Letters

That same year (we mean 1966/67) we suffered 1 grave setback and reaped 2 unexpected windfalls. The setback was publication on August 5 of the spurious G.G.B., our manuscript edition of R.N.S. having been pirated from Wetlands Press by a carefully placed anti-Bonapartist eager to ingratiate himself with the New York trade publishers. We had counted on royalties from that work to set us free of the goats and Gadf_y… But no matter: He or she shall pay for her/his piracy, as shall in time the 1 who took our initials with our text and published the Syllabus not even as a ciphered message in the guise of fiction, much less as plain and passed truth, but as mere entertainment!

Had the blow fallen a year or 2 earlier, during our vulnerable period, we might have succumbed. But we were supported in our adversity by the foundation grant, by the ready progress of the Concordance program, and by the 2 windfalls aforementioned. The 1st (too personal to detail in this letter) was our meeting of and subsequent association with Ms. Merope Bernstein, a brilliant student of political economy, entomology, and computer science at Brandeis U., who, dissatisfied as we with the academic establishment, had dropped out in her final semester to do fieldwork in militant ecology. We met at an anti-DDT pray-in-and-spray-out on the grounds of the old Chautauqua Institution on the evening of August 15, 1966, our 31st birthday and the most beautiful evening of our life. We can say no more.