Текст книги "Letters"

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E: Jerome Bray to his parents and foster parents. His betrayal by Merope Bernstein. His revenge and despair.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale NY 14752

June 17 1969

Mr & Mrs Gerald Bray a.k.a. Gadblank III

c/o Ranger & Mme H C Burlingame VI

Backwater National Wildlife Refuge

Dorchester County Maryland

Dearest Parents & Foster Parents

Every RESET has a RESET Back where we started All shall be ill Jack shant have Jill the man shant have his mare again and naught will be well Not bad how about a spot of punctuation, that’s better. Continue to delete all references to blank, very good, the mails aren’t safe, but don’t reset every time you see a pattern, or these letters will be a meaningless jumble of you-know-whats, here we go.

Dear Mother and Father and Foster Ditto it is not easy to write this letter. Are having a terrible time. Wish you were here. Why have you forsaken us, you too, like H.M. II a.k.a. G. III, Todd Andrews, Andrews Mack, and bad Merope Bernstein a.k.a. Margana y Fael, anti-Bonapartists all? Old Ranger B., dear Madame: Are you still at sweet Backwater or flown to your reward? Do you recall this orphan of the storm, that you rescued from his bulrush basket and raised up in the marsh as though he were yours despite his bad foot? Whose mother was a royal virgin whose father RESET Whose maternal grandfather RESET Please forward. Have you learned in the evening of your lives what you never knew in the morn of ours: where our true Mommy & Daddy are, and why they don’t write clearer letters? Please forward.

Dear parents: It is not easy to RESET Your long message to us of April 1 was duly printed out and delivered by LILYVAC, but we cannot find the key to that treasure, and we despair. Numbed by your numbers, stung like fallen Bellerophon, we wander far from the paths of men, devouring our own soul. The midpoint of our life approaches, unhappy birthday, ditto the Phi-point of our 5-Year Plan, 618 etc., and we are nowhere. The Tidewater Foundation has rejected us; they shall pay. Our letters go unanswered; our enemies rejoice. Year T (a.k.a. V) ends; soon it will be time to mate. With whom, Ma? NOT will not come to ES! Our business will go unfinished ha RESET Oh stop.

Themurah a.k.a. anagrammatical transposition is all humblank. Everything comes out scrambled after MARGANAYFAEL, leafy anagram for bad Margana y Flae, who bit us bye-bye on May 18, she shall RESET It was the anniversary of Napoleon’s coronation, 1st Sunday after Ascension, mild & cloudy, ☿ stationary in Right Ascension, ☍♆☉, hear the buzzing of the blanks in the apple trees, Apollo-10 launched, will land on USS Blank, etc. The bad news had just arrived from the Tidewater Foundation; we were RESET Drove down to Chautauqua in our VW Blank to share our sorrow with Margana y Rodriguez y Thelma y Irving, loyal comrades so we thought, with the weariness that only true revolutionary lovers Forget it. We did not knock; strode into their pad in the old St. Elret Hotel on the institution grounds for the comradely consolation that only RESET It was but May, Ma, and they were mating! In hemp smoke so thick it brought tears to our eye of newt! Irving with Thelma! Rodriguez with my Margana!

Look who here, said Thelma: it old Numbers. I can explain, Jer, said Margana. What’s to explain? Rodriguez asked rhetorically: Everybody must make the revolution in his/her et cetera heh heh. We’re like practicing up for the Mating Flight, joshed Irving; pull up some smoke and join us. He not joining me, declared Thelma; he give me the heeb-jeebs. Jerome, Margana said, it’s time I told you. Tell shmell, sniffed Rodriguez; he’s got eyes. What big ones, Irving chaffed. Cool it, hombres, urged Margana; remember what I said. Now look here, Jer, these spray guns aren’t what you think, okay? she went on (for while numbly regarding them we had not failed to notice the hideous weapons deployed about their quarters); we ripped off some herbicide from the county agent’s office, right? Our plan is to defoliate the Ivy League during their commencement exercises. Think what you please, Jerry; it’s the truth. And Roddy and I, well, we’re lovers: true revolutionary RESET Quick Henry, cried Thelma as we angrily opened our cape, the Flit! Jesus H. Keerist, expostulated Irv, put that thing away, man!

They flew for the exits: perfidious Margana alone stood her ground, spray gun in hand. Wicked, beautiful le Fay! Abdomen we so prized, that was to have taken our seed come August to hatch a brood of Conquerors! We hefted our barb; her courage failed, with a squeal she flung the spray gun at us and turned to flee, that’s F-L-E-RESET She deserved to die, Da, but we but numbed her: little shot in the tail to teach her a lesson and keep Rodriguez out of there till after mating season. Her friends abandoned her as she’d abandoned us, afraid either to come to her aid or to call the police lest they be burst for Illegal Possession. We ourself telephoned the Chautauqua Infirmary, gave the St. Elret number, reported a young female apparently O.D.‘d on some narcotic.

Faithless Merope! Margana y Blank! We kissed her numb face; we covered her numb and swiftly swelling shame; we retracted our number, rearranged ourself, waited with her till we heard the ambulance before slipping out through the screen and making a blankline home. All the way weeping and wondering, Now who’ll unscramble things? Who’ll feed the goats for fudge and slaughter? Who’ll take delivery in the rear, as wanton Merope was wont, come mating season? Perfidious M y F, would thou wert a blank preserved in amber! Yet never return to Lily Dale: we will not so spare you a 2nd time.

That was last month. Alone since with these senseless numbers, as Maimonides says that YHWH RESET We see now the scale of our betrayal. Agents of you-know-whom, the lot of them, and Merope Bernstein was their tool! The foundation was their creature; they supported us only to learn and steal and neutralize our plans; they put the blanks in LILYVAC’s program, saw to it our spring work period was wasted in vain unscrambling. This is no leafy anagram at all!

Ma y Da: Mayday! Mayday! We are back where we began. How to recycle? Every RESET Now they swarm to Chautauqua for the kill, operatives of the false T.F., under pretext of making an anti-Bonapartist film: perfidious Prinz, his ally Mensch, their beautiful captive Bea Golden (whose mind they have drugged with C₂H₆O; whose name they are not worthy to RESET Tomorrow, we daresay, they will celebrate the 154th of Waterloo; tonight they have chartered the Gadblank III (ah, Da) for a party cruise around the lake. We are not fooled: They know we are its pilot; they think by this crude stratagem to snare us in their web.

And we shall go, Ma, though counterstratagem we have none. We shall set out from the institute dock, Da, making false merry. Numbly we shall steer around the familiar circuits: 1st the lower lake, then up through the narrows where the bag of Chautauqua is tied in the middle. There, no doubt, as we round the buoys to begin the upper lake, or 2nd circuit, they will swap their gins-and-tonics for dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, and it will be finished. Pfft, forgotten, we shall RESET Unless dot dot dot

Lost Mother, old articifrix, key to the key: R.S.V.P.!

J.B.B.

I: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. Anniversary of the bees’ descent. Encounters with Jacob Horner and Marsha Blank. He identifies his condition with Perseus’s, and despairs.

Athenaeum Hotel

Chautauqua, New York 14722

Monday, June 16, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Concerned

TO:

Yours Truly

CONCERNING:

Your message to me of May 12, 1940

Old messenger:

It’s another anniversary (Jacob Horner has got us all doing it): of the birth of Joshua Reynolds in 1723, King Gustaf of Sweden in 1858, Stan Laurel in 1890; of the capture by Boston soldiers of French forts in Nova Scotia in Year 2 of the Seven Years’ War; of young Werther’s letter in 1771 reporting his having first met Charlotte several days earlier; of the lifting in 1812 of the British blockade of European ports to American shipping (but the news won’t reach Congress in time to forestall a declaration of war two days from now); of the invention of the squeeze play in baseball in 1894; of Leopold Bloom’s odyssey through James Joyce’s Dublin in 1904. And of the descent upon me 39 years ago, in 1930, at Andrea King Mensch’s breast as we dozed in a hammock near the hollyhocks in the backyard of the old Menschhaus on a flawless forenoon, of a swarm of golden bees.

Eloquence, Uncle Konrad predicted: the boy will grow up to be a Sophocles, a Plato. But it’s silence I’m stung into, zapped by history. Tides! The past is a holding tank from which time’s wastes recirculate. Nothing lost, alas; all spirals back, recycled. Once-straight Joe Morgan, freaked out on psychedelics, sweetly promises to kill Jake Horner unless history can be redreamed, his dead wife reborn. Horner himself, that black hole in the human universe, that fossil from the early 1950’s, has not altered since he dropped out of giaduate school eighteen years ago: a penman after my own heart, he claims to have “published” his first book by leaving the typescript behind in a rooming house for others to discover, or for the Allegheny Reservoir to drown. His “writing” since, I gather, has been the therapeutic compilation of what he calls his Hornbook: a catalogue of notable cuckolds of myth, literature, and history arranged alphabetically from Agamemnon to Zeus.

May I? I asked him yesterday, turning to the M’s. Horner shrugged, thinly smiled, assured me he knew no more than what was inferrable from “the fiction.” But there we all were, between Menelaus and Minos of Crete (and before Morgan, Joseph), followed left to right by columns headed Wife, Lover(s), Remarks. Not only

Cuckold

Wife

Lover(s)

Remarks

Mensch, Hector

King, Andrea

a. Erdmann, Willy (?)

b. Mensch, Karl(?)

c. Mensch, Konrad (?)

issue: Mensch, Peter (?) &/or Ambrose

but also, after Hector,

Mensch, Peter

Giulianova, Magda

Mensch, Ambrose

a. May 12, 1947

b. 1967-69

no issue

How had Horner come by that information, written nowhere but in my jettisoned Amateur manuscript? Did the tides of the Choptank circulate somehow through Lake Erie? The answer was plain, of course, in the entry just prior to Hector’s. Cuckold: Mensch, Ambrose. Wife: Blank, Marsha, followed in the third column by a very long list of names including Mensch, Peter, and in the fourth, after that name, by the remark: issue: Mensch, Angela Blank. Sorry, says Horner: Pocahontas insisted, and we try to be therapeutic. She’d wanted him to list as well her more recent conquests at the Remobilization Farm, he declared – from Casteene, M. through Joseph, Saint to X, Tombo—but he’d stoutly refused, therapy or no therapy, on the grounds that divorce exempts the cuckold from further horns.

Some of those names, Yours, I didn’t even know! The dates might have stung more if my memory were better – So that’s what you were doing in Philadelphia that weekend, etc. – and I could perhaps have made use of the list when Marsha’s lawyers were working me over. But now I neither despised nor pitied the woman, only tisked my tongue, resolved to stay clear of her, and sighed at the regurgitative habit of History that had brought her up in my life again.

In this instance, however, the dramaturge was in all likelihood not Clio but Reg Prinz, who seems as bent on redreaming my history as “St. Joseph” his own. The man wants some sort of showdown, clearly, and not only for his show. I expected to discover he’d photographed my tête-à-tête with Horner yesterday; indeed, lest there be hidden cameras in the Progress and Advice Room of the Remobilization Farm, I showed even less emotion than I felt at sight of those entries in Horner’s Hornbook: I simply fetched forth my Mightier-Than-Etc. and, in the interest of accuracy, put a (?) after Angie’s name.

Marsha, for pity’s sake! Well hear this, Y.T.; you too, Clio – and you, R.P., if your cameras are even now peeking over my shoulder: there is a limit to what I’ll swallow the second time around! As of my last to you I’d rescrewed Magda (Peter & Germaine forgive us), on the 12th anniversary of my virgin connection with her and the 19th of your water message. Very possibly I shall be in “Bibi’s” bibi ere our tale is told: Prinz seems to be setting us up, and Bea looks more golden in her glitterless “Rennie Morgan” role than she’s looked since we tumbled in her rumble seat back in the forties. My treatment of Milady A. has been unspeakable; I do not speak of it. Que sera etc. But I will not reenact my marriage! Salty Marsha, you shall not fuck me over over! Closed-circuit history is for compulsives; Perseus and I are into spirals, presumably outbound.

The question of the plot is clear: How transcend mere reenactment? Perseus, in his life’s first half, “calls his enemy to his aid,” petrifying his adversaries with Medusa’s severed head. In its second half – his marriage to Andromeda broken, his career at an impasse – he must search wrongheadedly for rejuvenation by reenactment, and some version of Medusa (transformed, Germaine: recapitated, beautiful!) must aid him in a different way: together they must attain “escape velocity”; open the circle into a spiral that unwinds forever, as if a chambered nautilus kept right on until it grew into a galaxy. The story must unwind likewise, chambered but unbroken, its outer cycles echoing its inner. Behind, the young triumphant Perseus of Cellini’s statue; ahead, the golden constellations from which meteors shower every August; between, on the cusp, nonplussed middle Perseus, stopped in his reiterative tracks, yet to discover what alchemy can turn stones into stars.

The planning, Yours, goes well; the writing is another matter. When I discover Perseus’s secret for him, I think you’ll hear from me no more; until I do, I pursue these ghosts in circles, beastly, buffaloed, and in these circles am by them pursued.

Beset, too, by metaphors, as by geriatric furies: the dry Falls; this tideless lake; old Chautauqua fallen out of time; this antique, improbable hotel, named after the place named after the city named after the gray-eyed goddess, Perseus’s wise half sister. The elders rock on the porches; bats flitter through the Protestant twilight; the water does not ebb and flow.

Waiting our arrival here this afternoon, a note from Magda: Mother’s condition grave. Will call if it grows critical. Angle sends love. Drop her a postcard from the Falls. M

No period, I note, after the initial. Mere inadvertence: coded signals are not Magda’s way of messaging. Even so, given History’s heavy hand with portents, I’m dismayed: there’s another scene must never be replayed.

Thirty-nine. With luck, about halfway through. Nothing to show for it but a pickup job, a screwy bibliography, a sore divorce, a short string of hedged liaisons, a cracked tower, a brain-damaged daughter. My heart smarts. My birthmark itches. Milady is properly fed up. This letter goes into Chautauqua Lake: the first one guaranteed not to return to sender.

Eloquence, redescend upon me. I despair.

E: The Author to A. B. Cook VI. A request for information and an invitation to participate in the work in progress.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

Sunday, June 15, 1969

A. B. Cook, Poet Laureate

Chautaugua, Maryland 2114?

Dear Mr. Cook:

Eventually, I hope, this letter will reach you. I learned only recently that you live in a place called Chautaugua, Maryland; my zip code directory lists no such post office, but while I was down your way on business two weeks ago, I noticed a road sign for Chautaugua along the Governor Ritchie Highway between Baltimore and Annapolis – it caught my eye because I live on Chautaugua Lake in west New York – and my map of Anne Arundel County confirms that there is indeed a Chautaugua Road not far from the mainland end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I must hope that four-fifths of a zip code plus your title will do the trick.

I have been told that you are descended from Ebenezer Cooke, poet laureate of late-17th/early-18th-Century Maryland, and from Henry Burlingame of Virginia, who is listed among those accompanying Capt. John Smith in his exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608. Fictionalized versions of both gentlemen play a role (indeed, Cooke plays the leading role) in my 1960 novel called, after Cooke’s satirical poem, The Sot-Weed Factor. I am forwarding you a copy, and trust you’ll indulge the liberties I’ve taken with your forebears.

My work in progress, which is of a different character, accounts for this letter. It is itself to be composed of letters, in both senses of the word: an epistolary novel, the epistles to be arranged in an order yet to be devised (I’m just past half through the planning of it). I’m also past half through my biblical threescore-and-ten, which detail no doubt accounts for my second notion about the story: that it should echo its predecessors in my bibliography, while at the same time extending that bibliography and living its independent life. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in the womb, but the delivered child must breathe for itself; one’s forties are the “product” of one’s thirties, twenties, etc., as the present century is the product of those before it – but not merely the product. You see my point.

Thus I am hazarding, for various reasons, the famous limitations both of the Novel-in-Letters and of the Sequel, most fallible of genres. The letters will be from seven correspondents: one from each of my previous books (or their present-day descendants or counterparts, in the case of the historical or fabulous works), plus one invented specifically for this work, plus – I blush to report, it goes so contrary to my literary principles – the Author, who had better be telling stories than chattering about them.

These seven correspondents I imagine contributing severally not only the letters that comprise the story but the elements of its theme and form. The main character, for example – a remarkable middle-aged English gentlewoman and scholar in reduced circumstances – by inviting the Author to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from the small American college where she’s presently teaching, suggests to him, even as he declines her invitation, the general conceit of “doctored letters.” From “Todd Andrews” (the lawyer-hero of my first novel, The Floating Opera) came both the notion of free-standing sequelae and the Tragic View of history, to which in fact I subscribe. From “Jacob Horner” (novel #2, The End of the Road) comes what might be called an Anniversary View of history, together with certain alphabetical preoccupations and the challenge of “redreaming” the past, an enterprise still not very clear to me. Et cetera.

#3 was The Sot-Weed Factor. While I don’t conceive the work in hand to be a historical novel, and have no intention of resurrecting Henry Burlingame and Ebenezer Cooke, I evidently do have capital-H History on my mind. You are, in a sense, the “sequel” to the laureate poet, possibly self-denominated, of Lord Baltimore’s palatinate. This letter is to solicit from you, as one author to another, (a) any information you’re willing to provide me, or direct me to, concerning the activities of the Cooke and Burlingame lines from the 18th Century to yourself, beyond what’s available in the standard local histories; and (b) your sentiments about reincarnating, as it were, your admirable progenitor. Might I presume so far as to include, mutatis mutandis, some version of yourself among my seven correspondents?

Cordially,

P.S.: What do you suppose accounts for the coincidence of your Indian place-name and mine, 450 miles apart?

5

~ ~ ~

L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Despair at Ambrose’s infidelity. Their Fifth Stage.

24 L Street, Dorset Heights

Saturday, 12 July 1969

John,

Lost, aye, I’m lost right enough, and not in any funhouse.

Three nights and days he spent with her down there in deserted “Barataria,” where except in goose-shooting season there is nothing to do but copulate and swat mosquitoes. They did both, did my A. and his Bea – more determinedly, I gather, than successfully – in A. B. Cook’s air-conditioned hunting lodge on the north end of the island, where the only dry ground is and where Reg Prinz’s movie set was and will be. (It’s to be rebuilt in August for redestroying in September: an example yours truly may be doomed to follow.)

Three nights and days! The whole long holiday weekend, whilst I steamed and stewed and reached new lows in Dorset Heights! Late on the Monday (7/7) he returned to me, covered with welts and cross as a bear. Confessed straight off, he did—announced, rather – that his philandering idyll had been no idyll: Couldn’t get it up for her (I’m glad, says I) about half the time (Ah, that hurt, and damn me for crying then and there). Would’ve called it quits even if Bea hadn’t got urgent word from “Monsieur Casteene” about the Doctor’s death.

You will have heard, no doubt: among the 200 pleasure-boaters feared lost in the big Lake Erie storm of 4 July – whilst we-all were making cinematical merry here on the Choptank aboard the O.F.T. II—was the dark proprietor of the Remobilisation Farm. No details yet.

Who cares? Who cares?

Well, Bea, it seems, for one. Anyroad she took the occasion to beat it out of Barataria and back to Fort Erie, leaving crestfallen Ambrose to scratch his own itches.

I gather further (And who cares? I do, God help me!) my prodigal has scrapped his Perseus piece, and there’s a pity. Indeed, while I still don’t know what he wrote to Bea Golden in that famous Unfilmable Sequence of Independence Day, I learn now that what he wrote it on was the verso of his manuscript, which then – like the legendary poet Gunadhya in The Ocean of Story (or Rodolfo in Act I of La Bohème)—he destroyed page by page, giving each to B.G. to read and chuck overboard. That hurts, John: it was… our story, if you know what I mean: Ambrose’s and mine. His notion that Medusa the petrifying Gorgon, Perseus’s snake-haired adversary, might actually have loved him and longed for destruction at his hands; that in the “2nd Cycle” of their connexion, recapitated and restored to her original beauty, she would teach him to love instead of to accomplish by heroical destruction; that by some magic physics of the heart they could become, not stones, but stars, rehearsing endlessly the narrative of their affair – I loved that; I had presumed to see in it the emblem of my trials thus far and a future hope.

Nope. The plan, he acknowledges, is dandy; he has preserved his graphs and charts, may attempt to publish them as is. But he will not after all, at this hour of the world, write…

So. I ought to’ve shown him the door, and did not. We languish here in air-conditioned desperation whilst the peninsula swelters: an odd, dull lull after all the recent action, but hardly a respite, certainly no vacation. Tender and tyrannical at once, vulnerable and volatile, my friend is burdened with something beyond his mother’s dying (which proceeds all too slowly, alas for her), the abandonment of his story, the impending return of Reg Prinz and the resumption (Monday next) of their rivalry – beyond even the set-down of his sexual ego on Bloodsworth Island. I don’t know what it is. My clear feeling – very possibly a desperate delusion – is that his “conquest” of and failure with Bea Golden really did have more to do with me (I mean with us, our unsuccess in the conception way) than with her. But I don’t know. He is a raw nerve now; sore as my heart is, I love and oddly pity him.

Too, we are back to’t. Impotent with her, he is a standing bone with me. And who cares? Well, the pair of us; God knows exactly wherefore. A touch more frequently in this “5th Stage” than in our fanatical 4th (but nothing like our sexy 2nd), we go to’t, to’t, to the crazy end – but not just—of July engenderment. Now I know the pattern, I cannot drop knickers for him without thinking of poor three-timed Magda: with mixed feelings as I fancy Ambrose thinking likewise. Once only I remarked as much: his eyes filled up; I shan’t again.

Anyroad, I am not to forget that we are not merely reenacting; that even were we, with luck this as yet but ill-defined 5th Stage will bring us to the 6th—i.e., to ourselves, to Ambrose and Germaine, not Ambrose and Magda/Jeannine Mack/Magda/Marsha Blank/Magda! Who will I be, I wonder, when, having gone through such protean metamorphoses, I return to my “true” self?

What else is new. Oh, that I seem in for a new couturial outrage. From old steamer trunks and attic cedar closets in the Menschhaus, Ambrose has recovered a virtual wardrobe of 1930-ish ladies’ wear – his then-still-stylish mum’s, I suppose – and…

Yup. That’s how we do’t when we go to’t these days at 24 L. It’s nothing Oedipal, I think (we’re not even sure they’re Andrea’s clothes): rather that, having failed to fertilise me in the costumes first of my present age and then of the presently young, he’ll give me a go in the garb of my own young womanhood and first fertility. And indeed, for all my apprehension that he may carry this new mummery, like the old, out of doors, I confess that intramurally it is not only Ambrose who finds arousing these early Joan Crawfords, late Greta Garbos, middle Marlene Dietrichs, not unreasonably unlike what I wore in Paris when André’s first intromission found its mark, some 350 ovulations past…

I cannot write.

And so I shall begin your Lost in the Funhouse stories. A. says he’s in them. If so, for whom is the funhouse fun? Not, I think, for lost

Germaine

A: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Dorchester County Tercentenary and Mating-Season Sequences. Ambrose’s concussion, and its cause.

24 L, 11 P.M.

19 July 1969

Well, John,

All evidence indicates that our little lull is done and some new storm hard upon us. As I write this (near midnight), our friend Ambrose lies half-conscious in my bed, his circuits just beginning to reconnect after a terrific crack athwart the cranium this noon, which decked and, it seems, mildly concussed him. My first experience of that alarming phenomenon, taken so lightly in our films, on the telly, in our fiction, where folks are regularly and tidily “knocked out,” to waken some minutes or hours later, shake their noggins a time or two, and then On with the story!

I here attest that that is not the way it is. A blow to the head severe enough to cause loss of consciousness (A.‘s, classically, was just above the temple, his left, not far from the famous birthmark), if it does not actually fracture the skull, plays hob with the memory functions for (going on to) half a day at least. One prays that this symptom – and the headache, and the heavy sleeping – will not be accompanied by nausea and vertigo, indications of subdural hematoma and more serious consequences. So far, so good: when he is awake, my dear despot cannot remember the question he put 90 seconds since, or my answer. He smiles, reputs and re-reputs it; I reanswer and re-reanswer. It was that fucker Prinz, wasn’t it? Yes, luv. With the light boom? I think the mike boom, dear. It was Prinz, wasn’t it? No question, luv; and no accident, I fear. With the fucking light boom, right? At the fucking tercentenary? The fucking mike boom, I believe, dear.

Et cetera. Well, it was Reg Prinz – not the Director himself, ever at the camera, but one of his grad-student bullies at the audio boom (at noon today, at Long Wharf, at the opening of the “Dorchester Story” pageant, part of the Dorchester County tercentenary festivities which commenced last night and will continue inexorably through next Sunday) – who smote my man upside the head as if by accident. And this smite, like my Yes-dears, was by way of reply. For it was Ambrose who cast the first stone, as it were, and not unjustifiably, last Monday, in of all places the bell-less belfry of the Tower of Truth. Let me rehearse our week, blow to blow, whilst my inquisitor sleeps.

Prinz and his pals reconvened per schedule in Cambridge last Sunday, the 13th, to begin shooting on the Monday what Ambrose vaguely calls “the Mating Season Sequences.” If he was apprehensive of retaliation for having gone off to Barataria with Bea Golden, Ambrose gave no sign, not even when we heard nothing from the man (as we expected to) on the Sunday evening or the Monday morning. I believe we decided that, after the hiatus of the week prior, Prinz was in no hurry to revive the contest or even his working connexion with my imperious consort, who for his part apparently considered it infra dig to ring up his employer and ask where the action was to take place. After breakfast Ambrose retired to my study to “reconsider the whole script” (maybe to figure out what on earth in your fiction could be described as “the Mating Season Sequences”?), and I spent the morning poolside (in a remarkable vintage-1930 swimsuit – but I’m allowed to wear a muumuu over it) rereading your Funhouse stories.

On them, a word only. A. assures me that you do not yourself take with much seriousness those Death-of-the-Novel or End-of-Letters chaps, but that you do take seriously the climate that takes such questions seriously; you exploit that apocalyptic climate, he maintains, to reinspect the origins of narrative fiction in the oral tradition. Taking that cue, Ambrose himself has undertaken a review of the origins of printed fiction, especially the early conventions of the novel. More anon. To us Britishers, this sort of programme is awfully theoretical, what? Too French by half, and at the same time veddy Amedican. Still and all, I enjoyed the stories – in particular, of course, the “Ambrose” ones. Your Ambrose, needless to say, is not my Ambrose – but then, mine isn’t either!

Over lunch that same last Monday, an agreeable surprise. In honour of the 180th anniversary of Bastille Day (and 152nd of Mme de Staël’s death: R.I.P., poor splendid woman, one year older than I am now!), he and I would climb Schott’s Tower of Truth. Its phallic exterior is complete; the finishing of its interior has been delayed indefinitely on account, ahem, of Grave Structural Defects ever more apparent in the foundation work. Even so, the dedication ceremonies are now definitely scheduled for Founder’s Day, 27 September, seventh anniversary of Harrison Mack’s establishment of Tidewater Tech/ Marshyhope State College/University College/University. And non grata as we are on Redmans Neck, Ambrose had got from a construction foreman – colleague of Peter’s a key to the premises and leave to climb stairs to the top (no lifts yet installed).