Ambrose, till then an affable colleague merely, saw me home and did me some services after at Tidewater Farms; our closer connexion dates from there. Clearly André has abandoned me for good. I am endeavouring to make it so: for good. This confession — whose readiness you now understand, whose prolixity you pardon, as I trust you now understand (no pardon called for) my susceptibility to the blandishments of Ambrose Mensch — this confession is the epilogue to the story, finally done. When I report to you that my “love” (oh bother the quotation marks!) for your erstwhile friend, especially since this chaste Third Stage of our affair commenced, grows determinedly, you will know what I mean. My whole romantic life, I am trying to persuade myself, has, like the body of this letter, been digression and recapitulation; it is time to rearrive at the present, to move into a future unsullied by the past.
It is time, most certainly, to end this endlessest of my letters (I’ve long since been back at 24 L; all’s apparently calm at Marshyhope; I am alone; it’s near midnight). But now the history is done, I must finish the tale of Prinz and Mensch it interrupted. After Prinz’s two-word rejection—“too wordy”—of Ambrose’s nearly wordless draft of the screenplay opening, it was decided between them (with your approval, I hope and presume) that since the text in hand was in itself essentially noncinematic, they would, if not quite set it aside altogether, use it merely as a point de départ for a “visual orchestration of the author’s Weltanschauung”: Ambrose’s deadpan phrase, in his explanation last night to the Marshyhopers of the sequence they were about to appear in. They will therefore freely include not only “echoes of your other works” and (don’t ask me) “anticipations of your works in progress and to come”—things you may not even have thought of yet, but “feasibly might, on the basis of etc.”—but anything Ambrose might think suitable in his new capacity — you’re aware that he’s an actor in his own script now, hired to play the role of Author? — or Prinz in his double aspect of director and, as it were, Muse. (He too is on both sides of the camera!) Still myself only halfway through your Sot-Weed Factor novel, for all I know to the contrary there may be in your works yet for me to read a Rip Winklish narrator who lives the first half of his life in the years 1776–1812 and the second half from 1940 to 1976, with a long sleep between in the Dorchester marshes. Or is he among those “anticipations”?
In any case, I know for a fact that what ensued was their improvisation. This anonymous or polynomial narrator — Ambrose, half jestingly, calls him by his own nom de plume, “Arthur Morton King”—in his movement from the First through the Second Cycle of his life (it is not clear, to me, whether in 1969 he is 29 or 65 years old), comes upon the student activists preparing to seize the administration building of a college built on what he remembers to have been an Indian burial ground, a Loyalist hideout in the Revolutionary War, and the site of a minor skirmish with Admiral Cockburn’s fleet in the War of 1812. Stirred but puzzled by the youthful call to arms (as I am puzzled by his puzzlement: is he not alleged to have been awake since 1940?), “Arthur” would join the students, but first asks them to explain who “our” enemy is, and what we mean to do with the college after we seize it. He insists likewise on hearing out the spokesmen for the administration…
It would not have worked at Berkeley or Buffalo; not even at College Park across the Bay. To give my pink-necks their due, it would not likely have worked here either, had Drew Mack been on campus, and had Ambrose not further disarmed the skeptical by instructing them to be skeptical; to suspect him of being planted by the F.B.I., or the C.I.A., or at least the administration; and to hoot down any attempt by Todd Andrews (who volunteered to act as the acting president’s spokesman) to reply to their harangues. But the chief strategy — Ambrose’s, not Prinz’s, who somehow made it clear to the students that he didn’t care one way or the other how the scene ended — was the grand diversion of cameraman, audio and lighting technicians and equipment, interruptions to reposition, rephotograph, rerecord, reconsider; Prinz’s vertiginous insistence that these repositionings and such be themselves photographed, not to falsify “on the ultimate level, you know” the cinéma vérité; Ambrose’s sudden inspired order to a young woman shouting obscenities, “Now! Now! Take off your clothes!” and to a dazed campus cop, “Now you pretend to arrest her!” and to the students who then pummelled the cop, “Cut! Cut! That’s great! Let the camera close in on her now!” Whilst Prinz hand-signalled quite different instructions to his crew, and the second camera filmed him so doing. “Now you decide we’re co-opting you!” cries Ambrose. “Somebody ask whether there’s even any film in the fucking cameras! Easy, those mothers are expensive. Now you chant ‘Off the media! Off the media!’ while we retreat! Tomorrow in Ocean City, south end of the boardwalk, got that? South boardwalk, by the funhouse! ‘Off the flicks! Off the flicks!’ “
Et cetera, until half the kids are laughing, most of the rest too confused to get their indignation organised, and the handful who try to storm Schott’s office easily stopped in the corridors, out of view, by the main body of campus police, who then usher them out a rear door, lock the building for the night, and patrol its vicinity till today.
When, I daresay — tomorrow too if the weather holds fine — my lover, the author turned actor, will have improvised, may be even now improvising, “the Funhouse Scene” at Ocean City, with his nondirective director, his cast of ex-activist amateurs, and his professional (if not expert) co-star…
But here my pen falters, and not only from writer’s cramp. A tiny—yes, jealousy—keeps me from sleep, though it’s now the first hour of, ah, the 11th. Of that painful American invention, Mother’s Day. I return now, for comfort and solace, to your hapless virgin poet Eben Cooke and his too-familiar mentor Henry Burlingame III, wearily wondering whether your novel is not some enormous coded reply-in-advance to these letters. What turns lie ahead in its plot? In mine? What have you in store for your exhausted
G.?
M: Lady Amherst to the Author. Three miracles in three days. Ambrose’s adventures with the film company. The Fourth Stage of their affair begins.
24 L Street
Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612
Saturday, 17 May 1969
Dear J.,
Mirabile, mirabile, mirabile dictu! Three miracles in three days! The plot of our lives as turned and returned as a baroque novel’s!
1. Mr A. B. Cook VI — to the entire astonishment of our ad hoc nominating committee and the great but discreetly concealed delight of two-thirds of its membership (i.e., myself and Ms Wright of the French Dept: a far cry from dear “Juliette,” but worlds away withal from Harry Carter: “Mr Wrong”) — thanked us by letter three days ago for the honour of our invitation… and declined!