Have I mentioned that, unaccountably, I Still Love Him too? Elsewise I’d clear straight out of this incubator of mildew and mosquitoes and get me to the clear cold air of Switzerland, or the at-least-civilised perversions of my “Juliette” in Nanterre. I could truly almost wish I were lesbian! When Magda came ’round this morning — ostensibly to ask whether I wanted to go with her to visit Mother Mensch in hospital, but actually to comfort me for Ambrose’s infidelity — when to the surprise of both of us we found ourselves embracing and enjoying a good womanly weep together — I was so moved by her direct understanding and sympathy, so relieved to be close to another woman for a change, I could almost have Gone Right On. She too, I half think, and altogether guiltlessly. There was a rapport there… But we didn’t, and I’m not, and what would please me even better would be to be sexless altogether, as shall doubtless come to pass soon enough. In the meanwhile, and mean it is, I love and crave (and miss) that unconscionable sonofabitch Ambrose; that — that scratcher of my itch; that writer.
And I have got clear ahead of my story. No question but moviemakers have the world in their pocket in our century, as we like to imagine the 19th-century novelists did in theirs. Let Ambrose ask the skipper of the Original Floating Theatre II to delay his leaving Cambridge for half an hour so that he can make a few notes thereupon for a novel in progress: the chap wouldn’t have considered it. But let a perfectly unknown Reg Prinz show up with camera crew and the vaguest intentions in the world… the world stops, reenacts itself for take after take, does anything it can imagine its Director might wish of it!
The showboat was docked at Long Wharf on the weekend of the Marshyhope fiasco: we were to have gone to see Bea do her Mary-Pickford-of-the-Chesapeake on the Saturday evening — and Ambrose actually went, straight out of the pokey, as did Prinz & Co., but yours truly was too ill with consternation for further vaudeville. The O.F.T. II was to have sailed on the Monday, but lingered till the Wednesday, cast and all, so that Prinz could get footage for possible use, and agreed to an unscheduled return to Cambridge on 4 July so that he could combine shots of the locally famous fireworks display with — here we go — a “sort of remake” of the Gadfly excitement of just a fortnight past! History really is that bird you mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament!
En attendant, as I despaired here in Dorset Heights, and wondered where on earth a sacked acting provost might go from Marshyhope, the cinematographic action shifted down-county to “Barataria,” where it and Ambrose and Bea got on quite well without me. I wonder who does Prinz’s cost accounting? That set, elaborate for him, was built months ago and has scarcely been used; as of the end of Giles Goat-Boy (I’m done), there is no mention of the 1812 War in your works. But on 23 June 1813, a British naval force attempted to dislodge Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians from their stronghold on Grand Terre Island, near New Orleans, and on the following day Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake fleet sacked Hampton, Virginia, raping a number of American ladies in the process. It was decided to combine “echoes” of both events in an obscure bravura scene shot on their approximate sesquicentennial down at the Bloodsworth Island set. Don’t ask me why they didn’t throw in Napoleon’s abdication on the 22nd (which coincided nicely with my cashiering and Jerome Bonaparte Bray’s abandoning the goat farm and pursuing Bea to Maryland on the Sunday), or Custer’s Last Stand against Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn on the 25th.
Don’t ask me either what exactly went on down there. I was — perhaps you noticed? — still too distressed in last Saturday’s letter to be either a good listener to, or a good reporter of, the news. Ambrose passed through on the Thursday and the Friday en route to spend time with his mother and his daughter; we slept together (this was just before the Hot Moon rose and my last hopes sank); I gather from his perfunctory accounts that Bea was as frightened of Mr Bray as he and Prinz were intrigued by him, and that the chap had fastened himself upon the company like a solicitous mosquito. Merry Bernstein (before she jumped the bail Drew Mack put up for her and fled underground upon Bray’s appearance in Cambridge) had confided to Bea that Bray’s assault on her, in her flat at Chautauqua back in May, had been of a bizarre anal character and literally venomous: she believed he had sodomized her with some exotic C.I.A. poison on his member, out of spite for her leaving him; she warned her ex-stepmother that the man was scarcely human. At this point Bea was still as much amused as alarmed by Cook’s protestations; she confided to Ambrose (a mark of their increased chumminess) that the story had reminded her of Merope’s father, whose penchant for anal copulation had been a factor in their divorce. She’d learned, she said, to keep a tight arse in such company. Ambrose himself was still fascinated by the correspondence of some of Bray’s obsessions—1st and 2nd Cycles, Midpoints and Phi-points, Fibonacci numbers, Proppian formulae — with his own preoccupations, of which they seemed to him a mad and useful limiting case. Bray’s rôle as a new rival for Bea’s favours did not much concern him: it seemed to frighten her closer, and Bray himself appeared to regard him as an ally against Reg Prinz — who, we must remember, was at this time still Bea’s lover.
Well: at some point in the shooting, Mr Bray — an amateur Stanislavski-Method actor, it would seem, as well as something of an amateur historian — carried over into the Rape-of-Hampton sequence his piratical characterisation from the Assault on Barataria (sound effects courtesy of the U.S. Navy), in which he’d taken the rôle of one John Blanque, a Creole friend of Jean Lafitte’s in the Louisiana legislature who later joined the buccaneering crew. Now it happens that Admiral Cockburn blamed the rape of the Virginia women, not on his English sailors, but on a gang of unruly French chasseurs britanniques whom he had impressed from the Halifax prison-ships into his Chesapeake service, and as the two events were being as it were montaged… Our Beatrice finds herself not only leapt upon, per program, by two extras and stripped fetchingly of her hoopskirts and petticoats to the accompaniment of “Gallic” grunts and leers, but “rescued” suddenly by Monsieur Blanque, who with surprising strength flings other Baratarians off her (one has a swelling the size of a goose egg on his thigh) and very nearly accomplishes Penetration before his victim — who must have felt herself back in her blue-movie period — can unman him with a parasol to the groin.
Yup, parasol. It was late June, Prinz had reasoned; they’d’ve had parasols. And never mind verisimilitude, he liked the fetishistic look of naked ladies with open parasols, and had instructed the girls to hold tight to their accessories whilst being stripped. Our pirate now clutches his family jewels and begs Bea’s pardon: he was overcome with love; it was that season of year. Ambrose not quite to the rescue this time, but nearby enough to get his comforting arms about the victim, I daresay — who is inclined to bring assault charges against Bray until Prinz dissuades her. Indeed, the familiarity of the tableau — Bea in extremis, the Author to the rescue (sort of), Bray apologising — has given the Director an Idea: inasmuch as the movie reenacts and re-creates events and images from “the books,” which do likewise from life and history and even among themselves, why should it not also reenact and echo its own events and images?
Ambrose is enchanted, Bray is willing, Bea is appalled, Prinz is boss. The 4th of July re-creation of the Gadfly party is devised. But it mustn’t be a strictly programmed reenactment: we are on the Choptank now, aboard the O.F.T. II, with a different backup cast. Time has moved on: it will be Independence Day; never mind the War of 1812. Let each principal, independently, imagine variations on the original Gadfly sequence.