And, yes

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

And finally the opening words of “Arthur Morton King’s” own fiction-in-progress: a retelling of the story of Perseus, of Medusa, of

O!

D: Lady Amherst to the Author. Trouble at Marshyhope. Her early relations with several celebrated novelists. Her affair with André Castine, and its issue. Her marriage to Lord Jeffrey Amherst. Her widowing and reduction to academic life.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

Saturday morning, 26 April 1969

My dear B.,

Directly upon my supplying you, in my last, with that gloss upon my address, I receive your letter of 20 April with its postscriptal request for just that information! One is given pause. But the same applies to my “confession” generally, I’m sure: more than you bargained for, and before you’d really got down to bargaining.

No matter — though these crossings in the post are decidedly eerie and a touch confusing. I have still past history to relate; and my present connexion with Ambrose M. (relationship were too portentous a word) remains curious enough to prompt me, if not to account for it, at least to record it, if only to remove me a tongue-tisking distance from my own behaviour. Saturday mornings (when I am alone or he is asleep) are convenient for me to write to you, over the breakfast coffee and “English”(!) muffins; and perhaps it will be as well — and fit — if, like fictions, these confessional installments go unreplied to: scribbled in silence, into silence sent, silently received.

My morning newspaper duly notes — what I’ve been in the thick of all week! — that college campuses your country over are at best in disarray, at worst in armed rebellion. Even the innocents here at Marshyhope (“pinknecks,” Ambrose calls them), inspired by their incendiary counterparts at Berkeley, Buffalo, Cornell, and Harvard, managed yesterday a brief takeover and “trashing” of John Schott’s office, and a “sit-in” in Shirley Stickles’s and mine. Schott and Shirley (and Harry Carter, shaking with fear for all his earlier dismissal of student activists as “Spock’s Big Babies”) were for fetching the army in straight off, no doubt to impress the conservative kingmakers in “Annapolis, maybe even Washington.” I too was chiefly irritated; would have been furious had they mussed my office. For while I deplore (for its futility more than for its imperialism) your government’s misguided war in Vietnam, and can by some effort of imagination follow the emotional logic that leads therefrom to, say, student occupation of administrative offices at Columbia University, I can by no manner of means take our students seriously, who so far from having read their Marcuse, Mao, and Marx, do not even read the morning news, and rail against the university without knowing (any more than Schott or Carter or Shirley S.) what a real university is.

Which, Ambrose tells me, and lately told them, is the proper object of demonstration. What they ought to protest, in his view, is the false labelling that calls such an enterprise as ours a college, not to say a university, in the first place, rather than an extended public high school. But what would these children do in a genuine university?

He and your “Todd Andrews,” almost alone, have been able to talk with the demonstrators, in whose stirring up Harrison Mack’s son, a bona fide radical, has had a hand. Mr Andrews is the most enlightened of the Tidewater Foundation trustees and their executive director as well, to whom even Schott must in some measure defer. While he and Drew Mack speak to each other across an ideological fence, there is some bond between them which the younger man clearly resents but cannot break. And Ambrose — an old friend of Drew Mack’s, clearly not a part of the regular academic establishment, and mistaken by the students for a radical because he despises Richard Nixon (I myself would describe my lover as a conservative nihilist) — found himself cast in the role of faculty spokesman for the students! The utter confusion he found appealing; no use Drew Mack’s (correctly) arguing to the protestors that Ambrose was no more the representative of “their values” than was Todd Andrews of the administration’s: they worked out a conciliation between them which gave both sides the illusion of being represented and ended the occupation. By extending the spring recess to a fortnight and moving up the final-examination period, they hope to forestall a regrouping of forces this semester. Next fall, one hopes, the mood on campus, if not the situation in Southeast Asia, will have changed.

Thus my lover unexpectedly finds himself in the sudden good graces of John Schott, to whom Mr Andrews has represented him as a forefender of adverse publicity for MSU in the news media. I am almost encouraged now to advance his name after all before our reconstituted nomination committee for the Litt.D. — rather, to entertain its advancement by someone else. To Ambrose himself, an apolitical animal, the whole business is, if not quite a joke, at most a sport or a variety of “happening”—“It’s what we have instead of Big Ten football,” he declares — and a potent aphrodisiac: in his cynical view, they play at revolution to excite themselves, then back to their liberated dormitories to make love. He is of course “projecting”: I write this weary to the bone, sore in every orifice from our amorosities of the night past, everywhere leaking like a seminiferous St Sebastian. From where in the world, I wonder, does so much come come?

Thus our gluttony persists, to my astonishment, into its fourth week! I should not have believed either my endurance or my appetite: I’ve easily done more coupling in the month of April than in the four years past; must have swallowed half as much as I’ve envaginated; I do not even count what’s gone in the ears, up the arse, on the bedclothes and nightclothes and dayclothes and rugs and furniture, to the four winds. And yet I hunger and thirst for more: my left hand creeps sleeping-himward as the right writes on; now I’ve an instrument in each, poor swollen darling that I must have again. He groans, he stirs, he rises; my faithful English Parker pen (bought in “Mr Pumblechook’s premises,” now a stationer’s, in Rochester, in honour of great Boz) must yield to his poky poking pencil pencel pincel penicellus penicillus peeee

Your pardon. Come and gone (an hour later) to fetch his daughter for an afternoon’s outing — and make what excuses he can, I daresay, to his Abruzzesa, Mrs Peter Mensch. Can he be servicing her too? it occurs to me to wonder. Physically impossible! And yet, titillated by the thought as at last I douche my wearies, I find myself dallying astride the W.C. with the syringe…

But I daresay this is not the sort of thing you had in mind to hear.

Nor I to write: not even two hours ago, when I set out to tell you for example that I was born Germaine Necker-Gordon in Paris to a pair of fashionably expatriate ambitious minor novelists who traced their separate descents from an unrecorded dalliance of young Lord Byron’s with the aging Madame de Staël in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, the penultimate year of her life. That I was educated in the second-rate salons and literary cafés of Paris and Rome by the most indulgent, amoral, loving, pathetic, dear, and worthless parents a child could have, who transferred their ambitions to me straight upon the completion of my first novel (at age nine!): once promising talents both, each of whose own first books had been mild critical successes; whose seconds and thirds had received diminishing notice; whose fourths and fifths and sixths had not found a publisher, so that like space rockets whose next stage fails to fire, they languished decade after decade in gently decaying orbit. That with their tender connivance I was deflowered, not ungently, at age fourteen, in Rome, in the woods of the Villa Ada (now a campground for tourists!), with a (capped) fountain pen, by Mr H. G. Wells, then 71, whom I feared and admired, and who admired in turn my person but not my fiction, which he found “smarmy.” He was not so much a dirty old man as a vulnerable, was Wells, and I a mischievous girl; neither his literary criticism nor his fountain pen much hurt me, but my parents, outraged at his critical judgement, refused to read anything he published after The Anatomy of Frustration (1936).