Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Here’s what I can tell you of that project. For as long as I can remember I’ve been enamored of the old tale-cycles, especially of the frame-tale sort: The Ocean of Story, The Thousand and One Nights, the Pent-, Hept-, and Decamerons. With the help of a research assistant I recently reviewed the corpus of frame-tale literature to see what I could learn from it, and started making notes toward a frame-tale novel. By 1968 I’d decided to use documents instead of told stories: texts-within-texts instead of tales-within-tales. Rereading the early English novelists, I was impressed with their characteristic awareness that they’re writing—that their fictions exist in the form, not of sounds in the ear, but of signs on the page, imitative not of life “directly,” but of its documents – and I considered marrying one venerable narrative tradition to another: the frame-tale and the “documentary” novel. By this time last year I had in mind “an open (love) letter to Whom It May Concern, from Yours Truly.” By April, as grist for what final mill I was still by no means certain; I had half a workbookful of specific formal notes and “incidental felicities”: e.g., “Bit #46,” from Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso: the choirs of the blessed, like sailors in formation on an aircraft-carrier deck or bandsmen at halftime in an American football match, spell out with themselves on the billboard of Heaven DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM (“Love justice, [ye] who judge [on] earth”); or #47, an old English hornbook riddle in the Kabbalistic tradition of the Holy Unspeakable Name of God: “AEIOU His Great Name doth Spell;/Here it is known, but is not known in Hell.”

I could go on, and won’t. “The correspondences!” I was ready to begin. All I lacked were – well, characters, theme, plot, action, diction, scene, and format; in short, a story, a way to tell it, and a voice to tell it in!

Now I have a story, at least in rough prospectus, precipitated by this pair of queer coincidences. Or if not a story in Henry James’s sense, at least a narrative method in Scheherazade’s.

But it is unwise to speak much of plans still tentative. Will you be my “Lady A,” my heroine, my creation?

And permit me the honor of being, as in better-lettered times gone by, your faithful

Author

2

~ ~ ~

N: Lady Amherst to the Author. Rejecting his counterinvitation.

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

5 April 1969

Mr John Barth, Esq.

Dept of English, Annex B

SUNY/Buffalo

Dear Mr B.:

No!

I am not Literature! I am not the Great Tradition! I am not the aging Muse of the Realistic Novel! I am not

Yours,

Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)

Acting Provost

GGP(A)/ss

O: Lady Amherst to the Author. Reconsidering.

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

12 April 1969

Dear Mr B.:

On the 22nd of this month I shall turn… forty-five. Germaine de Staël, at that age, had borne four children – one by her husband, two by her lover Narbonne, one by her lover Benjamin Constant – and was about to conceive her fifth and last, by a coarse young fellow half her age, whom her son Auguste (almost his coeval) called Caliban. The child, imbecilic last fruit of middle-aged passion, fatigue, and opium, would be named Giles, attributed to fictitious parents (Theodore Giles of Boston and Harriette, née Preston), and regarded jokingly by the household as a native American… But Germaine herself much admired Americans; spoke of them on her deathbed as “l’avant-garde du genre humain, l’avenir du monde”; was in correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris about moving to her property in Leroysville, New York, to escape Napoleon – and herself nicknamed her idiot child by her peasant lover Petit Nous: “Little Us”…

We British are great stoics; we French, famously unsentimental. But I cannot reflect on these things dry-eyed. I have no children (and no novels, and no estates), but my years have been hardly less vicissitudinous than my namesake’s; more so than anyone supposes; more so than I myself can believe. In our place and time a woman my age may expect, for better or worse, three or four decades yet to live; in this country especially, she may look and dress half her age, play tennis daily, dance all night, take lovers and the Pill…

Today, sir, I am very tired; those decades to come weigh me down like a heavy sentence. Today I could wish to be a middle-aged widow of the lower class in a Mediterranean village: already wrinkled, fallen-breasted, gone in the teeth, dressed in black, supernumerary, waiting to die.

Well.

Your letter to me of 16 March, declining our honorary degree, was cordial, if disappointing and problematical (the matter is far from resolved). Your follow-up letter of the 23rd was similarly cordial but, at least as I then regarded it, impertinent; hence my peremptory no of Saturday last. My reasons were several, over and above the vexing problem of thwarting John Schott and A. B. Cook; but I was in no humour just then to set them forth. I shall do so now.

In latter March (as promised in my initial letter), I read your Floating Opera novel, having been introduced earlier by Ambrose Mensch to the alleged original of your character Todd Andrews. I enjoyed the story – the first novel of an ambitious young man – but I felt a familiar uneasiness about the fictive life of real people and the factual life of “fictional” characters – familiar because, as I’m sure I have intimated, I’ve “been there before.” I could not look forward to being there again: yet again more or less artfully misportrayed for purposes not my own, however commendable; yet again “immortalised” like the victims of Medusa or the candid cameraman: picking their noses, scratching their backsides. Too, there was to be considered the fallen state of Literature, in particular of the Novel, most especially of trade fiction publishing in your country, as I learn about it from Ambrose Mensch. No, no, it was an impertinence, your suggestion that I offer my life for your literary inspection, as women used to offer their handbags for Isaac Babel’s!

A life, at that, lately turned ’round such sharp, improbable corners (even in the little space between my first letter and your reply) that I can scarcely recognise it any longer as my own, far less understand or rationally approve it. For Mme de Staël – I think for history generally – April truly is the cruellest month, as my old friend and fellow cat-lover once wrote: the tumultuous month when Cain slew Abel, when Jesus (and Dante) descended into Hell; when Shakespeare and Cervantes an Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. (and Germaine de Staël’s beloved father) all died; when the Titanic sank and the American Revolution began and Napoleon abdicated and the crew of the H.M.S. Bounty mutinied and all the black slaves in New York rebelled; when both ill-starred Germaines (and “Petit Nous”) were born; and when, in 1794, that other, better Germaine wrote despairingly from Coppet to her lover Narbonne in England: “Apparently, everything I believed I meant to you was a dream, and only my letters are real…”

I am distraught, as even my penmanship attests. You found disconcerting, you say, certain “spooky” coincidences between my first letter to you and your notes toward a new novel. I find disconcerting, even alarming, some half-prophetic correspondences between your reply and the course of my current life: so much so that I am led (yet another manifestation of early middle-aged foolishness, no doubt) seriously to reconsider your proposal, or proposition. I have much to tell, no one to tell it to…

But you must swear to me, by the Muse we both honour, that you are not nor have lately been in communication with Ambrose Mensch, as he has sworn to me he is not with you. Can you, sir, will you so swear? To

Yours sincerely,

Germaine Pitt

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Confessing her latest love affair and the excesses of its current stage.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

19 April 1969

My dear B.,

L Street and its companions – five long vowelled avenues crosshatched through sand and weeds by a score of short consonantal streets – comprise what is euphemistically called, by its “developers,” the residential “development” of a large corn and tomato field belonging to Mack Enterprises, Inc. Lying athwart an ever shallower winding creek midway between Cambridge and Redmans Neck, at the vertiginous “Heights” of five to seven feet above mean low water, it consists presently of the low-rise brick apartment house at 24 L – tenanted by new MSUC faculty, married graduate students, and (as of a few weeks ago) myself – and three prefabricated “model homes,” unoccupied. The rest is scrub pine, weedy drainage ditches, wooden temporary street signs, and advertising brochures. Mrs Jane Mack, whose backward brainchild Dorset Heights is, confidently expects the burgeoning of Marshyhope U., and the consequent demand for low-cost housing in its proximity, to turn this paper polis into a town half the size of Cambridge by 1976 and to swell her already distended fortune: the capital for its next phase of construction she has borrowed against her expectation of a settlement in her favour, rather than her children’s, of her late husband’s disputed estate.

Jane and I have, you see, since Harrison Mack’s death, become – rather, rebecome – friends: more or less, and faute de mieux, and warily at that. The woman is civilised. She is uncommonly handsome for her sixty-some years; could almost pass for my coeval. She is very consciously in that line of shrewd Baltimoriennes fatefully attractive to European nobility: Betsy Patterson, Wallis Warfield Simpson… We depend, lightly, upon each other’s society here in the depths of Dorset Heights (she drops in for a chat at my pied-à-marais; I am no longer non grata at Tidewater Farms), and this little dependency itself depends on Jane’s truly remarkable capacity for repressing disagreeable history. If she remembers my late connexion with poor Harrison, for example, or her earlier, less decorous one with my late husband (my small resentment whereat I had long since put by), she gives no sign of it. But her memory for property values, tax assessments, deed transfers, and common stock quotations is photographic! And the Yankee genius for commercial exploitation has flowered full in her since middle age: in those cool grey eyes there is no such thing as “the land”: what the soldier sees as terrain, the artist as landscape, the ecologist as matrix and theatre of natural processes, Jane sees, just as reflexively, as real estate to be developed, or otherwise turned to financial account. About history, tradition, she is utterly unsentimental, except as they might enhance the market value of real property. Such concerns as social equity or the preservation of “undeveloped” environments for their own sake she sincerely regards as madness.

Thus Dorset Heights. Thus L Street (she has offered me a stipend, as a “resource person,” to devise “appropriate” names for her alphabetic streets: a notion I thought echt mid-20th-Century American until Ambrose informed me that Back Bay Boston was so laid out in the 19th, on fenland drained and filled by Jane’s spiritual ancestors). And thus #24, where I write this, half appalled, half envious—“tuning my piano,” as your Todd Andrews puts it: waiting only, in order to begin the real substance of this letter, for your assurance that you and Ambrose have not lately been in touch; deciding not to wait after all (What would it matter? Have I not begun confiding already?); wondering really only where properly to begin, and why, and why not.

Yours of the 13th in hand, sir, accepting with polite apologies my rejection of your proposal. A gentlemanly note, for which thanks. Whether I should trust you, there is no way for me to know; but I feel strongly (a familiar, ambivalent feeling) that I shall, in any case. Last week I read your second novel, The End of the Road: a chilling read withal. Whatever its literary merits, it came obviously as something of a personal revelation to me (as did your first) concerning those several of its characters among whom I dwell: the people we are calling John Schott, Harry Carter, especially poor tragical Joe Morgan, and above all poor pathetical dead Rennie Morgan – with whose heartless exploitation, at least, I readily empathise. I am full of loathing for your narrator Jacob Horner (not only nature abhors a vacuum), who puts me disquietingly in mind of certain traits of my friend A.M., as well as of—

May I ask whether your Remobilisation Farm and its black quack guru were based on anything factual? And whether your “Joe Morgan” has been heard from lately?

Never mind, of course; I know how meaningless such queries are. And I quite understand and sympathise with Horner’s inability to account for his submissive connexion to the Doctor, for I have much the same feeling with respect to my own (uncharacteristic!) submission, both to your request for the Story of My Life and to a man to whom I cannot imagine myself being more than civil this time last year.

I mean, as you will have guessed, Ambrose Mensch: my colleague; my junior by half a dozen years, as he voluptuously reminds me; my ally against Schott and Carter in the Great Litt.D. Affair; my friend of the past few months, since the death of Harrison Mack – and, since Thursday, March 20 last, my lover.

Begun, then!

And where it will end, deponent knoweth not, only feareth. What Ambrose makes of me is plain enough and scarcely flattering, despite his assurances that (reversing the order of your own interests) my person attracted him first, my “symbolic potential” only later. What to make of him I do not know, nor how much of his past and present you’re acquainted with. Like the pallid Tityrus of André Gide’s Marshlands novel, which Ambrose has not read, he lives a near-hermit life in a sort of tower on the Choptank shore – a tower he has converted into a huge camera obscura! An “expert amateur of life,” he calls himself; an “aspirant to honorary membership in humankind.” In that sinking tower my lover measures the stars with a homemade astrolabe, inventing new constellations; he examines bemused beneath a microscope his swarming semen, giving names to (and odds on) individual spermatozoa in their blind and general race. He savours a tepid ménage à trois of many years’ languishing with the soulful East Italian wife of his stolid stonemason older brother (“two Krauts with garlic dressing”); he awaits with mild interest the turning cancerous of a port-wine birthmark on his brow – allegedly bee-shaped, but I see in its outline no more Apis mellifica than I see the initials AMK (for Arthur Morton King, his nom de plume) he claims to find in the constellations Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and Perseus. (Admittedly I can’t see Perseus and company there either, only a blinking bunch of stars.) He writes me “love letters” in the form of postscripts to an anonymous Yours Truly, from whom he claims once to have received a blank message in a bottle, and posts them on the Choptank tides (I get photocopies by the regular mail). His notion of wooing is to regale me with accounts of his previous love affairs, to the number of five – a number even less remarkable in that three were with the same woman (that Abruzzesa aforementioned) and two of those all but sexless.

Indeed, on the evidence of these “letters” and what I’d gathered of his life, I would have judged the man probably impotent, certainly no candidate for loverhood. Not in my book, any road, though God knows I’ve loved some odd ones, H.M. II (R.I.P.) not least among them. With that affair, such as it was, I was only just done; I wasn’t ready for another of any sort. Moreover, my taste has ever been for older men, make of it what you will: considerably older men, who’ve made some mark in the world. I’ve no time for nobodies, never have had; were our Tityrus as glamorous as a cinema star (he isn’t), I’d not have been interested in his clownish propositions.

So I thought, so I thought – and I thought wrong. My lover is most decidedly not impotent, only regressive and a bit reclusive. Like myself (I now realise, having paid scant attention to such things hitherto) he goes easily for considerable intervals without sexual connexion; then he sets about it as if the thing were just invented, or like a camel tanking up till the next oasis. I like him altogether better as a friend – so I told him frankly when he followed up his first “love letter” with an imperious visit to my office, pressing through Miss Stickles’s defences like Napoleon back from Elba. That tidewater Tuileries once attained, he plied his suit so ardently I almost thought he meant a rape, and was anxious less for my “honour” (he had no weapon, and I am not helpless) than, believe it or not, for the integrity of our ad hoc nominating committee for the Litt.D.: an integrity already vulnerable for our having become personal friends.

He exhorted; he declared; he declaimed; he went grinning to his knees, and made for mine. I could not tell how much if any of what he said was seriously meant. He threatened to fetch Shirley Stickles in as witness to his passion… We laughed and argued, teased and scolded, once I was assured he was neither drunk nor more than usually deranged. Clearly he was not in earnest – yet my firm insistence that I was not the least attracted to him physically, or interested in any “escalation” of our cordial connexion, but enflamed him the more. And if his words and manner were bantering, his bodily pursuit of me about the office was as unremitting as it was leisurely. I thought myself reprieved by the telephone (Harry Carter, relaying John Schott’s apparent nondisapproval of your nomination), but found myself obliged instead to speak in the most unbetraying businesslike tone to Carter and Stickles whilst submitting to my pursuer’s (now my captor’s) suddenly aggressive embraces. Only my calling in Miss S. to take dictation, whilst I had her on the line, put an end for the present to his advances, which otherwise he would very shortly have pressed to the point of my either yielding entirely or calling for aid. And his departure next day (the same Saturday of my first letter to you) for New York City, to confer with Mr Prinz about his screenplay draft, prevented his resuming them promptly thereafter.

They were not, as I trust I’ve implied, abhorrent to me, even repellent, those advances: simply irritating because unwanted. We were not friends enough for me much to fear for our friendship. I am no prude, as shall be seen. Neither of us was celibate by policy or committed to another. Did all those negatives (I asked him on his return, a week or so later) add up to a love affair? This was in my earlier digs, down by the boat harbour in Cambridge, whereinto he had kindly helped me shift from Tidewater Farms after Harrison Mack’s funeral. But they were inconvenient, especially as my provostial duties fetched me to the college five or six days a week; and so I bought a small car and leased the flat in Dorset Heights. Hearing that I was about to shift again, Ambrose had kindly turned up with lorry and labourers from Mensch Masonry, his brother’s firm, to spare me the expense of hiring movers. I was grateful, the more as he did not this time or in the next few days press his attentions otherwise than verbally. When neither manic nor despondent – to both which extremes the man is given – Ambrose Mensch is the mildest, most agreeable of friends: witty, considerate, good-natured, and well informed. But in the two or three matters which command his imagination at any given time, he is obsessive, and his twin projects for the season, by his ready admission, were my seduction and the besting of Reg Prinz.

Now, a woman may consent to sexual connexion, even to a more or less protracted affair, for no better reason than that persisting in refusal becomes too much bother. Ambrose, very big on solstices and equinoxes, chose Thursday, 20 March, to “make his play.” Your letters had arrived, declining the degree and suggesting we give it to Ambrose himself, an unthinkable idea. I’d called a meeting of the nominating committee for 2:30 to decide our next move, and invited Ambrose to stop by my office earlier on and discuss ways of forestalling Harry Carter’s inevitable renomination of A. B. Cook. To my surprise he proposed, straight upon entering, that we copulate at once atop the conference table, and took my arm to usher me there. I bade him be serious; he expressed his ardent wish that I bend over my desk and be mounted a tergo. I promptly so bent, but only to ring for Shirley Stickles, certain he’d not risk public exposure. As I asked her to come in, however, he called my bluff by hitching up my skirt and down my panty hose (horrid term!). I bade Shirley wait a moment; turned to him furious; found his trouser fly already open, penis out and standing, face all smiles. At the same time, Shirley announced into my ear that President Schott was on the line and must speak to me at once; even as she so declared, that unctuous baritone broke in to say he’d heard of your declining and wished, without of course in any way intervening in the committee’s deliberations, to read me then and there A. B. Cook’s newly published ode, in the Tidewater Times-Democrat, comparing Vice-President Spiro Agnew to St Patrick and the liberal news media to serpents. He began to read. As a last defence against Ambrose’s assault I tried to sit; the man was in my chair, set to impale. I could not both fend him off and hold the phone; it was madness, madness! And a too tiresome bother…

Thus it came to pass that at seven past two (so he told me after), just as the sun entered Aries, Ambrose M. entered yours truly. We both sighed, for quite different reasons. I bent as he wished, resting my elbows on my appointments calendar. Our acting president declaimed so vigorously I was obliged to hold the phone away from my ear. Ambrose took up the beat of Cook’s iambics. It had been a while since I’d known as it were more slap than tickle (dear Harrison seldom managed). When shirts of starchless denim (the laureate’s image for campus activists, who he complained were given too much sympathetic publicity by the media) was rhymed with squirts of Marxist venom, we sat as one person, and I assumed the rhythm myself to finish off the business. Then as at last the Effete Eastern Radical-Liberal Establishment was warned pentametrically to

Take heed:

For as Patrick drove into the waves of Eire

Those ancient vipers, so shall Spiro dare

To drive from our airwaves this later breed!

I received into myself my first installment of the Ambrosian ejaculate.

And reflected – what I had had no cause to concern myself with for some little while – that contraceptive measures had not been taken.

Well, Schott cried, what did I think? “Tell him you’d like to sit on it awhile,” Ambrose whispered. I requested a photocopy of the ode for the committee – whose meeting, just a few minutes later, prevented my either taking postcoital precautions or sitting on anything except clammy knickers for the balance of the afternoon.

He had taken vulgar advantage of me, I let Ambrose know at the first opportunity, and had foolishly jeopardised both our positions. That I had acquiesced to his assault rather than precipitate a scandal did not make us lovers or imply my consent to further importunities, certainly not in Shirley Stickles’s proximity. He amiably agreed, and by way of reparation stood me that evening to a feast of white wine and raw oysters (a passion of mine, and this region’s chief attraction) at the Dorset Hotel. He was animated, gently ribald, in no way presumptuous upon his “conquest.” We laughingly reconstructed, as best we could, the Maryland Laureate’s ode: at “squirts of Marxist venom” I chided him for not having deployed a French letter for my sake, or at least withdrawn at “waves of Eire.” He paid me the compliment of having assumed, so he declared, that I was “on the Pill,” and assured me further that, while his sexual potency was reliable, his fertility was not: “High count but low motility, like great schools of dying fish,” he put it – and so I learned of his predilection for, so to speak, self-examination.

Our conversation, then, while bantering, never strayed far from the neighbourhood of sex – indeed, our friend’s imagination is of a persistently, if unaggressively, erotic character. Together with the oysters and Chablis, it somewhat roused me: when he enquired, as offhandedly as one might ask about dessert, whether he mightn’t straightway return me the favour of an orgasm or two at 24 L, I came near to saying, “Why, yes, thank you, now you mention it.” Instead I cordially declined, and when he did not press, but affably hoped we might enjoy each other’s persons at more leisure before very long, I found myself after all desirous of him. In my car (he’d walked to meet me at the restaurant, and asked now for a lift home) he expressed his wish that he might freely so invite me in the future, when the urge was on him, without offending me, and I as freely decline or accept, until one or the other of us had found “our next lover.” One was not immortal, he went on, and solitary pleasures were – well, solitary. I could rely on his discretion and, he trusted, his ability. It was a pity that a woman of the world such as myself, a respected scholar and able administrator, must even in America in 1969 still wait for her male friends to take the overt initiative in sexual matters instead of asking, as easily as for any other small personal favour, to have, say, her clitoris kissed until she came out of her bloody mind…

I reproduce his language, sir, in order to suggest the good-humored prurience, or gentle salaciousness, characteristic of the man: rather novel to my experience and, together with his youthfulness, attentiveness, and general personableness, agreeable, if not exactly captivating. Whatever dependency or exploitation has been my lot, I have ever felt it to be upon or at the hands, not of men, particularly, but of others, more often than not people of superior abilities whom I admired. Moreover, like Mme de Staël I have lived a life of my own in the world. So if Ambrose Mensch “had his way with me” that night, it was by persuading me to have mine with him, first then and there in my little car in the parking area at Long Wharf; next all about the flat at 24 L, where he stopped till morning (and described to me—read would be the wrong word for such wordless pages – between the aforepromised business, his trial draft of the opening of his screenplay, wherein a woman’s hands are seen opening a bundle of letters one by one with a stiletto letter-opener whilst her voice, as if iterating to itself their return addresses, announces the title, the actors’ names, and the sundry credits. And this was the draft soon after rejected by Reg Prinz as “too wordy”!).

In the same way, if his “conquest” was completed eleven days later, on his 39th birthnight, it was because, by making no further direct overtures in that period, but maintaining his low-keyed, half-earnest chaffing about sexual initiative and women’s rights, he kept fresh in my memory how agreeable had been our lovemaking. I found myself not only inviting him back to 24 L for a birthday dinner, but initiating fellatio with the hors d’oeuvres and coitus after the cognac – over which too (I mean the Martell) I showed him your letter of 23 March soliciting the story of my life for your proposed new work. He sympathised with your “perverse attraction” (his term or yours?) to literary realism. He toyed briefly with the idea of incorporating your letter into his screenplay. And he advised me to advise you to bugger off.

Now, by his own acknowledgement A’s fertility is marginal. My own, I have cause to suspect, is approaching its term. Over the last two years my menses have grown ever more erratic: not infrequently I skip a month altogether. Through the period of my connexion with “George III,” these irregularities seldom caused me more anxiety than any woman might feel at the approach of her menopause: on the occasions when His Royal Highness (who was not impotent either, only slowed by age and debilitated by his “madness,” which followed in some detail the course of his original’s), aroused by an erotic passage, say, in some Fielding or Smollett I was reading to him, achieved congress with his “Lady Pembroke,” she was properly pessaried in advance. For the same reason I was not uneasy about these latter two Noctes Ambrosianae (faithful to his promise, he has so far conducted himself with rather more discretion than I). But that rash initial coupling in my office still fretted at my peace of mind. I had only his word for it that his “motility” was low (upon a former wife he fathered a child, a retarded daughter whose custody he retains); in any case it wanted only one healthy swimmer to do the job. That infusion I’d been obliged to sit upon through our committee meeting – where we’d postponed nominating A. B. Cook by the procedural diversion of disqualifying Ambrose from the committee on the grounds of your having mentioned him for the award, and selecting his replacement, a sensible woman from the French Department – was enormous, and coincided with the mild Mittelschmerz of my ovulation time. What was more, sore experience had taught me… a lesson that will keep for another letter.

Therefore, despite the heavy odds against my impregnation, I welcomed with relief the cramps that came on me in the evening of 2 April – and Ambrose rejoiced in the coincidence of my flow with the full Pink Moon.

That moon marked, in some oestral almanac of my lover’s reckoning, the end of the First Stage of our affair and the commencement of the Second (still very much in progress a fortnight since, though I cannot imagine it to be of very long duration!), which I can describe only as Coition to Exhaustion. Earlier on I remarked that I am neither prudish nor “frigid,” though the celebrated reserve of the English is, in my view, a quality much more admirable than not, and which I hope I yet manifest in some measure, at least in the other theatres of life. I cannot account for my behaviour, unprecedented in my biography if not altogether in his: having duly observed that he is my first lover younger than myself; that the erotic aspect of my past connexions had ever been of less moment to me than their other aspects; that I am undeniably in the last phase of youthfulness if not yet of vigour; that Ambrose’s style is still very much to encourage equality in the area of sexual initiative (a style with obvious appeal to one in my position) – having acknowledged all this, I am still at a loss to explain my, his, our appetite for raw copulation, its adjuncta and succedanea, these two weeks!