All this in fury in the Erie Motel on the Wednesday and again on the Thursday night, Ambrose having in between played Cotten to Bea Golden’s Monroe all over Goat Island (we looked: no Giles) and the sprinklered escarpment of the Falls (having turned the rapids off, the engineers must keep a spray of water on the Rochester shale, lest it dry and crumble even faster). Freud observes that the sound of falling water is aphrodisiac: rain on the roof of the gamekeeper’s cottage; Dido and Aeneas in their cozy cave. Ambrose had earlier invoked Freud’s observation to explain the attraction of Niagara Falls to honeymooners. I submit that the sound of the Falls not falling has an even more powerful effect upon our friend, though not upon the writer of these lines. Too, Ms Blank’s disconcerting smirk at her ex-husband’s new Old Lady, together with “Bibi’s” Rennie Morgan look of exhausted strength, inspires him to ever more ardent pursuit of Bea (Prinz doesn’t seem to mind; photographs it all), ever more humiliation of myself. Every day I’m screwed, both ways, and whilst I leak his stuff into my scanties, he chases after her.

The news, the news. Our “Jacob Horner” is a spook, a vacuum, an ontological black hole. In his presence (the word is perfectly inapposite) I feel my hold on myself, my sense of me, going the way of my sanity. “Are you actually the original of the Jacob Horner in the novel?” I ask him, and he answers, seriously: “In a sense.” Marsha Blank, on the other hand, seems no blank at all, but a cold-souled, calculating — okay, empty-hearted — embodiment of small-minded WASP vindictiveness who — whoa there: that’s Jealousy talking, and Desperation chiming in with modifiers. But what on earth did Ambrose once see in her? In their reenactment of The End of the Road she will take the role of your sexually exploited high school English teacher, Peggy Rankin (a role better suited to myself, I should think; no one would get away with exploiting Ms Blank a second time!). That Prinz himself seems fascinated by her is no surprise: she flirts with him in the full sly ignorance of an insurance company clerk-typist flirting with, say, Andy Warhol — no doubt in part to make Ambrose jealous — and Prinz indulges her, with as it were an anthropological curiosity. Between her and Ambrose the vibrations are murderous (Peggy Rancour, he has dubbed her): nothing in my own experience compares with it. And Bea Golden, stung (sorry; let’s say miffed) by Prinz’s sufferance of Blank’s rude overtures, responds now, out of spite, to Ambrose’s. God help me!

Upon this tawdry diagram of forces, “M. Casteene” and “Saint Joseph” smile benignly, though with different interests. What Casteene’s are I shall not even speculate (I cannot call him André; he is not A. B. Cook; he is to both what Marsha Blank is to the doorlady of Chautaugua, an imperfect clone; yet he alludes knowledgeably to the letters of 1812 and hopes to discuss their publication with me “fully,” together with “our larger strategy,” tomorrow, when the Baratarians are on holiday! John, John!). He is the courtly master of ceremonies, the Spielman; the low-keyed but high-geared tummler of the Remobilisation Farm, and director of the Wiedertraum (his term, I gather) that is The End of the Road Continued.

On that little psychodrama, too, I shall not speculate, except to say that it seems to me potentially as explosive as the Old Fort Erie powder magazine. And that, as it is being reenacted on a sort of anniversary schedule, with your novel as the basis of their script, the next episode will not occur until 20 and 21 July, when Horner (having been instructed by the Doctor on 1 June to take up grammar teaching as an antidote to his paralytical tendency) is to be interviewed by “Dr Schott” (also played by Casteene) and “Joe Morgan,” played by:

Joe Morgan. Oh, John: much changed! And yet, plus ça change… Whether he is “your” Joe Morgan is not for me to say — my sense is that it were dangerous, not to mention tactless, to press that question; nobody here does, either with “St Joe” or with any of the others — but he is most certainly “mine,” under howsoever altered a complexion: the courteous, intense, scholarly, boyish intellectual historian (in both senses) who so aided my researches at the Maryland Historical Society and later hired me at Marshyhope. Then, his simplicity, lucidity, and energetic gentleness covered (as we thought) a complexity, a mystery, perhaps even a violence: a darkness obscured by light, for which your tale of adultery, abortion, and death provided at least a fictive explanation. Now things seem reversed: the gentleness is still there, but it seems fierce; the mystery, irrationality, even mysticism, are on the surface; he has “done” the heavy psychedelics; his mind is “bent,” by his own admission (but not “blown”) — yet his account of his motives, his “reappreciation of the secret life of objects,” his “delinearisation of history,” all seem (at least when he’s speaking of them) as pellucid as William James’s rational chapter on the mystical experience, or Morgan’s own essay on Cheerful American Nihilism. His defeat last year by John Schott at Marshyhope must have been the penultimate straw; I gather something snapped at Amherst, and his friend “Casteene” arranged his coming to the Farm. I would not care to be in Jacob Horner’s saddle oxfords.

Being in my sneakers and penny loafers is no picnic, either. So many words, so many pages (Werther’s longest letter, that one of 16 June 1771 describing his introduction to Charlotte on the 11th, is a mere nine pages), and even so I’ve not mentioned “U.U.,” the Underground University of Senior Citizens and draft evaders organised at the Farm by Morgan and Casteene, in which Jacob Horner will presumably teach when the time comes. Or the minstrel show (based dimly on your Floating Opera!) rehearsing under “Bibi’s” direction for performance a week hence — by when, God willing, Ambrose and I will be out of this madhouse, with whatever scars; away from this eerie powder keg of cross-purposes and unsettled scores; back home (so it seems already; I would never have supposed!) to dear damp Marshyhope and our late commencement exercises.

But next Saturday’s Doctor of Letters has just put down his pen for the day. I must therefore put down mine: close my letter, open my legs: then out to the Fort, the Farm, the Falls, and whatever further setups and put-downs the afternoon holds for your

Germaine

P.S.: Prinz and Ambrose be damned, I intend of course to seek you out whilst we’re filming at Chautauqua and Lily Dale next week, if the post office will tell me where on that rural delivery route your cottage is. I promise not to be a nuisance — you’re not the first writer I ever met! — but we really should talk, don’t you think?

S: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her conversation with “Monsieur Casteene.” A fiasco on Chautauqua Lake. A Visit to Lily Dale, N.Y., Spiritualist Capital of America.

24 L St, Dorset Heights

Saturday, 21 June 1969

John,

So: back in Maryland, on the morning of the year’s longest day, and thoroughly alarmed, confused, distressed. I shan’t degrade myself further by enlarging for you upon my week, since clearly you do not wait for these reports with bated breath — perhaps not even with tempered curiosity. From Monday through Thursday last I was on and about your Chautauqua Lake, in weather as gray and chill as northern Europe’s: not like our proper Maryland Junes! On the Sunday prior, at Fort Erie, I’d had my remarkable conversation with “Monsieur Casteene,” in course of which he retailed to me such an astonishing and unexpected history of his connexions with yourself that on the Monday, when Ambrose and I were installed in Chautauqua’s old Athenaeum, I got your number from the operator and straightway rang you up. No answer, then or later. On the Tuesday — whilst Ambrose scribbled at his Perseus story and counterplotted against Reg Prinz within the ad libitum plot of their screenplay — I drove our hired car around the lake to your cottage, aided by directions from the rural postman. It was Chautaugua all over again, minus Mr Cook’s blank receptionist: the modest cottage, the tidy grounds, the seawall and dock, boats tethered at their moorings — and no one at home.