I hung it all up. God damn writing! This bloody farking scribbler’s itch that you (most recently) seduced me into scratching! (Write > M.E. writen > O.E. writan: to tear or scratch. Ditto scribe, and pace Ambrose.) Yes, yes, yes: that one time — when, like this, I was in the office, and for a change not longhanding it — I made a carbon, such a relief it was to feel businesslike when Ambrose had begun to make a public arse of me with such a vengeance. It gave my weekly confession at once a more official and (what have I to lose now?) a more fictitious aspect: as if I were a writer writing first-person fiction, an epistolary novelist composing — and editing, alas, in holograph — instead of a stateless 50-year-old widow, failed mother, failed writer, and scholar of no consequence, tyrannised and humiliated by a younger “lover” as she enters her menopause with little to look back upon except abortive liaisons with a number of prominent novelists, and nothing to look forward to.
And of course it took me no time at all to feel a greater fool yet for making that carbon, for editing it, for writing to you in the first place; and I “destroyed” the copy (i.e., wadded and wastecanned it) but posted the letter; and Shirley Stickles got to the wastecan before the custodian did, unless that worthy was in on the plot too; and it was too late to undo the award to Ambrose, they’d just have to hope, but once they were safely past 21 June they’d cut off the pair of us, using my letter as their trump card…
Et voilà!
Well: I am at the end of my forties, and the rest. I have been carrying on like a madwoman, and madly confessing it by the ream. The crowning irony now occurs to me: that perhaps you too believe, at least suspect, that I’m making all this up! Fantasizing! Writing fiction!
Jee-bloody-farking-sus!
Alors: if I am truly turpitudinous, and not hallucinating my tender connexion with Doctor Mensch, then I am now altogether reliant upon that spectacularly unreliable fellow. My “hope” this time last week was that Marshyhope’s commencement might remind him fondly of ours. Ha! Now my only hope is that I’m pregnant, and that conceiving a bastard by that bastard will restore him to me and to his senses. Some hope, whilst he climbs all over Bea Golden (but not yet into her knickers, not yet, not yet) as the Baratarians reenact on Bloodsworth Island Admiral Cockburn’s Rape of Hampton, Virginia, in 1813!
Total, total disgrace, such as my namesake never knew. This dispossessed augur can scratch her poor encausticked penis across these miserable beech leaves no further. Where is the peace Mann promised his ruined
G?
O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage concludes; the Fifth begins. Magda’s confession. The Gadfly fiasco reenacted: an Unfilmable Sequence.
24 L Street
Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612
5 July ’69
J.,
Oh, yes: still here. And still scratching.
You recall last Saturday’s last hope? No sooner hoped than hopeless. True, when the Mother of Alphabets rose full on the Sunday (the “Hot Moon,” and it has indeed been sweltering hereabouts), I failed to flow with my recent celestial regularity, and for some moments dared imagine — But it was a cruel false hope: next day, her name day, the last of the sorry month, I began, if not to flow, at least erratically to leak, and have dripped and dribbled this week through in pre-Ambrosian style.
As befits what looks to be the commencement of my post-Ambrosian life. Having been the efficient cause of my dismissal from Academe, the man has, as of Monday last, dismissed me, and as of yesterday abandoned me. Whilst I write this in air-conditioned solitude at 24 L, he is alone at “Barataria” with his new mistress, Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, of whom he made triumphant conquest last night by the rockets’ red glare.
Do I seem calm? I am, rather: that bitter hopeless peace old Thomas promised. Everyone is being frightfully understanding: good Magda Giulianova Mensch, of whom more to come; Todd Andrews; Jane Mack; even Drew Mack, who regrets by telephone that his disruption of the MSU commencement cost me my job (an example of bourgeois capitalist academic capriciousness, says Drew). My old friend “Juliette Récamier” has written sympathetically from her current post at Nanterre (don’t ask me how she heard so fast), where “for such an outrage [as my cashiering] we would burn down the university.” Oh, yes, and “Monsieur Casteene” also deplores (from Castines Hundred) John Schott’s move, of which he disclaims foreknowledge; nor had he imagined, when as A. B. Cook he accepted Schott’s invitation to visit Marshyhope for the fall semester (a detail he neglected to mention in our Remarkable Conversation) that he would be replacing me. He’d hoped, as my temporary colleague, to change my mind yet about publishing his ancestor’s letters: a service to himself, to historiography, and to the 2nd Revolution which he now prayed my altered circumstances might reincline me to, but which he would not solicit from me against my wishes. He is making “other arrangements” for their publication. If things should go ill between me and my current friend, God forbid, and I needed a change of scene, I was of course welcome at any time, and for any time, to Castines Hundred.
I thanked him politely for the invitation, but told him that things between my current friend and me were just dandy.
I have not mentioned that, even as he left me for Bea Golden (more precisely, upon Monday’s evidence that his low-motile swimmers had failed again with me, but before his Independence Day triumph over Reg Prinz), Ambrose informed me that our affair is not ended; only its 4th Stage, corresponding — somehow — to his failed marriage. As I was not pregnant, the 5th Stage would now commence — it was how he felt—and he hoped it would be of short duration, for he could not imagine my enjoying it any more than #4. I was a fool, he added (not for the first time since Commencement Day), to have persisted in this one-way correspondence with you, and especially to have made a carbon of such compromising stuff: but in my circumstances it was an understandable and forgivable folly. He was very sorry that it and he had cost me my job; contemptuous as he was of John Schott’s vulgar ambitions and pretentions, he was not finally so of mass public colleges like Marshyhope, as long as one did not mistake their activity for first-class education. He knew I’d done excellent things for the few really able students who had come my way, and at least no harm to the commonalty. Even he is sympathetic!
He could scarcely say what had possessed him at the exercises: he’d had an equivocal hint from Prinz, who had it from Drew Mack, that the radicals might be Up To Something after all; we both had heard from Bea with some amusement that Merope Bernstein had mobilised herself and disappeared in a hurry from the Farm when her ex-stepmother, after a sympathetic reunion, had cautioned her that Jerome Bray might well materialise in Fort Erie. But there wasn’t “really” any prearrangement: it had merely occurred to Ambrose that some sort of neo-Dadaist, bourgeois-baiting stunt would suit the movie, and he was distraught about his mother’s dying, and for that matter he was professionally preoccupied with the roots of writing, its mythical connexions with Thoth and Hermes, ibis and crane, moon and phallus and lyre strings… He too had been disrupted!
Oh, yes, and by the way: he still loved me, he declared; still hoped to impregnate and to marry me. To that end we ought still to Have Sex from time to time, once my bleeding stopped, what? Not to worry about the rent and the groceries; we’d manage. But I might be seeing a bit less of him in the days ahead, when he suspected that Andrea’s condition, his authorial concerns, and his activities in Prinz’s film might all approach critical levels.