Letters

No more games! You know, then, of an original “Monsieur Casteene,” Henry Burlingame, and Ebenezer Cooke: what I must know is their connexion, if any, with “my” André, and with those nebulous name-changers at Castines Hundred in Ontario, and with that alarming Annapolitan to whom we’re surrendering our doctorate of letters. Not to mention… my son! I have chosen to trust you as an author; I do not know you as a man. But I know (so far as I know) that I am real, and I beseech you not to play tired Modernist tricks with real (and equally tired) people. If you know where André Castine is, or anything about him, for God’s sake tell me! If A. B. Cook and his “son” Henry Burlingame VII are pseudonymous mimics of your (or History’s) originals, tell me! I believe “our” Cook to be dangerous, as you know. Am I mistaken? What do you know?

I feel a fool, sir, and I dislike that not unfamiliar feeling. It isn’t menstruation makes me cross, but being crossed and double-crossed.

Damn all of you!

By which pronoun I mean, momentarily I presume, you men. Not included in last Saturday’s roster of my former beaux was the one woman I’ve ever loved, my “Juliette Récamier”—a French New Novelist in Toronto whose meticulous unsentimentality I found refreshing after Hesse and my British lovers — and before it was revealed to be no more than increasingly perverse and sterile rigour. Yet I recall warmly our hours together and rather imagine that, had she not long since abjured the rendering of characters in fiction, she alone of my writer-friends might have got me both sympathetically and truly upon the page, with honour to both life and literature, love and art. Lesbian connexions have not appealed to me before or since: I mention my “Juliette” for the sake of completeness, and at the risk of your misconstruing her (as Ambrose does) into allegory. It is men I love, for better or worse, when I love; and of all men André, when he sees to it that our paths cross.

I think I pity the man or woman whose experience does not include one such as he: one to whom it is our fate and hard pleasure to surrender quite. We are not the same in our several relationships; different intimacies bring out different colours in us. With Jeffrey (and Hermann, and Aldous, and Evelyn, and the rest, even “Juliette”) I was ever my own woman; am decidedly so even with Ambrose, except that the lust we roused in each other last month truly lorded it over both of us. To André alone I surrendered myself, without scruple or consideration, almost to my own surprise, and “for keeps.” Nothing emblematic, romantic, or sex-determined about it; I have known men similarly helpless, to their dismay, in some particular connexion. It is an accident of two chemistries and histories; while my rational-liberal-antisentimental temperament deplores the idea as romantic nonsense, there’s no dismissing the fact, and any psychological explanation of it would be of merely academic interest.

Toronto: I spent the summer and fall of 1966 there, lecturing at the university, consoling myself with “Juliette” (their novelist in residence) for the loss of my husband, and waiting in vain, with the obvious mixture of emotions, for some word from André, who I assumed had arranged my lectureship. November arrived, unbelievably, without a sign from him. On the 5th, a Saturday, unable to deal with the suspense, I drove out to Stratford with my friend to see a postseason Macbeth at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre. Between Acts III and IV as I stepped into the lobby for intermission, I was handed a sealed envelope with my name on it by one of the ushers. I was obliged to sit before I could open it. The note inside, in a handwriting I knew, read: “My darling: Dinner 8 P.M., Wolpert Hotel, Kitchener.”

No signature. That little town, as you may know, is along the dreary way from Stratford to Toronto. I have no memory of the rest of the play, or of the ride back. My friend (who like Juliette Récamier had the gift of inferring much from little, and accurately, in matters of the heart) kindly drove me to that surprising, very European old hotel in the middle of nowhere, tisking her tongue at my submissiveness but declaring herself enchanted all the same by the melodrama. She waited in the lobby whilst I went up the stairs, literally trembling, to (what I’ve learned since to be) the improbably elegant German dining room on the second floor. The hostess greeted me by name. I saw him enter, smiling, from across the room, unmistakably my André: handsomer at fifty than he’d been as a young man! My heart was gone; likewise my voice, and with it my hundred questions, my demands for explanation.