Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

7 June 1969

John, John,

Provost indeed! What am I doing here, in this getup, in this office, in this country? And what are the pack of you doing to me?

Driving me bonkers, is what — you and Ambrose and André, André—straight out of my carton, as the children say. And I, well, it seems I’m doing what my “lover” claims to’ve devoted a period of his queer career to: answering rhetorical questions; saying clearly and completely what doubtless goes without saying.

E.g., that my apprehensions re the “4th Stage” of our affair prove in the event to have been more than justified. Every third evening, sir, regardless of my needs and wants — indeed, regardless of Ambrose’s needs and wants too, in the way of simple pleasure — I am courteously but firmly fucked, no other way to put it, in the manner set forth two letters past, to the sole and Catholic end of begetting a child. ’Appen I enjoy it (as, despite all and faute de mieux, I sometimes do), bully for me; ’appen I don’t, it up wi’ me knees and nightie anyroad, and to’t till I’m proper ploughed and seeded. In this business, and currently this only, the man is husbandly, John, as aforedescribed: husbanding his erections, husbanding my orgasms, his ejaculate. His eye like an old-time crofter’s is upon the calendar: come mid-lunation we are to increase our frequency to two infusions daily in hopes of nailing June’s wee ovum, May’s having given us the slip.

As I too must hope “we” do — yet how hope a hope so hopeless? Why, because, if this old provostial organ do not conceive, I truly fear the consequence! Silent sir (you who mock me not only by your absence from this “correspondence” but by your duly reported presence, even as I write these words, just across the Bay in College Park, to accept the honour you would not have from us. O vanity!): what I feared in mine of Saturday last is come to pass: our friend Ambrose has turned tyrant! Witness: I write this on office stationery because — for all it’s a muggy Maryland late-spring Saturday, the students long since flown for the summer, the campus abandoned till our anticlimactic commencement exercises a fortnight hence — I am in my office, winding up my desk work and putting correspondence on the machine for Shirley Stickles. And I am here not at all because the week’s work has spilled into the weekend. Au contraire: since our (early) final examinations put a term, hic et ubique, to the most violent term in U.S. academic history — one which I wot will mark a turn for ill and ever in the fortunes of many a college in this strange country — there’s been little to do, acting-provostwise. No: I am here now because I’m ashamed to show myself to Stickles, Schott, & Co., and so must do my windup work by weekend and weeknight, always excepting those reserved for conjugation.

And why ashamed? Oh well, because Distinguished Visiting Professor Pitt, Lady Amherst, acting provost, semicentenarian, erstwhile scholar, erstwhile gentlewoman, erstwhile respecter of herself, goes about these days sans makeup, bra, and panty girdle, her hair unpinned and straight and parted in the middle, her trusty horn-rims swapped for irritating contact lenses and square wire-framed “grannies.” The former she tearily inserts on the days her lord and master decks her out in miniskirt or bikini (dear lecherous Jeffrey, how you would laugh now at the legs you once called perfect, the arse and jugs you salivated after across Europe!); the latter complement her hippie basse couture: ankle-length unbelted calicos, bell-bottomed denims and fringed leathers — the whole brummagem inventory of head-shop fetishes, countercultural gewgaws, radical fripperies… Lord luv a duck! In which I am led forth, yea even as I feared, to “do” (and be done in by) “bags” of “grass” (I do not even like tobacco, excepting the smell of certain English mixtures in the briars of the couth) and I-forget-whats of lysergic acid diethylamide; to throw my limbs about like a certifiable lunatic in response to the “mind-blowing” megawattage of beastlike androgynes with surreal and grammatically singular denominations: the Who, the Airplane, the Floyd, the Lord have mercy on my soul. This in the hired “pads” and horny company of the film folk, generally — young and “with it” and “together,” beautiful of body and empty of head though not unskilled, the technicians especially — among whom I feel (as surely I’m meant to) a walking travesty, female counterpart of that rouged and revolting old fop in Mann’s Death in Venice.

The drugs do not finally much alarm me: André and I “did” hashish, cocaine, and opium in Paris a hundred years ago, along with our absinthe and Caprice des Dieux. Nor does the “kinky” “scene”: la vie bohémienne was not invented by the Flower Children, and cannot startle in a single of its aspects — the dope, the dirt, the diet, the promiscuity, the neobarbarist posturings, the radical/anarchist politics, freaky costumes, and woozy occultism — anyone acquainted with Europe’s demimonde from Dandyism through Dadaism. What alarms me is me: my acquiescence in this contemptible tyrannising; my playing, at such cost to my self-image, peace of mind, and professional activity, my lover’s stupid game.

Why do I permit myself to make myself ridiculous, boogalooing with Reg Prinz, Bea Golden (no child either, flower or otherwise; but she’s got the body for it, alas, as I have not, and the looseness of limb and morals; and Ambrose, damn him, is attracted), and the “Baratarians,” as the extras call themselves? The easy, obvious, armchair answer irritates me, no doubt because it is the main truth: my guilt for having given up my own child nearly thirty years ago (but Lord, Lord!) leaves me peculiarly victimisable at the hands etc. of a man whose regnant passion is to fertilise me. The more as I am d’un certain âge, widowed, expatriate (but from what fatherland, after all?), and — in Dostoyevsky’s lovely term—“morally prostrate” from the long tantalisings of André Castine and/or his Doppelgängers. True, true, true. But the main truth is not the whole truth. Even before this rage for paternity got hold of him, I had begun to love odd Ambrose; my dozen-or-so letters to you since March must surely bear witness to this weary heart’s movement from colleaguely cordiality to appall at his first crude overtures, thence through amusement, affection, attraction, and reckless lust, to, Lord help me, love.

I love him! (It excites me to write it.) The child thing scares me: both that he demands conception and that what he demands could, just possibly, occur. Preggers, for God’s sake! These other new demands scare me: it is not in a spirit of erotic sport that Ambrose rigs me out like a high school “groupie,” but in frustration at what in an earlier “stage” he prized: that I am Older. Indeed, I believe that were I as young as the would-be “starlets” among the Baratarians — whose narcotised, strobe-lighted, easily proffered favours mio maestro does not always, I think, refuse — he would not so particularly itch to make me big; it is I he wants to impregnate, precisely despite my age. But none of these scares me so much as the possibility of his ceasing to love me (he does, John; I know it). For a little while, I trust, he must work out in this bizarre and degrading wise his rage at unalterable circumstance. I love him! And so I “frug,” I flail my arms, I wiggle my bum — and close my eyes, open my legs, cross my fingers.

Like, um, wow?

Cependant, he has conceived a longish fiction, novella-size at least, upon the theme of ritual reenactment, drafting notes and diagrams and trial passages between his bouts with me and Prinz. I had almost forgot that he is, after all, an author. He had allowed to me as how the materials were to be classical — the myth of Perseus, Andromeda, and Medusa, to be specific — and we came so near to having a proper literary conversation on the subject that for a moment I had imagined myself twenty again in fact with old Hesse, old Huxley, old Whomever, gratifying their elder flesh whilst they gratified my young mind. I actually lubricated at the prospect of exploring with my lover his lovely reading of the myth, in particular the Medusa episode, which he sees not in the Freudian way as an image of impotence and vulval terror, but (the polished shield of Athene, the reflections and re-reflections) as a drama of the perils of self-consciousness. Ambrose’s Perseus, middle-aged and ill married, his mythic exploits and heroic innocence behind him, once again “calls his enemy to his aid” (Ovid’s happy phrase, for Perseus’s use of the Gorgon’s head to petrify his adversaries), attempts to reenact his youthful triumphs, comes a cropper, but with the help of a restored and resurrected Medusa — whose true gaze, seen clearly, may confer immortality instead of death — transcends his vain objective and becomes, with her, a constellation in the sky, endlessly reenacting their romance.