances as strait as our ancestor’s on St. Helena, we completed our higher education in sundry night schools and supported ourself by teaching technical and business-letter writing, 1st in the Agricultural Extension Division of the state university, later at Wicomico Teachers College, most recently in Fredonia, New York. We shall not describe here the conspiracies of anti-Bonapartists and counterrevolutionaries which drove us from academic pillar to post: they did all in their power, vainly, to mock and frustrate our literary career, knowing that our writings were never the fictions they represented themselves as being, but ciphered replies to those parental communications which have sustained us through every ordeal.

Of the fictions qua fictions you will have heard, all published by the Wetlands Press under various noms de plume: The Shoals of Love, by “J. A. Beille” (a name meant to echo Beyle, the French Bonapartist a.k.a. Stendhal); The Wa_p, by “Jean Blanque”; and Backwater Ballads, by “Jay Bray.” The use of our Indian ancestor’s surname in that last nom de plume was a coded challenge to our enemies; it elicited an altogether unexpected result, which changed our life. By the time Ballads appeared in print (to go unnoticed, like its predecessors, by the anti-Bonapartist literary establishment, but not by those for whom its private message was intended), we were at work on another “novel,” to be called The Seeker, whose hero reposes in a sort of hibernation in a certain tower, impatient to be RESET For reasons we did not ourself understand at the time, our work on this fiction had come to a standstill: then in September 1962 we were vouchsafed our 1st bodily visitation by an emissary of our parents – though we did not recognize him as such until some years later. This episode is recounted in the “Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher” of the “novel” Giles Goat-Boy (1966): an account accurate enough in its particulars, since the text was lifted outright from our Revised New Syllabus; yet wholly perverted, since its “author” is either the leader or the tool of the anti-Bonapartists who have done all in their power, vainly, to RESET O stop New ¶

Harold Bray, not the impostor Giles Goat-Boy, was Grand Tutor of the universal University! Persecuted and driven thence by agents of the Antitutor, he was revealed to us that night by his emissary as our ancestor on that campus beyond, as truly as the Bonapartes are our ancestors in this world. The coincidence of his surname and that of our Tuscarora grandmother is no coincidence!

Apprehensive of yet another plot against us, we were at 1st skeptical of this visitation and hesitant to read the manuscript entrusted to us by our visitant. In the year 1963/64, at the age of 30, we found ourself plunged into deepest torpor, not only during our normal rest period, but during our spring and fall work periods as well. Not recognizing that condition as the prelude to a grander pitch and stage of action, we sought help in nearby Lily Dale: 1st among the spiritualists who swarm there (and whose messages from our parents were transparently false); then among the activators of the famous Remobilization Farm, which had yet to be harried from the country by enemies not unconnected to our own.

The multitudinous and ingenious therapies of the Doctor’s staff restored us to the path of destiny (rather, revealed to us we had never left it) and prompted us to read The Revised New Syllabus, which did the rest. To the Farm we owe the pleasure of remeeting a former teacher (Mr. Jacob Horner, instructor in prescriptive grammar during our student nights at Wicomico Teachers College, now administrative assistant of the Farm, whom it will be our pleasure to engage as syntactical analyst in the NOVEL project when the 5-Year Plan is implemented) and the establishing of 2 invaluable associations: with M. Casteene, like ourself descended from French and Indian nobility, and eager to coordinate his historical enterprises and our own; and with H.R.H. Harrison Mack’s Tidewater Foundation, which we discovered (from M. Casteene) to be among the enlightened philanthropies on which the Remobilization Farm depends for support – and to which we turned in turn when we were ourself remobilized in 1965.

We straightway resigned our post at Fredonia (students the country over were by this time becoming impossible to teach in any case) and established ourself at Lily Dale to begin our Concordance to the R.N.S., supporting ourself as best we could by raising goats for fudge and slaughter and piloting the excursion boat Gadfl_ III (named for my lost father; never mind) on nearby Chautauqua Lake. In 1966, as your files will show, on the advice of M. Casteene we applied to Mr. Mack and were awarded a modest grant by the Tidewater Foundation for construction of a preliminary computer facility to aid in the Concordance – whose implications we ourself scarcely realized to be as revolutionary as intuited by M. Casteene and Mr. Mack’s son, Drew.

That same year (we mean 1966/67) we suffered 1 grave setback and reaped 2 unexpected windfalls. The setback was publication on August 5 of the spurious G.G.B., our manuscript edition of R.N.S. having been pirated from Wetlands Press by a carefully placed anti-Bonapartist eager to ingratiate himself with the New York trade publishers. We had counted on royalties from that work to set us free of the goats and Gadf_y… But no matter: He or she shall pay for her/his piracy, as shall in time the 1 who took our initials with our text and published the Syllabus not even as a ciphered message in the guise of fiction, much less as plain and passed truth, but as mere entertainment!

Had the blow fallen a year or 2 earlier, during our vulnerable period, we might have succumbed. But we were supported in our adversity by the foundation grant, by the ready progress of the Concordance program, and by the 2 windfalls aforementioned. The 1st (too personal to detail in this letter) was our meeting of and subsequent association with Ms. Merope Bernstein, a brilliant student of political economy, entomology, and computer science at Brandeis U., who, dissatisfied as we with the academic establishment, had dropped out in her final semester to do fieldwork in militant ecology. We met at an anti-DDT pray-in-and-spray-out on the grounds of the old Chautauqua Institution on the evening of August 15, 1966, our 31st birthday and the most beautiful evening of our life. We can say no more.

The 2nd windfall was the unexpected turn taken by our researches this past spring, when we completed the Concordance program and reviewed the initial computer printouts. You will recall that even in our 1st application we intimated (and could have no more than intimated, so tentative were our own speculations at that time) that the Concordance was to be “novel,” even “revolutionary”: the “Bellerophonic Prospectus” which we submitted to the foundation through Mr. Mack merely suggested that the circuitry of our proposed LILYVAC should be capable of mimicking prose styles on the basis of analyzed samples, and even of composing hypothetical works by any author on any subject. In our fall 1966 programming, stung by the spurious Giles, we made provisions for experiments in this line, thinking that publication of such canards as an End of the Road Continued or a Sot-Weed Redivivus or a Son of Giles might expose, confound, and neutralize our enemies; might even force reparations to aid our great work and set us free of the goats and RESET So successful was our circuitry and program design (despite the modest, even primitive, facility that is LILYVAC I), the 1st printouts, we are happy to report, transcended these petty possibilities.

We say transcended, rather than exceeded, because like a gift from the Grand Tutor, what LILYVAC gave us was not exactly what we had petitioned for, its superior “eyes” having espied in our data what ours had not. It did indeed produce a few pages of mimicry, in the format of letters written by our enemies and others; it even synopsized, as if in farewell to our Concordance project, a scripture to be called Revised New Revised New Syllabus. But the burden of its message to us was, not to abandon these enterprises, but to incorporate them into the grander project herewith set forth, to be code-named NOVEL.

The details are too sensitive to entrust to the ordinary post; we shall confide them to the foundation through Mr. Drew Mack on a “need-to-know” basis. But bear in mind that we are not an homme de lettres; that The Shoals of Love, The Was_, and Backwater Ballads were not mere novels, but documents disguised in novel format for the purpose of publicly broadcasting private messages to our parents – who, we now have reason to believe, have not been deaf to those cunning, painful ciphers, and may be replying to us in kind through LILYVAC.

Bear in mind also and therefore that any description of our revolutionized project is perforce cryptic and multireferential; when we say NOVEL, for example, we refer at once to at least 5 things: (a) (what we take to be) a document in the guise of an extended fiction of a revolutionary character; (b) a 5-year plan for the composition of that document; (c) a 5-year plan for effecting, in part by means of that document, certain novel and revolutionary changes in the world; (d) the title of a (also known as RN) and the code name of b and c; and (e) the code name for this Novel Revolution itself and the 5 several years of its implementation, which Ms. Bernstein and we have abstracted from LILYVAC’s printout instructions as follows.:

1. 1966/67 (Year N [already completed in essence, without our knowing the true significance of our labors]): Programming of LILYVAC I to mimic prose styles on the basis of analyzed specimens. Composition of hypothetical fictions. Neutralization of leading anti-Bonapartists and exaction of reparations for plagiarism [these last have yet to be achieved]. Poisoned entrails.

2. 1967/68 (Year O): Programming of LILYVAC II [i.e., the modifications and extensions of LILYVAC I to be made this fall with Tidewater Foundation funds, contingent on renewal of our grant] with data for The Complete and Final Fiction: e.g. analyses of all extant fiction, its motifs, structures, strategies, etc. Production of an abstract model of the perfect narrative, refined from such crudities as are now available, e.g. the “Swan-Geese” formula cited earlier. Toad that under cold stone days and nights has 31 sweltered venom sleeping got.

3. 1968/69 (Year V): 1st trial printouts of RN and analysis of same. Fillet of a fenny snake.

4. 1969/70 (Year E): Completion of analysis. Eye of newt. Reprogramming of LILYVAC II (or construction of LILYVAC III) for composition of Final Fiction RN.

5. 1970/71 (Year L): Final print-out of NOVEL (i.e., RN). Revelation of true identity. Rout of impostors and pretenders. Assumption of throne of France. Restoration of “Harrison Mack II” to throne of England. Destruction of all existing stocks of insecticides and prohibition of their manufacture forever. Toe of frog. Reunion with parents. Commencement of New Golden Age.

We have explained already that LILYVAC found it unnecessary actually to compose the hypothetical fictions, having adumbrated their possibility and demonstrated the capacity. Nor can it be said that the creature who appended his name to the false Giles has been neutralized: we have not got all the birds out of LILYVAC I, and its capacity, while exceeding what could have been expected of so modest a facility, falls short of our requirements for years O through L – a discrepancy which we look to the Tidewater Foundation to rectify. But he shall pay.

Moreover and finally, our spring work period was abbreviated by an almost successful attempt on the part of our enemies to assassinate us in late May of this year. In the guise of Chautauqua County officials and with the pretext of “fogging the woods around Lily Dale against lake-fli_s,” they laid a cloud of poison gas about the car in which Ms. Bernstein and we had parked, en route from our afternoon’s work, in order to review our draft of this very letter. Thanks to her quick action in rolling up the windows and taking the wheel, and the admirable traction of our loyal VW on marshy woodland lanes, we made good our escape. Ms. Bernstein, we are relieved to report, suffered no more than a few tears and sneezes; we on the other hand were gassed to unconsciousness for 24 hours, suffered delirium, nausea, poisoned entrails, and muscular spasms for the following week, and still experience occasional twitches and a sustained low-grade nervous disorder. They shall pay.

But we survived! (The innocent lake-blanks, alas, did not.) And, come August 15 and the commencement of our fall work period, we shall proceed with the implementation of Year O, for which nothing is wanted save sufficient funding for the redesign of LILYVAC I. And while such funding is available to us from several sources, the voice of History directs us to RESET Complimentary Close

JBB

F: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly (and Lady Amherst). A de-cla-ra-ti-on and an ex-hor-ta-ti-on. With several postscripts.

The Lighthouse, Mensch’s Castle

Erdmann’s Cornlot

Dorset, Maryland

March 3, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Whom It Concerned

TO:

Yours Truly (cc. Germaine Pitt)

RE:

Your blank and anonymous letter to me of May 12, 1940

Dear Sir or Madam:

Fill in the blank: AMBROSE LOVES ______________.

A.

P.S. (to G.P.): Dear Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English and Acting Provost of the Faculty of Letters of Marshyhope State University College Germaine Gordon Pitt Lady Amherst: I love you! And I shall in your pursuit surely make an ass of

P.P.S.: Sixth love of my life, admirable GGPLA: here are the first five “Words of Five Syllables” in the old New England Primer:

Ad-mi-ra-ti-on

Be-ne-fi-ci-al

Con-so-la-ti-on

De-cla-ra-ti-on

Ex-hor-ta-ti-on

They correspond, sort of, to this affair’s predecessors; also to the Story Thus Far (thus far unknown to you) of our relation, whereof we are come to Stage D already and shall by this letter be fetched E-ward.

In my student days, Lady, when science had still not purged itself of 19th-century pathos, the first principle of embryology was that Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: that the evolutionary history of the individual rehearses the ditto of his race. Law too lovely to be true! Which therefore I here take as first rule of my next fiction: its plot shall be the hero’s recapitulation, at the midpoint of his life, of his Story Thus Far, the exposition and complications of its first half, to the end of directing his course through the climax and dénouement of its second. My hero Perseus (or whoever), like a good navigator, will decide where to go by determining where he is by reviewing where he’s been. And inasmuch as my life here in the Lighthouse is itself a species of fiction, it follows that law of reenactment. On May 12, 1940, when I was ten, I found a note in a bottle along the Choptank River shore just downstream from where I write this: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, torn from a tablet and folded thrice; on a top line was penned in deep red ink TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN; on the next-to-bottom, YOURS TRULY. The lines between were blank – a blank I’ve been trying now for 29 years to fill! All my fictions, all my facts, Germaine, are replies to that carte blanche; this, like them, I’ll bottle and post into the broad Choptank, to run with the tide past cape and cove, black can, red nun, out of the river and the Bay, down to the oceans of the world. My Perseus story (if I write it) will echo its predecessors as middle-aged Perseus rehearses his prior achievements, before adding to their number; the house I live in is built from the stones of my family’s history, our past fiascos reconfigured. (And Marshyhope’s up-going Tower of Truth, worse luck for it, is rising on footers of those same false stones.) No wonder, then, dear G, if to my eyes these ABC’s from the N.E.P. spell Q.E.D. E.g.:

1. Ad-mi-ra-ti-on. When first I beheld you in the halls of Marshyhope last fall, an English tea rose among our native cattails and marsh lilies, et cetera. In fact, admirable lady, as a sometime scholar I had admired already your editions of Mme de Staël’s letters and your articles on her connection with Gibbon, Byron, Constant, Napoleon, Jefferson, Rousseau, Schlegel, & Co.; also your delicate commentary on Héloise’s letters to Peter Abelard; also your discreet recollections of H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Mann. Oeuvrewise, milady, we were well met ere we met!

Even if, as I quite imagine, my own obscure, tentative, maverick “writings” (I mean the works of “Arthur Morton King”) have yet to swim into your ken. What must you make, Fair Embodiment of the Great Tradition, of my keyless codes, my chain-letter narratives with missing links, my edible anecdotes, my action-fictions, 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 by Mack’s death (not having been quite his wife), I wasn’t quite paying court yet, either, when I seized the opportunity of your uncertain new standing at Tidewater Farms to console you diplomatically out to dinner and back to your pre-Mack lodgings.

There – by confiding to your new friend-in-need that you had no convenient way to remove from the Mack residence a number of gifts from His Late Majesty which ought not to be inventoried with his estate, and by permitting me to oblige you by fetching them at once in my car, and by confiding further thereupon (at my request and discreetly) some details of the George III/Lady Pembroke masquerade you’d carried off so admirably to old Mack’s benefit – you gave me grounds to confide to you my own more-or-less bereft and therefore eligible status as a divorcé with custody of a handicapped daughter.

For which afflictions of fortune you duly consoled me in your turn. Whence we moved to consoling each other, with your good Dry Sack, for the limitations of life in the academic and geographical backwaters of my Maryland; and you complimented my speech with having but a very inconspicuous American accent, and no Eastern Shore brogue at all; and I complimented you on your graceful acceptance of your fallen lot – but was by this time lost in admiration of your yet-youthful great gray eyes, your less gray hair, your excellent skin (especially for a Briton, Ma’am) and dentition, your sturdy breasts and waist and hips – which, together with your okay legs, put me strickenly in mind of Never Mind Whom, fifth love of my life, that Dido aforementioned (but her thighs tended to Italian amplitude, yours to a Kentish, downs-trekking, partridge-potting muscularity).