Letters

A pretty conceit! Go, man, go, I wanted to cry, sincerely for a change. But no sooner do I voice my delight — my ardent delight that “Arthur Morton King” intends to speak once again to the passions instead of playing his avant-garde games — than Ambrose chills over as if Medusa’d, and makes clear to me that his main interest in the story is formal: the working out, in narrative, of logarithmic spirals, “golden ratios,” Fibonacci series. Never mind the pathos of the failing marriage and fading hero; the touching idea that Medusa loves Perseus, even after he decapitates her; the tender physics by which paralyzing self-consciousness becomes enabling self-awareness, petrifaction estellation: out came the diagrams, on graph paper, of whirling triangles, chambered nautili, eclipsing binaries, spiral galaxies! And I am stripped and stood, not for ritual insemination (it had been but two days since the last), much less the simple making of love, but for his measuring whether, as he had read was the average case with Caucasian women, the distance from my feet to my navel was.618+ of my overall height—i.e., Phi, the golden ratio!

I was low-phi, lower-spirited. If I speak lightly, it is for the same reason that I speak at all: to drown out your thundering silence, to delay my going mad. In the same spirit I have begun your Goat-Boy novel and the preparation for the press of Andrew Cook IV’s four-letter family history. They have this co

But I have not quite lost my professional grip: had not, anyroad, as of Thursday last, the day before yesterday, when I bethought me to drive across the Bay “to A

The flag was up: outgoing mail. My courage faltered at sight of those four bold letters, so less equivocal than the man they surnamed or the epistles in my briefcase. A lane of boxwoods and azaleas led to a pleasant white frame cottage, its screened porches shaded by sycamores. The lawn continued to a creek or cove, where pleasure craft rode at moorings; from a staff on the T of the laureate’s dock flew the motley ba

A blank-faced woman opened but did not unchain the door, and through that unfriendly space regarded me. Too well dressed to be a domestic, too old (I judged) to be Cook’s daughter, yet too young to be “Henri’s” mother. A second wife, perhaps? Her nose was soft, but her chin and jaw were hard; her brow was high and fair, her eyebrows were plucked to a sharp line, her lips were thin — well, verbal portraiture is not my forte: sufficient that while in no particular uncomely, her phiz tout ensemble was remarkably empty, like that of a receptionist mildly inclined to mask her essential incordiality and profound uninterest. I identified myself, asked for Mr Cook, was told curtly he was not at home. I had historical papers concerning his family to show him, I declared, certain to be of considerable interest to him. Granted, I’d made no appointment, ought to have done… But these documents were truly remarkable. When was he expected to return? Or had he an office I might stop by, as I was in the neighbourhood?

She had no idea when he would return, tonelessly intoned Ms Blank — I was put in mind of Ambrose’s depiction, no doubt exaggerated, of his ex. He was on a speaking tour of Pe

End of professional grip. The woman neither closed nor unchained the door, but waited for me to turn away. Adieu, sanity! I didn’t think to ask whether she was Mrs Cook; at that point an incordially neutral reply that she was Mme Castine or Mme de Staël would scarcely have surprised me. Numbly recrossing the Chesapeake, I heard reported on ABC News that the American Falls at Niagara was about to be turned off, so that engineers and geologists could examine its fast-receding face and study ways to retard its crumbling: the accumulated rockfall at its base had made the drop less spectacular than that of Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side, and what with the U.S. Bicente