Letters (86 page)

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

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).

I dutifully suggested we take Angela. Touched, Milord thanked me for that thoughtfulness, but declared there was another female going with us instead. Now, John: our autocratic 5th Stage really has been in full noxious flower since I wrote you last, even though (thank God) Bea Golden had not returned from that Farm after the Doctor’s “funeral.” But for all I knew she might be back in town with Prinz, and now I wondered: Was I really expected to… But no, he was
joking!
My avant-gardist, it seems, has conceived a passion for old Samuel Richardson (the first to speak of the Death of the Novel, it turns out, in a letter to Lady Barbara Montague dated 1758): the third member of our
ménage à trois
was to be R.‘s
Clarissa!

All four volumes, dear? Sure, and a six-pack of National Premium, two beach towels, and our suntan lotion. Ambrose cannot bear
reading
that endless novel, you understand: he likes hearing me read him the table of contents and Richardson’s chapter summaries.

Chacun à son goût.
He was in good humour (not good enough to let me wear my own clothes; he decked me out in a Roaring-Twentyish cotton middy blouse with black silk sailor kerchief, rather fetching actually, Lord knows where he found it);
I
was in middle month and wondering whether we might manage the Zeus-&-Danaë trick up in that tower, seeing more conventional deposits had so far failed to yield interest. The weather was of course steamy and threatening thundershowers, which the soybean and corn fields needed; on the other hand, below-normal rainfall had kept the mosquito population down. The campus was deserted. We understand that A. B. Cook has already occupied my office—may be there as I write these lines—but he was not in evidence: only a few student groundkeepers and, over by the Media Centre, a van that we recognised as belonging to Prinz’s crew. We sped past, not to be recognised in turn, parked on the far side of Schott’s Folly, and let ourselves quickly through the padlocked cyclone fence into the construction site.

The scene was dead quiet: one could hear the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Maryland flapping in the damp breeze at their staffs a hundred yards off, and a few desultory cicadas. Round about the site were paper sacks of, of all things,
Medusa Cement.
We were duly amused, but the coincidence prompted, instead of erotic associations with Danaë’s brass tower, a re-remarking by Ambrose that whereas Medusa turned everything into stone, Mensch Masonry (whose cement it was) could be said to turn stone into everything, except money. Indeed, though allegedly cracked as the House of Usher, the stone-masonry base of the tower is handsomely done, in the same random rubble as the brothers’ camera obscura. The rest of the shaft is a rough-finished reinforced concrete eyesore.

We climbed, A. reminiscing about the alphabet-block towers they’d built together as boys: compromises, not always successful, between Peter’s interest in their engineering and Ambrose’s in what they
spelled.
I went first up the fire stairs, pausing at unglassed windows less to look at the not-much-of-anything than to give Ambrose occasion to “do a verbena,” as was his wont back in sexy April. (Do you know Maupassant’s tale “La Fenêtre,” about the verbena-scented lady who invites her suitor to her country château but will not yield to him? He consoles himself with her chambermaid and, discovering this latter one morning leaning out a turret window—so he supposes, from his position below and behind her—he resolves to surprise her by slipping up the stairs lifting her skirts, and kissing her knickerless derrière. The little prank succeeds; he quickly plants his lover’s kiss; is confounded by the scent there, not of the maid’s familiar
odeur naturel,
but of her chaste mistress’s perfume! Scandalised, the lady sends him packing; but—ah Guy! ah, France!—years after, as he retells the tale, it seems to the narrator that he can still summon to his moustaches
la senteur de verveine…)

Nothing doing.

We attained the top: dusty concrete floor and a sultry view of loblolly pines, parching grass, Marshyhope U., and white crab-boats on the distant creeks. A view (Ambrose declared after one perfunctory conning, and I agree) better mediated by camera obscura than viewed directly. Exam time again: Do you know Gossaert’s 16th-Century Danaë? A winsome, moon-faced teenager half wrapped in open indigo drapery, she perches on tasselled red cushions in a Renaissance campanile, ankles crossed but bare knees parted, and looks up with puckered unsurprise at the shower of gold which rains past the plump little breast that will one day suckle Perseus, onto the folds of her robe, and out of sight between her thighs. So presently perched I (changes changed) on a pair of clean 50-lb. sacks of Medusa, the only unsoiled seat thereabouts. Ambrose likewise, and fetched out… his beer and his Richardson.

It is the final tyranny of tyrants that, when on occasion they behave like decent chaps, we are inordinately grateful. Milord was merry. Roused already (and knees tentatively ajar), I was roused further by his
mere friendliness
for a change; further still by our rehearsal of
Clarissa’s
table of contents.
Her mother connives at the private correspondence between her and Lovelace… Her expedient to carry on a private correspondence with Miss Howe… A letter from her brother forbidding her to appear in the presence of any of her relations without leave. Her answer. Writes to her mother. Her mother’s answer. Writes to her father. His answer… Her expostulatory letter to her brother and sister. Their answers… Copies of her letters to her two uncles, and of their
characteristic
answers… An insolent letter from her brother on her writing to Solmes… Observes upon the contents of her seven letters… Her closet searched for papers. All the pens and ink they find taken from her… Substance of her letter to Lovelace… Lays all to the fault of her corresponding with him at first…

Et cetera. These from the mere 99 letters of Volume 1, with yet to come the 438 of the other three volumes! But we never came to them—Clarissa’s protracted rape and even more protracted repining unto death. For if, admixed with Ambrose’s mirth, was professional envy of his great predecessor’s wind (and the stamina of readers in those days), admixed with mine was a complex sympathy for Clarissa Harlowe—yea even unto her employment (Vol. IV, Letter XCVI, Belford to Lovelace) of her coffin for a writing table! I recalled that Clarissa’s “elopement” with Lovelace had been a major event in Mme de Staël’s girlhood, when, as 15-year-old Germaine Necker, she had doted breathlessly upon Richardson’s novels. And now she was dead, as presently Ambrose, André, I, and all must be, the most of us having done little more, in Leonardo’s phrase, than “fill up privies.” Before I knew it I was weeping instead of laughing, there in my antic getup on my cement sacks: half a century old, childless, husbandless, wageless, surely a little cracked (as Schott unkindly alleged), and stuck on Redmans Neck with an unsuccessful writer and petty despot instead of flourishing in Paris or Florence with some Benjamin Constant…

He kissed me, God bless Ambrose for that: a proper loving and consoling buss before he touched between my legs. Then I
did
go a bit mad: moaned at him to take me as he’d taken Magda in Peter’s cellar a quarter-century ago. Dear God, I wanted to conceive by him, to get
something
beyond my worn-out self! And by God we tried, on that hard bed of Medusa Portland. Let Danaë do it her way; I’ll get my Perseus with a regular roger! If there’s connexion between the ploughing and the crop… Comes then the golden shower, not a drop wasted on the draperies;
surely
that should turn the trick, if we’ve one in us to turn; my joy poured out as A. poured in—

Which is why I didn’t hear what he heard. My Zeus sprang off me as if galvanised, snatched up Vol. I and winged it staircaseward with a curse. Now I heard the whirrs and clicketies over there! By the time I got my legs together and my hem pulled down, he had armed himself with the sack of Vols II, III, & IV and, bare-arsed with his spigot still adrip, was whamming in a rage at Reg Prinz, perched there with his hand-held!

Now, of course, I’m indignant at such sneakery. But at the time I was still too busy feeling Zeus’d to the Plimsoll, too surprised at my lover’s shocking leap off me, too marvellous at his fury to muster a proper indignation. How Ambrose did go at him, cursing, swinging good weighty Sam: first at Prinz’s fuzzy head (who till the last possible frame kept the camera running), then at the instrument itself, when he saw Prinz more concerned for it than for his own cranium. Chucking
Clarissa,
Ambrose fought for that camera—it was strapped to Prinz’s arm—and threatened to smash it and Reggie’s head together if he didn’t expose that film then and there. By george he did it, too, Prinz shrieking like a wired-up bat the while: prised open the case, did Ambrose, clawed out the reel, and flung it like a Frisbee from the tower top before two of Prinz’s graduate-film-workshop types came to their master’s rescue.