Letters

I don’t know what I’m saying; I’m no philosopher; I despise cheap mysticism, trashy transcendencies. But the river, every crab and nettle on the swinging tide, every gull and oyster and mosquito, not to mention Drew and Tank-Top, Polly Lake, Joe Reed, Jimmy Harris, the Choptank Bridge — and my late father, and the Mother I Never Knew, and Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, all her husbands, and her mother, who once came to me naked and by surprise on a humming summer noon a hundred years ago, and all the creatures of the past, the present, the future — they all are precious! Were precious! Will be precious!

I wept for history. I came perilously close to something “beyond” the Tragic View. Polly understood, suggested we stop somewhere for a bracer. We did, aboard my skipjack in the Municipal Basin, where she has often been my companion. I felt a need to drift with time and tide on something intimately seasoned, crafted, nobly weathered yet still graceful: my Osborn Jones and good Polly Lake both filled that bill. Cold Molson’s Ale returned the Mystic Vision to incipience, restored me to my home waters: rationalist-skeptical BLTVHism, where I am still moored — though with dock lines thenceforth and to this hour singled up, ready to cast off for that strange new landfall briefly glimpsed.

I had meant to end the historical part of this letter with a fuller account of Harrison Mack’s “decline” and Lady Amherst’s artful comforting of his last years. But my morning allotted to letter writing has moved ahead into early afternoon; I must go down to the boatyard and attend to brightwork on Osborn Jones. Therefore I shall skip the account of Jane Mack’s visit to my office last week: her curious confession, her disquieting combination of shrewdness, candor, and obliviousness. Your retelling of it notwithstanding, I cannot say confidently that Jane even remembers our old love affair! It is in any case as if it had never happened. Remarkable, that the bridge between fact and fiction, like that between Talbot and Dorchester, is a two-way street.

I’ve gone on at this length and with this degree of confidentiality because, with respect to your solicitation, like E. M. Forster I could not know what I thought till I saw what I said. Having said so much, as if to tease or dare you into making use of it, I find my reservations still strong, though not quite final. The rumors current, that Reg Prinz’s company will film that old showboat story on location, promise me renewed discomfort, the more so if, coincident with the county’s Tercentenary and the dedication of Marshyhope’s “Tower of Truth” (both occasions of local pride), you were to publish another satiric novel with an Eastern Shore setting and a character named Todd Andrews. Certain of my current “cases”—in particular the threatened litigation between Jane and Drew over Harrison’s estate — are of perhaps more delicacy and moment than any I’ve handled since the ones you described, almost plausibly, in your Opera. Not just my welfare and the Macks’ are involved, but the Tidewater Foundation, its multifarious philanthropies, and (so Drew declares) even Larger Stakes.

All which items, to be sure, have dramatic potential, and are almost fictional in their factual state. But I’m not an homme de lettres; my dealings are with the actual lives of actual people, and if my view of them is tragical, it’s not exploitative.

But no matter. I beg pardon for speaking like a literary advisor, even like a father, when in fact it’s you who are in a sense my father, the engenderer of “Todd Andrews.” But (a) I’m old enough to be your father; (b) my own principal literary production has been that Letter to My Father (now younger than I am!), which this “letter to my son” threatens to rival in prolixity; and (c) never having had a son of my own, it’s a tone I’m prone to, as Drew does not fail to remind me.

So what am I saying? That I shall consider your invitation further over Easter (anniversary of another famous sequel, more ambiguous than Napoleon’s Hundred Days) and rereply. Meanwhile, I must caution you against rising fictively to any of the factual bait I’ve herein chummed the tide with, or reusing my name without my express permission. I say this in no sense to rattle sabers; only to apprise you, like a telltale on the luff of your imagination, that you’re sailing very close to the wind. And not yet with my approval and consent, though decidedly with my most cordial

Good wishes,

T.A.

T: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. Progress and Advice.

4/3/69

TO:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

FROM:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada