His plan will keep till next Saturday’s letter: it was as baroque as the plot of your Sot-Weed novel promises to be (at the time I said “circuitous as Proust,” and André kissed my forehead and replied, “Voilà ma Recherche, précisément”), which for all I know may be itself a love letter from him. God knows it bristles with his “signals”! Did you write it? I grow dizzy; grew dizzy then, no longer just from Sodium Pentothal.
But when the time came I went, with a sigh and no false hopes, as I would have gone to the University of Hell for my novelist of history, had his plot and precious voice demanded. Adieu, chère “Juliette”: you I traded — when André bid me au revoir for the last time to date, a few days and much further instruction later — for unfortunate Mr. Morgan, mad King Harrison, contemptible John Schott… and Ambrose Mensch.
Who has filled me full, if not fulfilled me, as I’ve filled these pages Like she-crab or queen bee after mating season, I luxuriate, squishy and replete, in this sexless interval. May it last a few days more!
What have I forgotten? That I remembered, too late, who it was I’d met on the day Joe Morgan mentioned Turgot and the physiocrats in the library of the Maryland Historical Society in 1961: our nominee-by-default for next month’s doctorate, for whom Schott even now will be at composing a treacly citation. I last remet him three months ago, at poor Harrison’s funeral, with… “his” … “son.”
Vertigo! Who is whose creature? Who whose toy? Help me, John, if you have help to give a still-dismayed
Germaine
P.S. Whilst City College, Colgate, Harvard, Illinois — yea, even Oneonta, even Queens — are torn asunder (per program?), all is uneasy calm at Marshyhope. More interest here in Derby Day than in Doomsday!
I: Lady Amherst to the Author. More trouble at Marshyhope. Her relations with the late Harrison Mack, Jr., or “George III.”
Office of the Provost
Faculty of Letters
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
10 May 1969
Mon cher (encore silencieux) B.,
I write this — sixth? eighth? — letter to you once again from my office, once again more or less besieged by the “pink-necks.” Shirley Stickles wonders why I do not dictate it to her; I wonder, not having heard from you on the then urgent queries in my last, why I continue to write, write, write, into a silence it were fond to imagine pregnant. And I know the answer, but not what to make of it.
A difficult season, this, for Shirley Stickles. She cannot understand (I cannot always either) why the students who seize and “trash” Columbia, extort ransom for stolen paintings from the University of Illinois, force the resignation of the presidents of Brown and CCNY, commit armed robberies at Cornell, and more or less threaten MSUC, are not even expelled and sent posthaste to Vietnam, far less put to the torture as she recommends. And the sudden transvaluation of Ambrose Mensch, whom she despises, in the eyes of John Schott, whom she adores, baffles and troubles her like yesterday’s unsainting by Pope Paul of Christopher, Barbara, Dorothy, et alii.
What has happened is that my lover (so he remains, more tender and solicitous than ever, though our respite from sex is of a week’s duration now) has for the second time come to the rescue, more or less and altogether cynically, of Marshyhope, and so further endeared himself thereby to our acting president as to lead that unworthy to wonder aloud to me this morning, in S.S.‘s presence, whether, “if it should happen that Mr Cook is unable to accept our invitation,” we mightn’t extend it after all to Ambrose! Schott trembles now, you see, for the success of his Commencement Day exercises, so vulnerable to disruption, when the state comptroller will be present to accept our maiden doctorate of law. Much as his instincts (and ex-secretary) warn him not to trust Ambrose, with Cook’s consent he would “sacrifice” the Litt.D. — which, like the doctorate of science, has small political utility — to insure the peace of the ceremonies and, incidentally, to bring Reg Prinz’s cameras back on campus.
They were the instrumentality of Ambrose’s triumph yesterday. The week has been unseasonably warm here, more like midsummer than like the gentle Mays of my (and your Ebenezer Cooke’s) Cambridge. The students, impatient to get out of their clothes and onto the ocean beaches, lolled and frolicked in the quad with Frisbees, guitars, transistor radios, and sun reflectors, ever more restless and boisterous as the week went on. Drew Mack’s disciples in the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (“Marshyhope Maoists” is Ambrose’s term) scolded them daily through bullhorns for not emulating their brothers and sisters to the north and west. The usual list of nonnegotiable demands was promulgated, the ritual denunciations made of the administration (all fairly just, in this case, but not different from those being lodged against the ablest college officials in the land), the de rigueur student-faculty strike proclaimed. But in such sunshine, with the sparkling Choptank so close at hand and the season’s first Ocean City weekend coming on, who wanted to be cooped up in an occupied building? Besides, it was reported that a bona fide film company was arriving in Cambridge, complete with actors, directors, and cameras, and might visit the campus en route to “location” farther down-county. If the weather held, we all agreed, we would probably be spared.
Alas, yesterday dawned cool, windy, overcast; at noon it began to drizzle, though the forecast for the Saturday remained fair. It is our ill fortune, under the circumstances, that while the majority of our students, being from the immediate area, go home on weekends, the activists cannot conveniently do so, being most of them from “Baltimore or even farther north.” In short, enough support was mustered from the bored and frustrated to threaten a second takeover of Tidewater Hall, this one determined to “succeed” where the first, a fortnight since, had failed. And again we administrators, our number augmented by Ambrose and Mr Todd Andrews, debated whether calling in the state police would intimidate or aggravate our besiegers. Most of us were confident that Drew Mack and his comrades would welcome the provocation as a chance to rally moderates to their cause, especially if the troopers could be incited to swing truncheons or make arrests. Schott and Harry Carter wondered nevertheless whether a firm, quick, “surgical strike”—the academic expulsion and physical removal from the campus of all the known organisers of the rising — was not our last hope of avoiding embarrassment in June.
The rain stopped, but the sky remained cloudy, the air chill. Ambrose then proposed that Reg Prinz and company be invited at once, as a diversion, to do certain on-campus footage more or less called for by his screenplay, which was flexible enough to include, at least tentatively, impromptu performances by the student activists themselves. The move might buy us time for the weather to clear; the medium being cinema instead of television news reportage, there would be no particular provocation in the presence of the cameras. And the rumour could be circulated that the filming would continue over the weekend at Ocean City (there is boardwalk “footage,” I understand, in your book Lost in the Funhouse, which I’ve yet to read; Prinz is apparently working it into the film).
Schott and Carter, while they had no strong objections to this stratagem, had no great confidence in it either, not having met Prinz except by the way at Harrison Mack’s funeral last February. But I had got, if scarcely to know him, at least somewhat to appreciate Prinz’s peculiar, unaggressive forcefulness and inarticulate suasion, during my stay at Tidewater Farms, where he was a special sort of visitor. And so while trusting the man would be like trusting a wordless interloper from outer space, I could second Ambrose’s proposal, from my own experience, as more likely than it might seem. Mr Andrews, who also knew the chap slightly, concurred. We were given shrug-shouldered leave to try it.