Letters (68 page)

I’d be pleased to hear from you; could easily drive over to Fort Erie from Buffalo for a chat, if you’d prefer.

7 June 1969

John, John,

Provost indeed! What am I doing here, in this getup, in this office, in this country? And what are the pack of you doing to me?

Driving me bonkers, is what—you and Ambrose and André, André—straight out of my carton, as the children say. And I, well, it seems I’m doing what my “lover” claims to’ve devoted a period of
his
queer career to: answering rhetorical questions; saying clearly and completely what doubtless goes without saying.

E.g.,
that my apprehensions
re
the “4th Stage” of our affair prove in the event to have been more than justified. Every third evening, sir, regardless of my needs and wants—indeed, regardless of
Ambrose’s
needs and wants too, in the way of simple pleasure—I am courteously but firmly fucked, no other way to put it, in the manner set forth two letters past, to the sole and Catholic end of begetting a child. ’Appen I enjoy it (as, despite all and
faute de mieux,
I sometimes do), bully for me; ’appen I don’t, it up wi’ me knees and nightie anyroad, and to’t till I’m proper ploughed and seeded. In this business, and currently this only, the man is
husbandly,
John, as aforedescribed: husbanding his erections, husbanding my orgasms, his ejaculate. His eye like an old-time crofter’s is upon the calendar: come mid-lunation we are to increase our frequency to two infusions daily in hopes of nailing June’s wee ovum, May’s having given us the slip.

As I too must hope “we” do—yet how hope a hope so hopeless? Why, because, if this old provostial organ do not conceive, I truly fear the consequence! Silent sir (you who mock me not only by your absence from this “correspondence” but by your duly reported presence, even as I write these words, just across the Bay in College Park, to accept the honour you would not have from us. O vanity!): what I feared in mine of Saturday last is come to pass: our friend Ambrose has turned tyrant! Witness: I write this on office stationery because—for all it’s a muggy Maryland late-spring Saturday, the students long since flown for the summer, the campus abandoned till our anticlimactic commencement exercises a fortnight hence—I am in my office, winding up my desk work and putting correspondence on the machine for Shirley Stickles. And I am here not at all because the week’s work has spilled into the weekend.
Au contraire:
since our (early) final examinations put a term,
hic et ubique,
to the most violent term in U.S. academic history—one which I wot will mark a turn for ill and ever in the fortunes of many a college in this strange country—there’s been little to do, acting-provostwise. No: I am here now because I’m ashamed to show myself to Stickles, Schott, & Co., and so must do my windup work by weekend and weeknight, always excepting those reserved for conjugation.

And why ashamed? Oh well, because Distinguished Visiting Professor Pitt, Lady Amherst, acting provost, semicentenarian, erstwhile scholar, erstwhile gentlewoman, erstwhile respecter of herself, goes about these days sans makeup, bra, and panty girdle, her hair unpinned and straight and parted in the middle, her trusty horn-rims swapped for irritating contact lenses and square wire-framed “grannies.” The former she tearily inserts on the days her lord and master decks her out in miniskirt or bikini (dear lecherous Jeffrey, how you would laugh now at the legs you once called perfect, the arse and jugs you salivated after across Europe!); the latter complement her hippie
basse couture:
ankle-length unbelted calicos, bell-bottomed denims and fringed leathers—the whole brummagem inventory of head-shop fetishes, countercultural gewgaws, radical fripperies… Lord luv a duck! In which I am led forth, yea even as I feared, to “do” (and be done in by) “bags” of “grass” (I do not even like
tobacco,
excepting the smell of certain English mixtures in the briars of the couth) and I-forget-whats of lysergic acid diethylamide; to throw my limbs about like a certifiable lunatic in response to the “mind-blowing” megawattage of beastlike androgynes with surreal and grammatically singular denominations: the Who, the Airplane, the Floyd, the Lord have mercy on my soul. This in the hired “pads” and horny company of the film folk, generally—young and “with it” and “together,” beautiful of body and empty of head though not unskilled, the technicians especially—among whom I feel (as surely I’m meant to) a walking travesty, female counterpart of that rouged and revolting old fop in Mann’s
Death in Venice.

The drugs do not finally much alarm me: André and I “did” hashish, cocaine, and opium in Paris a hundred years ago, along with our absinthe and
Caprice des Dieux.
Nor does the “kinky” “scene”:
la vie bohémienne
was not invented by the Flower Children, and cannot startle in a single of its aspects—the dope, the dirt, the diet, the promiscuity, the neobarbarist posturings, the radical/anarchist politics, freaky costumes, and woozy occultism—anyone acquainted with Europe’s
demimonde
from Dandyism through Dadaism. What alarms me is
me:
my acquiescence in this contemptible tyrannising; my playing, at such cost to my self-image, peace of mind, and professional activity, my lover’s stupid game.

Why do I permit myself to make myself ridiculous, boogalooing with Reg Prinz, Bea Golden (no child either, flower or otherwise; but she’s got the body for it, alas, as I have not, and the looseness of limb and morals; and Ambrose, damn him, is attracted), and the “Baratarians,” as the extras call themselves? The easy, obvious, armchair answer irritates me, no doubt because it is the main truth: my guilt for having given up my own child nearly thirty years ago (but Lord, Lord!) leaves me peculiarly victimisable at the hands etc. of a man whose regnant passion is to fertilise me. The more as I am
d’un certain âge,
widowed, expatriate (but from what fatherland, after all?), and—in Dostoyevsky’s lovely term—“morally prostrate” from the long tantalisings of André Castine and/or his
Doppelgängers.
True, true, true. But the main truth is not the whole truth. Even before this rage for paternity got hold of him, I had begun to love odd Ambrose; my dozen-or-so letters to you since March must surely bear witness to this weary heart’s movement from colleaguely cordiality to appall at his first crude overtures, thence through amusement, affection, attraction, and reckless lust, to, Lord help me, love.

I love him! (It excites me to write it.) The child thing scares me: both that he demands conception and that what he demands could, just possibly, occur.
Preggers,
for God’s sake! These other new demands scare me: it is not in a spirit of erotic sport that Ambrose rigs me out like a high school “groupie,” but in frustration at what in an earlier “stage” he prized: that I am Older. Indeed, I believe that were I as young as the would-be “starlets” among the Baratarians—whose narcotised, strobe-lighted, easily proffered favours
mio maestro
does not always, I think, refuse—he would not so particularly itch to make me big; it is
I
he wants to impregnate, precisely despite my age. But none of these scares me so much as the possibility of his ceasing to love me (he does, John; I know it). For a little while, I trust, he must work out in this bizarre and degrading wise his rage at unalterable circumstance. I love him! And so I “frug,” I flail my arms, I wiggle my bum—and close my eyes, open my legs, cross my fingers.

Like, um, wow?

Cependant,
he has conceived a longish fiction, novella-size at least, upon the theme of ritual reenactment, drafting notes and diagrams and trial passages between his bouts with me and Prinz. I had almost forgot that he is, after all, an author. He had allowed to me as how the materials were to be classical—the myth of Perseus, Andromeda, and Medusa, to be specific—and we came so near to having a proper literary conversation on the subject that for a moment I had imagined myself twenty again in fact with old Hesse, old Huxley, old Whomever, gratifying their elder flesh whilst they gratified my young mind. I actually lubricated at the prospect of exploring with my lover his lovely reading of the myth, in particular the Medusa episode, which he sees not in the Freudian way as an image of impotence and vulval terror, but (the polished shield of Athene, the reflections and re-reflections) as a drama of the perils of self-consciousness. Ambrose’s Perseus, middle-aged and ill married, his mythic exploits and heroic innocence behind him, once again “calls his enemy to his aid” (Ovid’s happy phrase, for Perseus’s use of the Gorgon’s head to petrify his adversaries), attempts to reenact his youthful triumphs, comes a cropper, but with the help of a restored and resurrected Medusa—whose true gaze, seen clearly, may confer immortality instead of death—transcends his vain objective and becomes, with her, a constellation in the sky, endlessly reenacting their romance.

A pretty conceit!
Go, man, go,
I wanted to cry, sincerely for a change. But no sooner do I voice my delight—my
ardent
delight that “Arthur Morton King” intends to speak once again to the passions instead of playing his avant-garde games—than Ambrose chills over as if Medusa’d, and makes clear to me that his main interest in the story is formal: the working out, in narrative, of logarithmic spirals, “golden ratios,” Fibonacci series. Never mind the pathos of the failing marriage and fading hero; the touching idea that Medusa
loves
Perseus, even after he decapitates her; the tender physics by which paralyzing self-consciousness becomes enabling self-awareness, petrifaction estellation: out came the diagrams, on graph paper, of whirling triangles, chambered nautili, eclipsing binaries, spiral galaxies! And I am stripped and stood, not for ritual insemination (it had been but two days since the last), much less the simple making of love, but for his measuring whether, as he had read was the average case with Caucasian women, the distance from my feet to my navel was .618+ of my overall height—
i.e., Phi,
the golden ratio!

I was
low-phi,
lower-spirited. If I speak lightly, it is for the same reason that I speak at all: to drown out your thundering silence, to delay my going mad. In the same spirit I have begun your
Goat-Boy
novel and the preparation for the press of Andrew Cook IV’s four-letter family history. They have this connexion: the fictional prefatory letters to your novel pretend to dispute the factuality of the text; but my factual preface to and commentary upon Cook’s letters to his unborn child must address and if possible resolve the question of their authenticity. I am full of doubts—on account not only of their dubious source and questionable motive, but of such textual details as the inconsistently idiosyncratic spelling, some apparent anachronisms
(e.g. counterinsurgent,
which my
Oxford English Dictionary
does not even list, though it attests
counter-revolutionist
back to 1793 and
insurgent
back to 1765), and a vague modernity in their preoccupation. Yet it seems not
impossible
that they are genuine—the stationery and calligraphy strike me as authentic, though of course I’ll check them out—or at worst corrupted copies, on old paper, of authentic originals, perhaps altered to some ulterior purpose, like the notorious Henry Letters they allude to. As a historian of sorts, I must of course make a proper inquiry. As a quondam intimate of André Castine, I know how futile such an inquiry may prove against an artful doctorer of letters. As a too tormented human being, I am tempted to rush them into print, in some uncritical journal of local history, to the end of precipitating what they’re supposed to precipitate, and hang the consequences!

But I have not
quite
lost my professional grip: had not, anyroad, as of Thursday last, the day before yesterday, when I bethought me to drive across the Bay “to Annapolis, maybe even Washington,” beard A. B. Cook VI in his den, have done with mysteries, confront him with (copies of) the letters, and pin him down once for all on his relation to “Henri Burlingame VII.” The film company have finished the first round of location shooting in Cambridge and “Barataria” on Bloodsworth Island, and are dispersed, to regroup next week on the Niagara Frontier for the second round (Where do the Falls figure in your fiction? I had thought it all set in Maryland or in Nowhere); Ambrose was busy with slide rule and mechanical-drawing instruments—strange tools for a man of letters! So I slipped out of 24 L with a briefcaseful of proper attire, endured the smirks of attendants at the first service station on Rte 50 (who surely took me for a superannuated whore) in order to fetch the key to the Ladies and change from mini to midlength, do up my hair, harness in the old tits and turn—what relief!—and, for the first time since the weekend, look my proper self (the chap checked my credit card as if for fraud). Then over the bridge to Chautaugua, Md, on the south shore of the Magothy, and up a certain shrubberied drive to a letterbox marked COOK.