Letters

She did: he had invited her to a visiting lectureship there, which invitation she had declined.

“He has invited her de nouveau,” André proudly informed me. “And this time she must accept.”

Must she now. And why should she exchange the civilisation of Toronto’s Yorkville Village and Bay-Bloor district for what had impressed her as the, let us say, isolated amenities of Tidewater Farms and vicinity? Eh bien, for the excellent reason that while we had lost one child, we had, if not regained, at least relocated another. Henri was alive and well! And doing the Devil’s work with his “father” in Washington, D.C., so effectually that if he were not checked there would very possibly be no Second Revolution at all in our lifetimes; whereas, were he working as effectively for “us,” things might just possibly come to pass by “our” target date, 1976. Perhaps I remembered André’s own dear father’s spanning with thumb and forefinger the easy distance from D.C. across the Chesapeake to the marshes of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, whence he had hoped to infiltrate and undermine the bastions of capitalist imperialism (or their infiltrators and underminers, depending on whether one credited the declared intention or the consequences of his actions)?

Tearfully — though just then D.C. suggested to me neither District of Columbia nor direct current, but dilation and curettage — I did remember those nights of love and happy polemic at Castines Hundred in 1940, while Europe burned.

Then I was to understand that a certain secret base in these same marshes, not very far from Marshyhope State University College, was the eastern U.S. headquarters for the Movement: Maryland and Virginia were peppered with their secret bases; that’s why ours was safest there. From the vantage point of a visiting professorship at Marshyhope, I could observe and reacquaint myself with Henri, at first anonymously as it were, and then, if all went well…

His plan will keep till next Saturday’s letter: it was as baroque as the plot of your Sot-Weed novel promises to be (at the time I said “circuitous as Proust,” and André kissed my forehead and replied, “Voilà ma Recherche, précisément”), which for all I know may be itself a love letter from him. God knows it bristles with his “signals”! Did you write it? I grow dizzy; grew dizzy then, no longer just from Sodium Pentothal.

But when the time came I went, with a sigh and no false hopes, as I would have gone to the University of Hell for my novelist of history, had his plot and precious voice demanded. Adieu, chère “Juliette”: you I traded — when André bid me au revoir for the last time to date, a few days and much further instruction later — for unfortunate Mr. Morgan, mad King Harrison, contemptible John Schott… and Ambrose Mensch.

Who has filled me full, if not fulfilled me, as I’ve filled these pages Like she-crab or queen bee after mating season, I luxuriate, squishy and replete, in this sexless interval. May it last a few days more!

What have I forgotten? That I remembered, too late, who it was I’d met on the day Joe Morgan mentioned Turgot and the physiocrats in the library of the Maryland Historical Society in 1961: our nominee-by-default for next month’s doctorate, for whom Schott even now will be at composing a treacly citation. I last remet him three months ago, at poor Harrison’s funeral, with… “his” … “son.”

Vertigo! Who is whose creature? Who whose toy? Help me, John, if you have help to give a still-dismayed

Germaine

P.S. Whilst City College, Colgate, Harvard, Illinois — yea, even Oneonta, even Queens — are torn asunder (per program?), all is uneasy calm at Marshyhope. More interest here in Derby Day than in Doomsday!

I: Lady Amherst to the Author. More trouble at Marshyhope. Her relations with the late Harrison Mack, Jr., or “George III.”

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

10 May 1969

Mon cher (encore silencieux) B.,

I write this — sixth? eighth? — letter to you once again from my office, once again more or less besieged by the “pink-necks.” Shirley Stickles wonders why I do not dictate it to her; I wonder, not having heard from you on the then urgent queries in my last, why I continue to write, write, write, into a silence it were fond to imagine pregnant. And I know the answer, but not what to make of it.