Letters

He and your “Todd Andrews,” almost alone, have been able to talk with the demonstrators, in whose stirring up Harrison Mack’s son, a bona fide radical, has had a hand. Mr Andrews is the most enlightened of the Tidewater Foundation trustees and their executive director as well, to whom even Schott must in some measure defer. While he and Drew Mack speak to each other across an ideological fence, there is some bond between them which the younger man clearly resents but cannot break. And Ambrose — an old friend of Drew Mack’s, clearly not a part of the regular academic establishment, and mistaken by the students for a radical because he despises Richard Nixon (I myself would describe my lover as a conservative nihilist) — found himself cast in the role of faculty spokesman for the students! The utter confusion he found appealing; no use Drew Mack’s (correctly) arguing to the protestors that Ambrose was no more the representative of “their values” than was Todd Andrews of the administration’s: they worked out a conciliation between them which gave both sides the illusion of being represented and ended the occupation. By extending the spring recess to a fortnight and moving up the final-examination period, they hope to forestall a regrouping of forces this semester. Next fall, one hopes, the mood on campus, if not the situation in Southeast Asia, will have changed.

Thus my lover unexpectedly finds himself in the sudden good graces of John Schott, to whom Mr Andrews has represented him as a forefender of adverse publicity for MSU in the news media. I am almost encouraged now to advance his name after all before our reconstituted nomination committee for the Litt.D. — rather, to entertain its advancement by someone else. To Ambrose himself, an apolitical animal, the whole business is, if not quite a joke, at most a sport or a variety of “happening”—“It’s what we have instead of Big Ten football,” he declares — and a potent aphrodisiac: in his cynical view, they play at revolution to excite themselves, then back to their liberated dormitories to make love. He is of course “projecting”: I write this weary to the bone, sore in every orifice from our amorosities of the night past, everywhere leaking like a seminiferous St Sebastian. From where in the world, I wonder, does so much come come?

Thus our gluttony persists, to my astonishment, into its fourth week! I should not have believed either my endurance or my appetite: I’ve easily done more coupling in the month of April than in the four years past; must have swallowed half as much as I’ve envaginated; I do not even count what’s gone in the ears, up the arse, on the bedclothes and nightclothes and dayclothes and rugs and furniture, to the four winds. And yet I hunger and thirst for more: my left hand creeps sleeping-himward as the right writes on; now I’ve an instrument in each, poor swollen darling that I must have again. He groans, he stirs, he rises; my faithful English Parker pen (bought in “Mr Pumblechook’s premises,” now a stationer’s, in Rochester, in honour of great Boz) must yield to his poky poking pencil pencel pincel penicellus penicillus peeee

Your pardon. Come and gone (an hour later) to fetch his daughter for an afternoon’s outing — and make what excuses he can, I daresay, to his Abruzzesa, Mrs Peter Mensch. Can he be servicing her too? it occurs to me to wonder. Physically impossible! And yet, titillated by the thought as at last I douche my wearies, I find myself dallying astride the W.C. with the syringe…

But I daresay this is not the sort of thing you had in mind to hear.