Letters (17 page)

As Jeannine and Mrs. Upper West Side were off to the Ladies, I told you what I knew of the old Chesapeake showboat myself. Moreover, without actually mentioning my own adventure thereupon in 1937 or my just-completed memoir, I observed that the vessel had been equipped with two sets of stage- and houselights: one electric for landings with available power, such as Cambridge, one acetylene for landings without. And I remarked that, given the volatility of acetylene on the one hand, and on the other that old staple of riverboat programs, the sound-effects imitation of famous steamboat races and explosions, one could imagine a leaky valve’s effecting a cataclysmic coincidence of fiction and fact, or art and reality.

You were amused. You extemporized on my conceit, bringing the portentous name of the boat and its impresario into your improvisation. We got on.

My age allows me to confess without embarrassment that I have always admired the novelist’s calling and often wished I had been born to it. My generation is perhaps the only one in middle-class America that ever took its writers seriously: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passes are my contemporaries; with the latter two, during their Baltimore residences, I was socially acquainted. Nowadays the genre is so fallen into obscure pretension on the one hand and cynical commercialism on the other, and so undermined at its popular base by television, that to hear a young person declare his or her ambition to be a capital-W Writer strikes me as anachronistical, quixotic, as who should aspire in 1969 to be a Barnum & Bailey acrobat, a dirigible pilot, or the Rembrandt of the stereopticon. Even on the last day of 1954 and the first of 1955 it struck me thus, though I saw no point in so remarking to you. But in the 1920’s and ’30’s, even into the ’40’s, there was still a heroism in your vocation such as I think there will never be again in this country; a considerable number of us had rather been Hemingway than Gary Cooper or Charles Lindbergh, for example.

It was this reflex of respect that interested me enough in you to draw you out on your ambition (at your then age and stage, neither more nor less realistic than Jeannine’s) and to pursue the coincidence of our preoccupation with the Floating Theatre. Before I left the yacht club with the Singer party, you and I were discussing the philosophical implications of suicide (I was surprised you’d not yet read Sartre or Camus, not to mention Kierkegaard and Heidegger, so fashionable on the campuses then). I went so far as to confide to you the nature of my
Letter to My Father
—you’d mentioned Kafka’s to his, which I’d not heard of—and my
Inquiry:
the one setting forth my precarious heart condition and my reasons for not apprising Father of it; the other investigating
his
suicide in 1930. I don’t remember saying good night.

The third notable thing that happened to me before morning was that my celibacy—imperfectly maintained since the end of my old romance with Jane Mack, and more a passive habit than an active policy—took its worst beating in seventeen years at the hands so to speak of Mrs. Upper West Side at the Tidewater Inn, across the Choptank in Less Primitive Talbot County, where the Singers were stopping. Their friend had, it developed, a Thing about Courtly Southern Gentlemen (Oedipus Rhett?). It was a blow to her to hear from me that Maryland had officially sided with the Union in the Civil War; that grits and hominy and live oaks and Spanish moss are not to be found in our latitude; that Room Service listed no mint juleps among their nightcaps. I consoled her with promises of terrapin chowder and a pressed wild-duck sandwich come morning, and the news that
our
part of Maryland had been staunchly Confederate, and Loyalist before that, and had enjoyed its latest Negro lynching well within her lifetime. I believe she had half hoped to find a slave whip under my vest, boll weevils in the bed; I in turn was expected to be titillated by such exotica as that she was fourteen years my junior, an aggressive fellationist and stand-up copulator, and a
Jewess
(her term, which she despised, hissed seductively through perfect teeth). I professed to be astonished that her
tuchas
bore no Cabalistic emblems, her
pipik
no hidden diamonds—only, lower down, a much tidier cesarean scar than could readily be left by our small-town surgeons. She declared herself dumbfounded that I had no tattooed flag of Dixie on my foreskin—nay, more,
no foreskin!
We laughed and humped our heads off for some days into the new year, in her hotel and mine, the Singers having long since smiled good-bye to us at the Easton airport.

Sharon’s husband-on-the-way-out, I learned, was the actor Melvin Bernstein. His real name had been Mel Miller; as an apprentice borscht-circuit comic he’d changed it to sound more Jewish; later, when he moved into “straight” acting, he regretted not having kept the low-profile original, but couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice the small and no longer quite appropriate celebrity of his stage name. To the consequent ambiguity of his scope and unambiguity of his name he attributed his failure to succeed as a leading man; but his career as a character actor was established in New York, and he was beginning to pick up similar roles in films. He was compulsively promiscuous, Sharon testified, and addicted to anal copulation, which she found uncomfortable and distasteful as well as, on the testimony of her proctologist, conducive to hemorrhoids. Hence the action for divorce, despite Mel’s engaging to offer to lubricate his vice with
shmaltz.
I was to muse upon this information six years later, when Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer, still the hopeful pre-starlet, flew out to Los Angeles via Reno to become the next Mrs. Melvin Bernstein.

Well.

About your
Floating Opera
novel, which appeared the following year, I understandably have mixed feelings. On the one hand it was decidedly a partial betrayal on your part of a partial confidence on mine, and though you altered names and doctored facts for literary effect, some people hereabouts imagined they saw through to the real thing, with consequent minor inconvenience to my law practice and my solitary life. It was not long after, for example, that I exchanged my regular room in the Dorset for a certain goose-hunting retreat out on Todd’s Point, down the river, and commissioned a local boatbuilder to convert me a skipjack to live aboard in Cambridge in the summer, when the hotel gets too warm. On the other hand, my old love of fiction, aforementioned, was gratified to see the familiar details of my life and place projected as through a camera obscura. What’s more, Harrison Mack read the novel too, found in it more to praise than to blame despite the unflattering light it cast him in, and was prompted to reopen a tentative correspondence with me, which soon led to the chaste reestablishment of our friendship and my retention as counsel for Mack Enterprises on the Eastern Shore. For this indirect and unintended favor, I’m your debtor.

The company had bought out old Colonel Morton’s farms and canneries, including the Redmans Neck property, and was replacing the tomatoes with more profitable soybeans. Harrison was just beginning to fancy himself George III of England and Jane to display the business acumen of her forebear and ideal, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. I did not know then—what I learned only last month—that Jane’s managerial activity, doubtless like Betsy’s, coincided with the termination of her menses by hysterectomy and, by her own choice, of her sexual life. Just prior to her surgery, in 1949, Jane had permitted herself the second extramarital affair of her biography, this time without Harrison’s complaisance: a brief wild fling in London and Paris with Sir Jeffrey William Pitt, Lord Amherst, now deceased, then husband of that same Lady Amherst you mention in your postscript and descendant of the Lord Jeff of French and Indian War celebrity. More anon.

Under Jane’s direction, Mack Enterprises throve and prospered. From chemical fertilizers and freeze-dried foods they branched into certain classified research in the chemical-warfare way, over the protests of myself (by then a stockholder) and son Drew, a political science undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. The Macks bought, built, and moved to Tidewater Farms; I became a trustee, then executive director of their Tidewater Foundation; Jeannine married Mel Bernstein; Drew scandalized his parents by going off to do graduate work at Brandeis, along with Angela Davis, under Herbert Marcuse. The Tidewater Foundation implemented, in addition to Tidewater Tech, dozens of lesser Mack philanthropies, some whimsical, not all with the unanimous consent of the trustees: a quack health farm in west New York and Ontario, not unlike the one described in your
End of the Road
novel (I opposed it; Jane and Harrison approved it for the sake of Jeannine, a sometime patient there); the Jerome Bonaparte Bray Computer Center at Lily Dale, N.Y. (he’s the crank you ask about in your letter, whom also I opposed; but both Macks were impressed by the Bonaparte connection, and Drew, to their surprise, also approved the project, for reasons not entirely clear); the Annual Greater Choptank July 4th Fireworks Display (this was a prickly one, as it offended both Harrison in his George III aspect and Drew in his radical antichauvinism. We pacified the father with a private Guy Fawkes Day display out on Redmans Neck; Drew’s demand for an equal-candlepower May Day celebration was then outvoted). Among our current unanimous beneficiaries are the upcoming Dorchester Tercentenary and a floating summer repertory theater on the Cambridge-Oxford-Annapolis circuit: a larger replica of Captain Adams’s showboat, it bears the paradoxical name
Original Floating Theatre II.
Never mind that Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, (as of 1963, when she left old Mel for Louis Golden, a producer of B—and blue—movies) exploited this charity to play roles she never could have won on her own: the productions, alternating with old flicks, are by far the best in the area, and this venture led the foundation into other cultural philanthropies: a media department at Tidewater Tech (now Marshyhope College), for example, and the subsidizing of young artists dealing with the local scene.
E.g.,
as perhaps you know, “Bea Golden’s” latest lover (Louis having gone the way of his predecessors in 1968), the formidable Reggie Prinz, whose film-in-the-works of your new book is partially backed by foundation money.

I’m ahead of myself. Lord and Lady Amherst stopped at Tidewater Farms in 1961 and were, excuse me, royally entertained by the Macks, whether because Harrison and Lady A. knew nothing of Jane’s old affair (Jane herself, I am bemused to learn, has a positive genius for repressing unwelcome memories), or because Harrison’s royal delusion by then insulated him from jealousy (George III never wondered about Queen Charlotte). More likely, bygones were simply bygones. It was during this visit that Harrison first associated Germaine Pitt Amherst with the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Elizabeth Spencer: a new and fateful stage of his madness, partly responsible for her later invitation to MSUC. I first met her then, too, and liked her better than I liked her husband.

Meanwhile, up in Waltham, Mass., Andrews Mack has become fashionably but by no means insincerely radicalized. Having disappointed his parents in the first place by choosing Hopkins and Brandeis as his soul mothers rather than Princeton and Harvard, he now quite exasperates them by dropping his doctoral studies in ’63 to assist in the Cambridge (Maryland) civil rights demonstrations—quite as his father had picketed his
own
father’s pickle factories back in the thirties. When the July 4th fireworks were canceled that year on account of the race riots, Harrison followed the family tradition of disowning his son, though not by formal legal action. Drew responded by promptly marrying one of his ex-classmates, a black girl from Cambridge.

I do not suggest that he married her solely as a gesture of protest: Yvonne Miner Mack is a striking young woman, Brandeis-bright, less radical than her husband but well to the left of Bobby Kennedy, for example, in whose office in the Justice Department the Cambridge riots were temporarily adjudicated; Drew loved her and had been living with her for some time. But unlike his friend and apparent mentor “H. C. Burlingame VII” (don’t ask), young Mack is simplistic by policy as well as ingenuous and sincere by nature, and lives largely in ardent symbols. Moreover, he’d been opposed to marriage thitherto on the usual radicalist grounds. They have two sons now: bright, handsome little chaps whom Drew instructs in their African heritage and Yvonne takes to hear Leonard Bernstein’s children’s concerts. Sinistral but nowise sinister, long-haired and ascetic, Drew Mack looks to me less a hippie than a Massachusetts Minuteman in his denims, boots, and homespun shirts, his hair tied neatly back with a rubber band. I would bet my life on his integrity; not a nickel on his subtlety or diplomacy—and I think the Established Order has more to fear from him than from all the H. C. Burlingames and A. B. Cooks together, for he lives his beliefs down to the finest print he can understand.

In 1966 he made an impassioned but cogent appeal to the Tidewater Foundation to underwrite the Black Power movement on the Eastern Shore, for Our Own Ultimate Good. Jane and Harrison were indignant, the other conservative trustees scornful, the “liberals” opposed on principle to committing the foundation politically. All were concerned for the delicate negotiations, then in progress, for annexing Tidewater Tech to the state university system. The vote, but for Drew’s own, was unanimously negative, the executive director abstaining. Drew thereupon abandoned his efforts to Work Within the System and urged his most militant colleagues to burn Whitey down. The following summer, as you will recall, a modest attempt was mounted to do just that, and Yours Truly (who this time did
not
abstain) came near to being blown up for the second time in his life. One day I shall tell you the story.

Better, I’ll tell you it now, and so wind up this calliope music. I belong to that nearly extinct species, famously discredited by history, contemned alike by the Harrison Macks from the right and by the Drew Macks from the left: I mean the Stock Liberal, whom I persist in believing to be the best stock in the store. He is the breed most easily baited for half-measures and most easily caught in self-contradiction, for he affirms the complexity of most social-economic problems and the ambivalence of his own approaches to their solution. If he is in addition (as I have been since 1937) inclined to the Tragic View of history and human institutions, he is even easier to scoff at, for he has no final faith that all the problems he addresses admit of political solutions—in some cases, of any solution whatever—any more than the problems of evil and death; yet he sets about them as if they did. He sees the attendant virtues of every vice, and vice versa. He is impressed by the fallibility of people and programs: it surprises him when anything works, merely disappoints him when it fails. He is in short a perfect skeptic in his opinions, an incorrigible optimist in his actions, for he believes that many injustices which can’t be remedied may yet be mitigated, and that many things famously fragile—Reason, Tolerance, Law, Democracy, Humanism—are nonetheless precious and infinitely preferable to their contraries. He is ever for Reform as against revolution or reaction: in his eyes, the Harrison Macks and A. B. Cooks live in the past, the Drew Macks and H. C. Burlingames perhaps in the future, his kind alone in the present. Yet, as a connoisseur of paradoxes, he understands to the bone that one of St. Augustine’s concerning time: that while the Present does not exist (it being the merely conceptual razor’s edge between the Past and the Future), at the same time it’s all there is: the Everlasting Now between a Past existing only in memory and a Future existing only in anticipation.