Letters

Thus lost, what I found instead was a muse to reorient me with my projects — a role you were serenely unaware of playing. That you had personally known, even been on more or less intimate terms with, several old masters of modernist fiction as well as their traditionalist counterparts, made you for me Literature Incarnate, or The Story Thus Far, whose next turning I’d aspired to have a hand in. That you were… a few years my senior (who have been 40 since I was 20, and shall continue to be till 60) aroused me the more: for so is Literature! Your casualest remarks I read as portents and fetched to the Lighthouse to examine for their augury. “Did you know,” you asked me once over post-committee coffee in the Faculty Club, “that James Joyce was terribly interested in the cinema, and had a hand in opening the first movie-house in Dublin? But of course, as his eyesight failed…” And you added, “Curious that Jorge Borges, our other great sightless modernist, has always been attracted to the cinema too; I believe he’s even done filmscripts, hasn’t he?” Yet you had no idea that I was at that moment wrestling with the old rivalry between page and screen, making notes for an unfilmable filmscript, and being tempted by Reg Prinz’s invitation to do a screenplay of a certain old friend’s new book! What’s more, one of the principals of that book itself (at least in my screenplay notes) is a woman much resembling yourself, who has a tempestuous affair with a brash American some calendar years her junior and some light-years her social inferior! If our connection was not plotted in heaven, dear Germaine, it’s because our Author lives elsewhere. May you too find it be-ne-fi-ci-al!

3. As I hope you found my attempt at con-so-la-ti-on last month at Harrison Mack’s funeral, when, it seemed to me, our relationship escalated to a third stage. For one thing, I touched you — even embraced you for the first time, under pretext of consoling a bereft colleague. You were startled! But for all you knew, such unwonted familiarity might be customary among Americans: another manifestation of our aggressive informality, like my suddenly addressing you as “Germaine” instead of “Lady Amherst” or (à la Schott) “Mrs. Pitt.” Yet it’s an English proverb, not an American, that the time to pay court to a widow is en route home from the funeral. If you were not quite rewidowed by Mack’s death (not having been quite his wife), I wasn’t quite paying court yet, either, when I seized the opportunity of your uncertain new standing at Tidewater Farms to console you diplomatically out to dinner and back to your pre-Mack lodgings.

There — by confiding to your new friend-in-need that you had no convenient way to remove from the Mack residence a number of gifts from His Late Majesty which ought not to be inventoried with his estate, and by permitting me to oblige you by fetching them at once in my car, and by confiding further thereupon (at my request and discreetly) some details of the George III/Lady Pembroke masquerade you’d carried off so admirably to old Mack’s benefit — you gave me grounds to confide to you my own more-or-less bereft and therefore eligible status as a divorcé with custody of a handicapped daughter.

For which afflictions of fortune you duly consoled me in your turn. Whence we moved to consoling each other, with your good Dry Sack, for the limitations of life in the academic and geographical backwaters of my Maryland; and you complimented my speech with having but a very inconspicuous American accent, and no Eastern Shore brogue at all; and I complimented you on your graceful acceptance of your fallen lot — but was by this time lost in admiration of your yet-youthful great gray eyes, your less gray hair, your excellent skin (especially for a Briton, Ma’am) and dentition, your sturdy breasts and waist and hips — which, together with your okay legs, put me strickenly in mind of Never Mind Whom, fifth love of my life, that Dido aforementioned (but her thighs tended to Italian amplitude, yours to a Kentish, downs-trekking, partridge-potting muscularity).

Consoled and consoling to my cups by midnight, having exploited your reluctance to be rude, but acceding at last to your reminder that Monday was a workday for the living, I went home to my Lighthouse imagining how it would be to divest an acting provost and genuine English gentlewoman of her tweeds. Would her underthings give off heather, saddle leather? Her voice — of all her admirables the admirablest, the very pitch and timbre of La Belle Lettre sans Merci—what does it say, how sound, in carnal transport? Et cetera — my interest mounting, so to speak, in the month between then and now. I contemplate as always my camera obscura (of which, as of the Lighthouse and Mensch’s Castle, more anon); but instead of the river, the town, the vanished seawall which begins our family saga, I see you.