JBB
cc T. Andrews
W: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly and Lady Amherst. THE AMATEUR, or, A Cure for Cancer, by Arthur Morton King
The Lighthouse, Mensch’s Castle
Erdmann’s Cornlot
Dorset, Maryland
March 31, 1969
FROM:
Ambrose Mensch, Whom It Still Concerns
TO:
Yours Truly (cc: GGPLA)
RE:
Your message to me of May 12, 1940
Dear Sir or Madam:
Whom it so concerned, the undersigned, You wrote not a word to, not a letter, in Your letter to me of 5/12/40. Therefore I write You, seven times over, everything.
The enclosed You may have seen already: an early effort, abortive, on the part of “Arthur Morton King” to come to terms with conventional narrative and himself. Nine years ago tonight, on my 30th birthday, I first chucked it into the Choptank. There had been a little party for me here in my brother’s house, my wife’s contribution to which was a jeroboam of Piper-Heidsieck; walking home afterward (we had a flat near the yacht basin in those days) we enjoyed what was becoming a ritual quarrel. Marsha alleged that I was unfaithful to her, in spirit if not in physical fact, with my brother’s wife. I protested that there was a great difference, both between psychological and physical infidelity and between my wife and my sister-in-law, and that while I had admittedly loved Magda Giulianova once when she was Peter’s girlfriend and again when she was his bride, that latter “affair” (third of my life, Germaine) was nonsexual and had been entirely supplanted by my marriage.
All which was more true than not, and irrelevant, the real burden of Marsha’s complaint being not that I loved Magda or another, “physically” or “spiritually,” but that I did not love herself as much as either she or I could wish. And to this not-always-unspoken charge I could in good faith at best plead nolo contendere: I loved Marsha and Marsha only, but not greatly — a description that fit as well my feeling for myself.
The night lengthened; tempers shortened. Bitter Marsha went to bed alone. I withdrew to my “study” (daughter Angie’s bedroom) with the last two inches of Piper-Heidsieck, reviewed by night-light this work-then-in-progress and my 30-year-old life, lost interest in continuing either, washed down 30 capsules of Marsha’s Librium with the warm champagne, corked The Amateur in the empty jeroboam, walked drowsily across the park to launch it from Long Wharf on what I hoped was an outgoing tide, and went home to die.
Perhaps to die: I believed that 30 Libriums (I did not know the milligrammage) was probably a fatal dose, as Andreyev believed — when, at age 21, he lay between the railroad tracks in Petersburg — that the train would probably kill him. I also knew, like him, that my belief was possibly mistaken. The probability and the possibility were equally important; no need to go on about that. As I approached the bedroom I was struck by the thoughtlessness of imposing my corpse upon Marsha and Angie. The night was not cold; I had remarked early yachts in their slips; now I returned to the basin, thinking foggily (from the hour and the alcohol, not the Librium) to borrow a dinghy and go the way of my manuscript. None in evidence. A police car cruised from High Street down toward the wharf, parking place of young lovers; I took cover in the cockpit of the nearest cabin cruiser, not to be mistaken for a thief or vandal; curled up on the dew-damp teak; began to feel ridiculous.
And chilly. And cross. It seemed to me that my shivering and sniffling and general discomfort would likely keep me awake, and that unless I slept, the chemicals might make me only nauseated instead of comatose and finally dead. Back to the apartment, which had never seemed so cozy: let the living bury the dead, etc. Good-bye Angie, I wasn’t the best of fathers anyhow; ditto Marsha, ditto husband. My head was fortunately too heavy for more than this in the self-pity way. I stretched out on the living-room couch and tried to manage a suitable last thought: something to do with the grand complexity of nature, of history, of the organism denominated Ambrose M.; with the infinite imaginable alternatives to arbitrary reality, etc. Nothing came to mind.
Best night’s sleep in years. Woke entirely refreshed and, in fact, tranquil. It was explained to Angela that Daddy sleeps on the couch sometimes after he works late, not to wake Mommy. Marsha’s prescription I refilled before she noticed any Librium missing. For a few days my wife was cool; then, after an ambiguous “shopping trip to Washington,” her normal spirits returned until the next domestic quarrel, a month later. The marriage itself persisted another seven years.
God may be a literalist, but Life is a heavy-handed ironizer. Two days into my 31st year, tranquilly prowling the rivershore near here with Angie, I spied my Piper-Heidsieck jeroboam in the shallows near the crumbling seawall, not an oystershell’s throw from where Your water message had come ashore to me in that gin bottle 20 years earlier. Lest eyes more familiar than Yours fall on it, I retrieved it. Except for a brief uncorking circa 1962 to oblige a certain fellow Hedonist — who swapped me a couple of his own discarded experiments in unorthodox narrative in return for three chapters of the enclosed: my Bee-Swarming, Water-Message, and Funhouse anecdotes — both bottle and contents rested undisturbed thenceforth, in my subsequent domiciles, until tonight.
Something in those Libriums liberated me from the library of my literary predecessors, for better or worse. Tranquilly I turned my back on Realism, having perhaps long since turned it on reality. I put by not only history, philosophy, politics, psychology, self-confession, sociology, and other such traditional contaminants of fiction, but also, insofar as possible, characterization, description, dialogue, plot — even language, where I could dispense with it. My total production that following summer was a (tranquil) love-piece for my daughter:
The ass I made of myself in my last missive to You dates from that same period, as does my practice — followed faithfully until tonight — of using only no-deposit-no-return bottles for submission of manuscripts. Well before Allan Kaprow and company popularized the Happening, “Arthur Morton King’s” bibliography, so to speak, included such items as Antimasquerade (attending parties disguised as oneself, and going successfully unrecognized) and Hide & No Seek (in which no one is It). The radical tinkerers of New York and Cologne associated with the resurgence of “concrete poetry” and “intermedia” seemed to me vulgar parvenus; by 1961 I had returned to the word, even to the sentence, in homeliest form: my exemplars were the anonymous authors of smalltown newspaper obituary notices, real-estate title searches, National Geographic photo captions, and classified help-wanted ads. By 1967, after a year of fictions in the form of complaining letters from “A. M. King” to the editors of Dairy Goat Quarterly, Revue Metaphysique, Road & Track, Rolling Stone, and School Lunch Journal—which if collected, as they could never imaginably be, would be found to comprise a coherent epistolary narrative with characters, complications, climax, and a tidy dénouement — I became reenamored simultaneously with Magda (I was by then divorcing) and with that most happily contaminated literary genre: the Novel, the Novel, with its great galumphing grace, amazing as a whale!
But not the Art Novel; certainly not those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism. No one named as I am, historied and circumstanced as I am, could likely stomach anything further in the second-meaning way; and a marsh-country mandarin would be an odd duck indeed! I examined the history and origins of the novel, of prose narrative itself, in search of reinspiration; and I found it — not in parodies, travesties, pastiches, and trivializations of older narrative conventions, but…