Letters

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!