Letters

“Your Uncle Karl and I have talked it over,” he said to me. My heart drained. He lit a Lucky Strike, managing the book match with one hand. “One part lime to three sand from now on, is what we think. Pete won’t mind. No Portland except for pointing. It’s all damned nonsense. D’you follow me?”

N, O, et cetera

“No, I don’t!” I should have cried, Yours Truly; and “No, I shan’t!” dear Germaine. But oh, I did, I followed them, follow them yet, shall follow them finally and readily into our ultimate plot in the Dorset boneyard, where Uncle Wilhelm’s unmarked stone still marks his grave. M ends this fragment and my first “love affair,” which, with that water message, began my vocation and my trials as an nomme de lettres: still laboring to fill in the blanks, still searching for an exit from that funhouse, a way to get the story told and rejoin my family for the long ride home.

“Nonsense,” says Arthur Morton King, my drier half: “It’s all damned nonsense.” He abandoned “personal” literature long since, as tacky, smarmy. He could not care less that, come fall, the Narrator went off to college (along with the unnamed other laborer on Mensch’s Castle that summer, his friend and fellow writer-to-be); that Peter came home, married Magda, entered the firm as Karl’s partner, and took over completion of his ill-founded house. I tell and tell, Germaine; yet everything is yet to tell: how Ambrose got from ’47 to ’69; from the sandy basement of the Castle to its “Lighthouse” camera obscura; from his realization that that water message must be replied to, through his maverick noncareer as A. M. King, to his present commitment (first draft now two-sevenths complete and sent to Reggie Prinz in New York) to make a screenplay from his fellow laborer’s labors. Along that way, for romantical interest, four other affairs: two with Magda, one with the would-be star of Prinz’s current project, one with wife Marsha, mother of his backward angel.

“All damned nonsense,” King declares. “Take a (blank) page from Uncle Wilhelm’s book: already in his day art was past such tack and smarm.”

But this Ambrose has the family syndrome: will somehow nudge and bully it through, and make love to Milady A., and do that filmscript however often Prinz rejects it. And compose a seamless story about life’s second revolution; and help Peter salvage firm and family. And—here A. M. King and I are one—“rescue” Fiction from its St. Helena by transforming it altogether, into something full and luminous as the inside of Rosa’s egg.

~ ~ ~

S: The Author to Todd Andrews. Soliciting the latter’s cooperation as a character in a new work of fiction.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

March 30, 1969