In the meanwhile, heartening it is to find among the dross a comrade, a fellow traveler, whose good wishes we reciprocate most

Cordially,

P.S.: As to those cinematographical rumors. The film rights to The Floating Opera are contracted, and a screenplay is in the works, but I have no particular confidence that the story will actually be filmed, on location or elsewhere. Many shuffle the cards who do not play when the chips are down.

In any case, the Prinz-Mensch project is something different, I gather, and altogether more ad libitum. Prinz I know only by his semisubterranean reputation on the campuses; in 1967 he communicated to me, indirectly and enigmatically (he will not write letters; is said to be an enemy of the written word) his interest in filming my “last novel,” which at the time was Giles Goat-Boy. Later he introduced himself to me by telephone and, as best I could infer, gave me to know that it was my “last book” he was interested in filming—i.e., by that time, the series Lost in the Funhouse, just published. I had supposed that book not filmable, inasmuch as the stories in it were written for print, tape, and live voice, have no very obvious continuity, and depend for their sense largely on manipulations of narrative viewpoint which can’t be suggested visually. I told Prinz these things. If I read correctly his sighs, grunts, and hums, they were precisely what appealed to him!

I let him have an option, the more readily when he intimated that our friend Ambrose Mensch might do the screenplay. Our contract stipulates that disagreements about the script are to be settled by a vote among the three of us; so far I’ve found Prinz at once so antiverbal and so personally persuasive that I’ve seconded, out of some attraction to opposites, his rejection of Mensch’s trial drafts. And almost to my own surprise I find myself agreeing to his most outrageous, even alarming notions: e.g., that by “last book” he means at least a kind of Ongoing Latest (he wants to “anticipate” not only the work in progress since Funhouse but even such projected works as LETTERS!); at most something ominously terminal.

No question but he will execute a film: my understanding is that principal photography is about to be commenced, both down your way and — for reasons that we merely literate cannot surmise — up here along the Niagara Frontier as well. I find myself trusting him rather as a condemned man must trust his executioner.

We shall, literally, see.

I: The Author to Lady Amherst. Accepting her rejection of his counterinvitation.

Department of English, Annex B

SUNY/Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

April 13, 1969

Professor Germaine G. Pitt, Lady Amherst

Office of the Provost, Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

My dear Lady Amherst:

In response to your note of April 5: I accept, regretfully, your vigorous rejection of my proposal, and apologize for any affront it may have given you. I did not mean — but never mind what I did not mean. I accede to the counsel of your countryman Evelyn Waugh: Never apologize; never explain.

May I trust, all the same, that you will not take personally my use of at least the general conceit — for the principal character in an epistolary novel as yet but tentatively titled and outlined — of A Lady No Longer in Her First Youth, to represent Letters in the belletristic sense of that word?

Cordially,

M: The Author to Lady Amherst. Crossed in the mails. Gratefully accepting her change of mind.

Chautauqua Lake, New York

April 20, 1969

Germaine G. Pitt

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland

My dear Ms. Pitt,

My note to you of April 13, accepting your rejection of my proposal, must have crossed in the mails yours to me of April 12, tentatively withdrawing that rejection: a letter my pleasure in the receipt of which, as that old cheater Thackeray would write, “words cannot describe.” Since, like myself, you seem given to addressing certain correspondents on certain days of the week, I happily imagine that this letter, too — welcoming your reconsideration and hoping that you will entrust me with whatever confidences you see fit to share — will have passed, somewhere between western New York and the Eastern Shore of Maryland (along the Allegheny ridges, say: the old boundary between British and French America), yet another from you, bringing to light those mysteries with which yours of the 12th is big.

Vicissitudes! Lovers! Pills! Radical corners turned! The old familiar self no longer recognizable! Encore!

I jest, ma’am, but sympathetically. (Excuse my longhand; I write this from a summer cottage at Chautauqua, where snow fell only yesterday into the just-thawed lake. And on the Chesapeake they are sailing already!) If April — in the North Temperate Zone, at least — is the month of suicides and sinkings, that’s because it’s even more the month of rebeginnings: Chaucer’s April, the live and stirring root of Eliot’s irony. (So you really knew Old Possum! How closely, please? You are not the One who settles a pillow by her head and says to Prufrock: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all…”?!) In this latter April spirit I wish you a happy birthday.

I also swear by all the muses that I am not just now nor have I lately been in touch with Ambrose M. We have amicably drifted apart in recent years, both personally and aesthetically; have not corresponded since early in this decade. The news of his connection with Reg Prinz was news to me. I’ve seen (and concurred with Prinz in the rejection of) A’s first draft of the opening of that screenplay alleged to be based on some story of mine. It seems tacitly understood between us that direct communication would be counterproductive while he’s taking — with my tacit general approval — vast liberties with my fiction. Have you and he become close?

Enfin: I am by temperament a fabricator, not a drawer-from-life. I know what I’m about, but shall be relieved to get home to wholesale invention, much more my cup of tea. Meanwhile, I urge you to tell on, while I like a priest in the box draw between us now a screen. Or better, like a tape recorder, not distract you by replying. Or best, like Echo in the myth, give you back eventually your own words in another voice.

Cordially. Hopefully. Exhortingly. Expectantly.

Respectfully. Sincerely,

— L Street? I find neither in my memory nor on my map of Cambridge any neighborhood or suburb called Dorset Heights, or streets named for letters of the alphabet.?

3

~ ~ ~

T: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Third Stage of her affair with Ambrose Mensch. Her latter-day relations with André Castine.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

Saturday, 3 May 1969

My dear B. (or, Dear Diary),

Thanks, I think, for not responding to my last two “chapters.” You understand why, even as I made to slip last Saturday’s into the drop box (such odd-shaped ones over here!), it occurred to me to post it on the Monday by certified mail instead: having seen fit to comply with your request, I need only some confirmation that these letters are being received, and by the addressee. Your “John Hancock” on the receipt is my “Go now and sin some more.”