Well, I wasn’t there. Why try to make you see what I didn’t? What Magda didn’t either, since the whole point of what followed was its unseeability, hence its unfilmability! From Ambrose, before he left me, I had the generallest notion of his conceit for the episode: certain features of the 12 May “Unwritable Sequence” filmed on the Ocean City beach were to be echoed in combination with certain others of the Gadfly party of 17 June—e.g., the Author’s attempt to woo away or rescue the Fading Starlet from the Director. This attempt would more directly involve another Water Message and, “as in the myths,” a literal Night Sea Journey. The vessel to be forging upchannel, against the tide, under the gibbous moon, as the contretemps is enacted. J. Bray to fly again to some misguided rescue. Bea to receive A.’s water message at the climax. The dénouement (presumably left open) to be illuminated by the rockets’ red-white-and-blue glare.
All quite filmic, so far and so put, and the more technicolourful for Marsha Blank’s apparent half-conspiracy with Bray: that chap wants Bea himself, Ambrose calculates, and regards Prinz as his more immediate rival, therefore inclines to aid the Author against the Director. Marsha, from mere epical vindictiveness we suppose, wants Ambrose not to have what he wants, therefore will incline to help Bray get Bea for himself. Don’t ask me, John — whose own main question is why in that case it wasn’t I she directed her spite against! I wasn’t there, and anyroad this visual bravura was all a red (white and blue) herring on Ambrose’s part, to throw Prinz off guard. For the Big Surprise this go-round was to be that what had been a literal blank on 12 May (the washed-out script) and an insignificant detail on 17 June (A.‘s posting his bottled missive into Chautauqua Lake and learning from Bray’s spiel that it could after all just possibly return to him via the Mississippi, the Gulf Stream, and Chesapeake Bay) would now — unroll? explode? all visual verbs! — into the whole climactic “action”: no action at all, not even the minimal action of inditing or reading a letter, but the letter itself.
A letter! Which, to date, none but the Author and the Reader (Bea’s surprise new rôle!) has read. Therefore nobody who witnessed what happened knows what happened. What Magda and the others saw (and heard) was a hammed-up rehash of the earlier business: Bea (in beach towel, from the boardwalk scene) is either menaced or embraced by the Director (sans sheepskin now: all the male principals are wearing tails; I mean animal tails, not formal coats. Don’t ask me. Pencil > penis = tail?) and additionally menaced, or threatened with rescue, by Mr Bray. Who this time, knowing it’s All Part of the Movie, either will not or cannot repeat his astonishing gymnastics of last month, but merely bumbles about, unable to comply with the Director’s direction to “do [his] number” on Bea. Bray too wears a tail, between his legs; he cannot take his eyes off Bea, who earnestly promises to scratch them out, Movie or no Movie, if he lays a hand on her. Marsha appears, to everyone’s surprise (except, I suspect, Reg Prinz’s — where else would she have got the costume Magda describes, which is clearly the same worn earlier by Bea, butterfly wings and all?): a little drunk and without Bea’s semiprofessional talents, but coldly attractive all the same, Magda admits, in her amateur attempt to do a Poor Butterfly. Bea, Ambrose, Bray are nonplussed; the Baratarians are breaking up; the men among them, tails in hand, go dancing ’round the five principals.
All good cinema! But then Ambrose fetches out his bottle (“a big one,” Magda reports; my guess is that it was a certain famous jeroboam of Piper-Heidsieck); he puts Bea’s hand around its neck and covers it with his own; together they smash it over the ship’s bow-rail as if to launch her. In lieu of champagne, a quire of writing paper sprays out, blank as the message that Started It All. I imagine the chorus pauses; Prinz frowns. And now it develops that our hero has a tail with a difference: he sets Bea down before him, snatches up tail tip and paper with a flourish (his last cinematical gesture), and begins… to write.
The Baratarians’ tail dance peters out. Bray and Marsha (he has Rescued her; his cloaked arm is about her wings; she looks very uncomfortable, M. attests) are transfixed, sort of. Ditto Prinz and for that matter Bea, who finds it harder to sit than to stand attractively in her beach towel. Everyone wonders what’s up, none more than the camera crew. The Director gives no directions.
And Ambrose writes. First page done, he hands it to Bea and begins Page 2. He writes, she reads, both silently, almost motionlessly. Marsha makes a single strident effort to get things going again: a few squeaks and flutters. Bray whispers something urgent to her, leads her off; to Magda she looks cross and uncertain, but she goes with him, somewhere else in the vessel, out of sight. Prinz removes his glasses, contemplatively sucks one earpiece. The passengers turn their attention, with appropriate shrugs and murmurs, to the fireworks just beginning to rise from Long Wharf. Peter Mensch scratches his nose, confesses that it’s all beyond him, he’s not much for the movies anyroad, and gimps over to explain the ground pieces to Angie. She, reasonably enough, wants to know what all the tails were for. Magda suspects they have to do with spermatozoa (Bea’s towel is virgin white, eggshell white; she wears a tight white old-fashioned bathing cap; some of the men wear black ones), but mumbles something about tadpoles, frogs and princesses; she’s not sure what Daddy has in mind.
Ambrose writes. Bea reads, silently, altogether engrossed, and discards each page overboard as she finishes it. Half an hour later — the cameras have long since turned to the fireworks — the pair go off together hand in hand, somewhere inside. Prinz confers gravely with his cameraman, then stalks off after them. When the O.F.T. II docks, Ambrose appears for a moment to say good night to Angela and announce to Magda that he’ll be down in Barataria for a few days. With Bea. That Prinz is furious, has suspended shooting, may even scrap the film. That Magda needn’t bother getting in touch with me; that was his problem. But she should ring him up at once if his mother either revived from her coma (of three days’ duration now) or actively resumed her dying.
So. Happy Birthday, America! And bugger off, Germaine!
I think I know enough of my ex-lover’s preoccupations with the medium of fiction to guess what he might have attempted in those pages: not only (instead of a blank sheet) a full and gorgeous love letter from Whom It Concerned to Yours Truly — much too full for the camera to follow its inditing or a Voice-over to intone — but a text whose language is preponderantly nonvisual, even nonsensory in its reference. How many postcoital apostrophes I heard from him, in June, whilst I up-ended for his low-motile swarmers, upon the peculiarly noncinematic properties of written fiction! Composed in private, to be read in private, at least in silence and virtual immobility, author and reader one to one like lovers — his letter would ideally have been a sort of story, told instead of shown, exploiting such anticinematical characteristics as, say, authorial omniscience and interpretation, perhaps some built-in ironic “discount” in the narrative viewpoint, interior monologue, reflexion. Its language would be its sine qua non: heightened, strange, highly figurative — and speculative, analytical, as often abstract as concrete. It would summarise, consider, adjudicate; it would interrupt, contradict itself, refer its Dear Reader to before and behind the sentence in progress. It would say the unseeable, declare the impossible. I have even argued with Ambrose, warmly, that such defining of his medium, however understandable the impulse among writers who feel their ancient dominion usurped by film, is strictly unnecessary: that the words It is raining are as essentially different from motion pictures of falling rain as are either from the actual experience of precipitation…