As ever,
— And, friend, how do you fare? I have in the body of this letter stuck deliberately to business. But as you know, I know (by letters only) your admirable Lady Amherst; and via that correspondence — which I initiated but have not done right by — I know a great deal that isn’t my business, as well as one or two things (e.g., your adventures with Mr. Prinz) that sort of are. I won’t presume to remark on either, though I have my opinions. Except of course to say I’m sorry to hear that your mother’s dying and your brother’s ill. And look here, Ambrose: your Ex (excuse me, but I recollect her amiably from college days, when she typed all our fledgling manuscripts) — has that chap Jerome Bray really got her in his clutches?
U: The Author to Ambrose Mensch. Replying to the latter’s telephone call of the previous night.
Chautauqua, New York
August 24, 1969
Old ally,
Understood. My letter to you of 8/3 awaited your return from Canada to the house I once helped you build, and the distressful urgencies chez toi kept you from replying till last night. My sympathy, old altered ego: to you, to Peter, to your sister-in-law.
See here: there was no call to call. My letter was nothing urgent — a trial balloon, not a cry for help. But perhaps the urgency was on your end; on the phone you sounded, with every good reason, strung out to the limit.
Therefore, while I look forward to the promised letter amplifying your remarkable suggestions and too-generous offers of your own invention, I’ve no mind at all to accept the latter — certainly at least not before you’re calmly sure you’ll never use that Perseus material yourself, and not unless I can present you with some quid for so handsome a quo. J. L. Borges (whose birthday today is, along with Beardsley’s and Beerbohm’s) maintains that “originality” is a delusion — that we writer chaps are all more or less faithful amanuenses of the human spirit. So be it: but let it be the human spirit, not one particular fellow human’s!
So I shall perpend with thanks, but put by for the present, your suggestion that I make a chimerical book out of Perseus, Bellerophon & Something Else before tackling LETTERS, though I acknowledge its fitness and am much impressed by the conceit.
On the other hand, I accept at once and gratefully your other suggestion: that the ground theme be not so much revolution or recycling as reenactment: the attractions, hazards, rewards, and penalties of a “2nd cycle” isomorphic with the “1st.” It’s what I’d thought around without thinking of: a kind of key — to what treasure remains to be seen. And your remark that I cannot rescue Ambrose Mensch from the Funhouse because he’s no longer there I take for good news amid all your bad. At least I understand, to the heart, your impulse at the midpoint of your life to “empty yourself before commencing its second half. Surely that’s what midpoints and the Axis Mundi are all about.
But the coincidence of that midpoint with your family griefs, and with what looks to be the climax of that crazy business between you and Reg Prinz, gives me pause. As I work and play through this bright hot Sunday (St. Bartholomew’s Day) on my upland lake, I anxiously imagine you-all down there in Tidewaterland “reenacting” today on their anniversary — which is also the traditional date of Muhammad’s flight and John Gilpin’s ride — the “Bladensburg Races” and the burning of Washington. Are you not, in your condition, playing with fire?
I must trust your excellent Lady A. to see to it you don’t get burned. Speaking of Conditions: is it premature (or presumptuous) of me to add, to my thanks and my best wishes to you both, my congratulations?
As ever,
7
~ ~ ~
E: Lady Amherst to the Author. Explaining her fortnight’s silence. The Burning of Washington. Two more deaths and a memorial service. Preparations for the Bombardment of Fort McHenry and for her wedding.
“Mensch’s Folly”
Saturday, 13 September 1969
Dear Mr B.,
Enclosed, if I remember to enclose it when this is done, is a copy of my transcript of Ambrose’s taped letter of 1 September to (the late) “Author Morton King,” with whom we are no longer concerned. It will explain to you, more or less, a vertiginous business of 6’s and 7’s that I myself intend to think no more of, though it still directs our lives as did astronomy the ancient Mayans’.
Today, for example, is not really Saturday, 13 September; it is Wednesday 10th. But having written you faithfully for 21 sixth days straight (21 Sabbaths if you’re Jewish or 7th-Day Adventist) and then — for very good reason! — having missed the past two Saturdays together with another menstrual period, I’ve so much and mattersome to catch you up on that I’m starting this letter three days early. And I shall be lucky, even so, to get it up to the “present” and posted by its letterhead date.
My wedding day!
But there I spring already into the future, doubtless in flight from the shocks of the three weeks since my last: a period of being at sixes and sevens indeed. Then we had just got the horrid news of Peter’s bone cancer and were wondering whether or not to go down to “Barataria” for the “Burning of Washington.” Already an age ago, another world. Peter Mensch is dead, John! And Joe Morgan is dead! (And maybe Mr Jerome Bray, and for all we know Bea Golden. And, to be sure, Mr Ho Chi Minh.) “Washington” is in ashes; Baltimore’s about to take its lumps — and the Menschhaus is in deep mourning, and Mensch Masonry’s office has been burglarised, and we’re pretty sure I’m pregnant, and Magda is amazing, and A. B. Cook is being strangely friendly, and Marsha Blank has declared that Peter is (was, was) Angie’s father, and nobody (but Marsha) cares a damn about that one way or the other, and Ambrose and I will marry at Fort McHenry at 5:08 EDST this coming Saturday, Rosh Hashanah!
See A.‘s letter for explanation, more or less, of that specific hour and date: the 6th something of the 6th something else of the 6th 6th 6th 6th what-have-you.
Peter, Peter, Peter! and poor Joe!
Bloodsworth Island. We went down there after all on that Sunday morning, 24 August, after I’d reported to you the bad news of Peter’s diagnosis and Ambrose had telephoned you, much distraught, late that Saturday night, in reply to your letter. (On the matter of your writing to him, after half a year’s silence to me, I shall not speak.) And as he mentioned in his subsequent letter from Barataria on the Monday morning — typed with his left hand because his right was out of action and I was too busy with hysterical Merry Bernstein to do his writing for him — a lively time was had by all.
Ambrose was, you understand, feeling as emptied—by his mother’s death, by Peter’s crisis, by M. M. Co.‘s final bankruptcy, by his abandonment of that lovely Perseus project and his longtime pseudonymity — as I, in the 3rd loving week of our “mutuality,” was feeling filled. We went down there, despite our then distress, for the same reason that we will go forward with our wedding plans despite our even greater bereavement now: because Magda (and, back then, dear Peter) insisted. We wound down through your endless marshes — still, steaming, buggy — across the labyrinth of shallow waterways and distant loblolly pines in Backwater Wildlife Refuge, where I saw my first American eagle, down past Crapo and Tedious Creek to Bishops Head, at the lonely tail of Dorchester County. I thought uncomfortably of Ambrose’s having brought Bea Golden through these same marshes in July, at the beginning of hateful Stage 5, to roger her up and down the beach whilst I stewed and fretted in my flapper drag up in Dorset Heights… A hundred years ago!