God may be a literalist, but Life is a heavy-handed ironizer. Two days into my 31st year, tranquilly prowling the rivershore near here with Angie, I spied my Piper-Heidsieck jeroboam in the shallows near the crumbling seawall, not an oystershell’s throw from where Your water message had come ashore to me in that gin bottle 20 years earlier. Lest eyes more familiar than Yours fall on it, I retrieved it. Except for a brief uncorking circa 1962 to oblige a certain fellow Hedonist — who swapped me a couple of his own discarded experiments in unorthodox narrative in return for three chapters of the enclosed: my Bee-Swarming, Water-Message, and Funhouse anecdotes — both bottle and contents rested undisturbed thenceforth, in my subsequent domiciles, until tonight.

Something in those Libriums liberated me from the library of my literary predecessors, for better or worse. Tranquilly I turned my back on Realism, having perhaps long since turned it on reality. I put by not only history, philosophy, politics, psychology, self-confession, sociology, and other such traditional contaminants of fiction, but also, insofar as possible, characterization, description, dialogue, plot — even language, where I could dispense with it. My total production that following summer was a (tranquil) love-piece for my daughter:

The ass I made of myself in my last missive to You dates from that same period, as does my practice — followed faithfully until tonight — of using only no-deposit-no-return bottles for submission of manuscripts. Well before Allan Kaprow and company popularized the Happening, “Arthur Morton King’s” bibliography, so to speak, included such items as Antimasquerade (attending parties disguised as oneself, and going successfully unrecognized) and Hide & No Seek (in which no one is It). The radical tinkerers of New York and Cologne associated with the resurgence of “concrete poetry” and “intermedia” seemed to me vulgar parvenus; by 1961 I had returned to the word, even to the sentence, in homeliest form: my exemplars were the anonymous authors of smalltown newspaper obituary notices, real-estate title searches, National Geographic photo captions, and classified help-wanted ads. By 1967, after a year of fictions in the form of complaining letters from “A. M. King” to the editors of Dairy Goat Quarterly, Revue Metaphysique, Road & Track, Rolling Stone, and School Lunch Journal—which if collected, as they could never imaginably be, would be found to comprise a coherent epistolary narrative with characters, complications, climax, and a tidy dénouement — I became reenamored simultaneously with Magda (I was by then divorcing) and with that most happily contaminated literary genre: the Novel, the Novel, with its great galumphing grace, amazing as a whale!

But not the Art Novel; certainly not those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism. No one named as I am, historied and circumstanced as I am, could likely stomach anything further in the second-meaning way; and a marsh-country mandarin would be an odd duck indeed! I examined the history and origins of the novel, of prose narrative itself, in search of reinspiration; and I found it — not in parodies, travesties, pastiches, and trivializations of older narrative conventions, but…

But I’m ahead of myself. On another front of my general campaign, meanwhile, I privately declared war upon the cinema. My resolve to know these adversaries better led me (i.e., A.M.K.) to attempt for Reggie Prinz the screenplay of B’s book. Prinz has rejected my trial draft of the opening: “Too wordy”! I know my next move.

So: either this old story is new to You, or else You read and returned it nine years ago. It is the story of the broken seawall, the Menschhaus and the camera obscura, the cracked “castle” in whose sinking tower I live, with Peter and Magda and my daughter. It is the story of our firm and our infirmity, by which John Schott’s Tower of Truth — whose foundation-work is our doing — will prove the latest to be undone. “Arthur Morton King” is the pen name I still use; but his rhetoric is less florid, his view of authorship less theistical, than they were when he and I turned 30.

I go now to my new friend’s apartment, to mark the advent of my 40th year. She has promised for the occasion a beef Wellington; the wine is my responsibility. Having raised Magda’s dark eyebrows with my excuses for not dining tonight with the family and my reticence about my plans for the evening (she guesses I’ve found a new lover; can scarcely have guessed whom), I went down to the Lighthouse cellar to review our family’s holdings in the champagne way, and thus came across this earlier vinting. Heavy-footed life!

Magda followed me down; stood mutely by as I tucked two bottles of Mumm’s ’62 Extra Dry under one arm, the old jeroboam under the other. Did she recognize that crack in the masonry, down which she numbly ran her finger like some Italian Madeline Usher? No: she realized only that our recentest affair (fifth of my life, Germaine) is truly done, and that she was realizing it in a place where other things had ended, begun, reended, rebegun.

I raised the Jeroboam. “If at first, et cetera.” And knowing I could only compound the injury, tried anyhow to explain that what I meant was that I meant to try again to launch this old chronicle on the tide, and that as I had this cover-letter to write and a dinner engagement at eight, I must get to it. I’ve felt Magda below me since, feeding Angie and the family as I’ve written these pages; she feels me upstairs setting down these words before I go, each letter scored as if into her skin. In the night to come she’ll feel me drinking to the health of my eleven-day-old sixth love-affair and to my birthday; humping hornily in the ruins of the feast; etting all the ceteras lovers love…

A curse upon tides, Yours Truly, that turn, and, turning, return like misdirected letters what they were to carry off! Thought well drowned, our past floats back like Danaë with infant Perseus, to take eventual revenge. Would that the Choptank were that trusty sewer the Rhine, flowing always out, past the Loreleis and castles of our history; mercifully fetching off our dreck to some Nordzee dumping-ground of time — whence nothing returns unless recycled, distilled, laundered as Alpine snow.

But tides are what tides over whom this betides; who gladly now would say adieu but must make do with au revoir: i.e.,

A.M.

cc: Germaine Pitt: encl.

ENCL.

THE AMATEUR,

or,

A Cure for Cancer

by Arthur Morton King

A

Alhazen of Basra, Gemma-Frisius, Leonardo — from them A. learned to make his great dark camera. But he learned it Plato-wise, as it were by recollection, for that notion — like the tower itself, like Peter Mensch’s entire house — hatched from Aunt Rosa’s Easter egg, that Uncle Konrad gave her in 1910. Before he knew East Dorset was East Dorset and Ambrose Ambrose, he knew the landscape in that egg; his eye was held to it in the cradle. I smile that poor Aunt Rosa, throughout her younger wifehood, railed at Konrad’s seedless testicles and her fruitless womb. Clip and tumble as they might, dine on shellfish, ply the uterine thermometer, she went to her grave unfructified. While lo, as mistress of the egg she is mother of this world we move in: the nymph inside who leans against the Rhine-rock under the Schloss; Mensch’s Castle and the camera obscura; seawall, marshes, funhouse, Cornlot; the bees on Andrea Mensch’s breast and Ambrose’s birthmark; the mosquitoes that bite our Maryland lovers; the crabs they eat; the cancers that eat them. Our story is ab ovo: nothing here but hatched from there.