Letters

Most people in this world seem to live “in character”; they have a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous with one another and true to the rules of their type.

And

It is our intention to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht, or Ludi Magister Josephus III, as he is called in the archives of the Glass Bead Game.

And

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE…

And

When I reached C company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.

And even

An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.

And, yes

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

And finally the opening words of “Arthur Morton King’s” own fiction-in-progress: a retelling of the story of Perseus, of Medusa, of

O!

D: Lady Amherst to the Author. Trouble at Marshyhope. Her early relations with several celebrated novelists. Her affair with André Castine, and its issue. Her marriage to Lord Jeffrey Amherst. Her widowing and reduction to academic life.

24 L Street

Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612

Saturday morning, 26 April 1969

My dear B.,

Directly upon my supplying you, in my last, with that gloss upon my address, I receive your letter of 20 April with its postscriptal request for just that information! One is given pause. But the same applies to my “confession” generally, I’m sure: more than you bargained for, and before you’d really got down to bargaining.

No matter — though these crossings in the post are decidedly eerie and a touch confusing. I have still past history to relate; and my present connexion with Ambrose M. (relationship were too portentous a word) remains curious enough to prompt me, if not to account for it, at least to record it, if only to remove me a tongue-tisking distance from my own behaviour. Saturday mornings (when I am alone or he is asleep) are convenient for me to write to you, over the breakfast coffee and “English”(!) muffins; and perhaps it will be as well — and fit — if, like fictions, these confessional installments go unreplied to: scribbled in silence, into silence sent, silently received.

My morning newspaper duly notes — what I’ve been in the thick of all week! — that college campuses your country over are at best in disarray, at worst in armed rebellion. Even the innocents here at Marshyhope (“pinknecks,” Ambrose calls them), inspired by their incendiary counterparts at Berkeley, Buffalo, Cornell, and Harvard, managed yesterday a brief takeover and “trashing” of John Schott’s office, and a “sit-in” in Shirley Stickles’s and mine. Schott and Shirley (and Harry Carter, shaking with fear for all his earlier dismissal of student activists as “Spock’s Big Babies”) were for fetching the army in straight off, no doubt to impress the conservative kingmakers in “Annapolis, maybe even Washington.” I too was chiefly irritated; would have been furious had they mussed my office. For while I deplore (for its futility more than for its imperialism) your government’s misguided war in Vietnam, and can by some effort of imagination follow the emotional logic that leads therefrom to, say, student occupation of administrative offices at Columbia University, I can by no manner of means take our students seriously, who so far from having read their Marcuse, Mao, and Marx, do not even read the morning news, and rail against the university without knowing (any more than Schott or Carter or Shirley S.) what a real university is.

Which, Ambrose tells me, and lately told them, is the proper object of demonstration. What they ought to protest, in his view, is the false labelling that calls such an enterprise as ours a college, not to say a university, in the first place, rather than an extended public high school. But what would these children do in a genuine university?