Letters

We danced (the mambo!); Jeannine introduced me to a woman-friend of theirs: a handsome, fortyish New Yorker undergoing divorcé, who’d come down with the Singers to our darling town for respite from litigation, and to have a look at Barry’s string of funky little flea-traps in case the settlement gave her a bit to play with. Her tan (Martinique) was even darker than Jeannine’s; she pretended to be afraid of being lynched by mistake; she demanded I loosen my collar so that she might examine firsthand whether I was a red-neck; she expressed her belief that a female divorce lawyer, which she planned to become, would be even less scrupulous than we males. We danced (early rock ’n’ roll!). As always, Jeannine was thick with the musicians, a group imported for the evening at triple scale from Across the Bay. The drummer, we agreed, was the weak sister; she now informed me that it was not their usual and regular drummer we’d judged, but a local lad who knew some of the band members and had asked to sit in for one set. Upon his being relieved we were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, young Ambrose Mensch, who, obviously smitten with Jeannine (I believe they had been high school lovers), was by way of appending himself and his then wife to our little party.

Thus we met, you and I; and knowing your family I recognized your name, but you did not mine (there are scads of Andrewses in the area; ours is the oldest plot in the cemetery). You told me that as a would-be writer you hoped someday to publish fictions set in this area; that having lately seen an Aubrey Bodine photograph of Capt. James Adams’s Original Floating Theatre, you had a vague notion of a novel in the format of the old blackface minstrel shows — a “philosophical minstrel show,” I believe you called it — and had come down to Cambridge during your university’s Christmas recess in order to do a bit of local research on that showboat. You were aloof but not incordial; it took some pressing to get the foregoing out of you — but I know how to press.

As Jeannine and Mrs. Upper West Side were off to the Ladies, I told you what I knew of the old Chesapeake showboat myself. Moreover, without actually mentioning my own adventure thereupon in 1937 or my just-completed memoir, I observed that the vessel had been equipped with two sets of stage- and houselights: one electric for landings with available power, such as Cambridge, one acetylene for landings without. And I remarked that, given the volatility of acetylene on the one hand, and on the other that old staple of riverboat programs, the sound-effects imitation of famous steamboat races and explosions, one could imagine a leaky valve’s effecting a cataclysmic coincidence of fiction and fact, or art and reality.

You were amused. You extemporized on my conceit, bringing the portentous name of the boat and its impresario into your improvisation. We got on.

My age allows me to confess without embarrassment that I have always admired the novelist’s calling and often wished I had been born to it. My generation is perhaps the only one in middle-class America that ever took its writers seriously: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passes are my contemporaries; with the latter two, during their Baltimore residences, I was socially acquainted. Nowadays the genre is so fallen into obscure pretension on the one hand and cynical commercialism on the other, and so undermined at its popular base by television, that to hear a young person declare his or her ambition to be a capital-W Writer strikes me as anachronistical, quixotic, as who should aspire in 1969 to be a Barnum & Bailey acrobat, a dirigible pilot, or the Rembrandt of the stereopticon. Even on the last day of 1954 and the first of 1955 it struck me thus, though I saw no point in so remarking to you. But in the 1920’s and ’30’s, even into the ’40’s, there was still a heroism in your vocation such as I think there will never be again in this country; a considerable number of us had rather been Hemingway than Gary Cooper or Charles Lindbergh, for example.

It was this reflex of respect that interested me enough in you to draw you out on your ambition (at your then age and stage, neither more nor less realistic than Jeannine’s) and to pursue the coincidence of our preoccupation with the Floating Theatre. Before I left the yacht club with the Singer party, you and I were discussing the philosophical implications of suicide (I was surprised you’d not yet read Sartre or Camus, not to mention Kierkegaard and Heidegger, so fashionable on the campuses then). I went so far as to confide to you the nature of my Letter to My Father—you’d mentioned Kafka’s to his, which I’d not heard of — and my Inquiry: the one setting forth my precarious heart condition and my reasons for not apprising Father of it; the other investigating his suicide in 1930. I don’t remember saying good night.