Letters

So. The only unattached lady among so many charming, unattached gentlemen, and too unfortunately distracted to enjoy their gallantries. Or properly to acquaint myself with the youngest member of our company, the most detached certainly, if not unattached, who hovered in the margins of the evening as of this letter. “And I believe you’ve not met Mr Prinz,” Jane said at the end of our cocktail introductions, as I attempted dazedly to measure A. B. Cook against André’s depiction. In the following year, last year, when I found myself de facto mistress of Tidewater Farms, playing “Esther” to Harrison’s “Ahasuerus” (his conceit, after one of George III’s) whilst “Queen Vashti” refreshed herself at the real Bath and Cheltenham, I had occasion to re-view Reg Prinz — else I’d be unable to describe him now, so distraught was I and evanescent he that November evening. The “son [Harrison] should have had” is at the end of his twenties, lean, slight, light-skinned, freckled, pale-eyed, sharp-faced. He wears round wire-rimmed spectacles like Bertolt Brecht’s and a bush of red hair teased out as if in ongoing electrocution. His chin and lips are hairless. No hippie he, his clothes are rumpled but clean, plain, even severe: in Ambrose’s phrase, he dresses like a minor member of the North Korean U.N. delegation, or a long-term convict just released with the warden’s good wishes and a new suit of street clothes. He neither smokes nor drinks nor, so far as I could hear, speaks. It is said that he comes from a wealthy Long Island Jewish family and was educated at Groton and Yale. It is said that he “trips” regularly on lysergic acid diethylamide and other pharmaceuticals, but deplores the ascription to them of mystic insight or creative vision in their users. It is said that he is a brilliant actor and director; that he has absorbed and put behind him all the ideology of contemporary filmmaking, along with radical politics (he thinks Drew Mack naive, we’re told, but is “interested” in Harrison and A. B. Cook as “emblems,” and “admires” Henry Burlingame VII) and literature, which he is reputed to have called “a mildly interesting historical phenomenon of no present importance.” One hears that he is scornful of esoteric, high-art cinema as unfaithful to the medium’s popular roots, which however bore him. Political revolutions, he is said to have said, are passé, “like marriage, divorce, families, professions, novels, cash, existential Angst.”

Do not ask me where, when, or to whom the young man has delivered himself of these opinions, most of which I have at at least second hand from Ambrose. I have indeed, on occasion since, heard him speak, in a voice almost inaudible and invariably in ellipses, shrugs, nods, fragments, hums, non sequiturs, dashes, and suspension points. Ambrose declares that his immediate presence (I must add “except at formal Guy Fawkes Day dinner parties”) is uncommonly compelling; that in it most “issues” and “positions” seem idly theoretical, or simply don’t come up however much one had meant to raise them; that the most outrageous situations are acquiesced in and seem justified by “the wordless force of his personality.” I deny none of the above — though I suspect my lover of some projection! — and I do indeed find Prinz a quietly disquieting, inarticulately insistent fellow: a sort of saxifrage in the cracks of the contemporary, or (to borrow one of Ambrose’s tidewater tropes) a starfish on the oyster bed of art. But one wonders—this one, anyroad — whether that vague antiverbality proceeds from (I had almost said bespeaks) a mindless will or a mere vacuum; whether the man be not, after all, all surface: a clouded transparency, a… film.