Nothing! In a state of mild shock I accepted Schott’s “promotion”; prepared to stay on, out of dull necessity, where I had no wish nor other reason to be; notified Jane that I would be moving out of Tidewater Farms before the spring semester in any case, as Harrison needed his Lady Pembroke no longer, only his trained nurses (he was making his own floods by this time, in the Royal Celestial Electrical Bed of Patagonia — and, yes, ordering his feces freeze-dried by Mack Enterprises, to “fertilise the hereafter”). On 14 January — anniversary for me of Germaine Necker’s marriage to the Baron de Staël in 1786; for Harrison, of Congress’s ratification of the Treaty of Paris two years earlier — he suffered the stroke that blinded and half paralyzed him. Jane flew home; I withdrew to the flat I’d scarcely tenanted since hiring it. A fortnight later the second stroke killed him.
Among the mourners at my friend’s funeral were Prinz — whose mistress Jeannine Mack now openly was — and Ambrose, already engaged by him to write the screenplay from your fiction. Have I told you that Harrison never knew it was a story of yours that Prinz meant to film? (The foundation’s subsidy was for an unspecified film project set in the tidewater locale.) That he lent his support to a medium whose novelty he disliked, only when Prinz assured him that the film would “revise the American Revolution” and “return toward the visual purity of silent movies”? (George III was very big on purity in his latter days.) I myself was at the time unaware of and uninterested in the nature of his and Ambrose’s project, and cannot tell you whether Harrison and Jane ever read the novel in which you feature them: Tood Andrews has done, and seems to hold no grudge. He, Jane, Drew, Yvonne, Ms Golden, and John Schott were there, others I didn’t know… and A. B. Cook… and with him an impassive, reticent young man whom he introduced as his son Henry Burlingame.
I don’t know, John. He seemed about the right age. He could be said to resemble either Cook or André or me at least as much as “Bea Golden” resembles Harrison or Jane (or Todd Andrews). He spoke — when at all — with a slight Québécois accent, but spelled his name with a y and made no reply to Cook’s stage-whispered tease that the accent was affected. In the same mock whisper Cook declared to me that he’d asked his son on my behalf about the impostor I’d mentioned at our last meeting — that chap who claimed to be a relative? And that Henry had denied having ever heard the name Castine except, like himself, in the annals of colonial America. But who knew whether to believe a cunning rogue like his son? And he supposed we oughtn’t to mention colonial America in the house of the late lamented, what?
So I don’t know. If Cook had whipped off a wig, changed teeth and voice, donned eyeglasses, declared himself André Castine, and proposed marriage on the spot, I still wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have known (though I’d no doubt have said yes).
Will you believe that whilst I waited for a sign from heaven, tried to hold onto what reason remained to me after so long, so much, so many — half of my belongings still upstairs in Jane’s house! — I traded polite condolences with the company, approved the gentle ironies in Todd Andrews’s eulogy (a gloss on the motto of the college: Praeteritas futuras fecundant, “The past fertilises the future”), made sarcastic quips with Ambrose about Cook’s funeral ode, and said nothing to the young man whom perhaps I carried in my womb for nine months and five thousand miles, brought into the world, have scarcely seen since (and have not seen since)? I… had not the strength, have not, to beard the lion (and eyeglass him, etc.) in his den; to lay siege to Annapolis, Bloodsworth Island, Castines Hundred; to press, press until no mysteries remain. Because… what then? I had abandoned the boy-child; what claim had I on the man?
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!’ “