Letters

Nope. The plan, he acknowledges, is dandy; he has preserved his graphs and charts, may attempt to publish them as is. But he will not after all, at this hour of the world, write…

So. I ought to’ve shown him the door, and did not. We languish here in air-conditioned desperation whilst the peninsula swelters: an odd, dull lull after all the recent action, but hardly a respite, certainly no vacation. Tender and tyra

Too, we are back to’t. Impotent with her, he is a standing bone with me. And who cares? Well, the pair of us; God knows exactly wherefore. A touch more frequently in this “5th Stage” than in our fanatical 4th (but nothing like our sexy 2nd), we go to’t, to’t, to the crazy end — but not just—of July engenderment. Now I know the pattern, I ca

Anyroad, I am not to forget that we are not merely reenacting; that even were we, with luck this as yet but ill-defined 5th Stage will bring us to the 6th—i.e., to ourselves, to Ambrose and Germaine, not Ambrose and Magda/Jea

What else is new. Oh, that I seem in for a new couturial outrage. From old steamer trunks and attic cedar closets in the Menschhaus, Ambrose has recovered a virtual wardrobe of 1930-ish ladies’ wear — his then-still-stylish mum’s, I suppose — and…

Yup. That’s how we do’t when we go to’t these days at 24 L. It’s nothing Oedipal, I think (we’re not even sure they’re Andrea’s clothes): rather that, having failed to fertilise me in the costumes first of my present age and then of the presently young, he’ll give me a go in the garb of my own young womanhood and first fertility. And indeed, for all my apprehension that he may carry this new mummery, like the old, out of doors, I confess that intramurally it is not only Ambrose who finds arousing these early Joan Crawfords, late Greta Garbos, middle Marlene Dietrichs, not unreasonably unlike what I wore in Paris when André’s first intromission found its mark, some 350 ovulations past…

I ca

And so I shall begin your Lost in the Funhouse stories. A. says he’s in them. If so, for whom is the funhouse fun? Not, I think, for lost

Germaine

A: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Dorchester County Tercentenary and Mating-Season Sequences. Ambrose’s concussion, and its cause.

24 L, 11 P.M.

19 July 1969

Well, John,

All evidence indicates that our little lull is done and some new storm hard upon us. As I write this (near midnight), our friend Ambrose lies half-conscious in my bed, his circuits just begi

I here attest that that is not the way it is. A blow to the head severe enough to cause loss of consciousness (A.‘s, classically, was just above the temple, his left, not far from the famous birthmark), if it does not actually fracture the skull, plays hob with the memory functions for (going on to) half a day at least. One prays that this symptom — and the headache, and the heavy sleeping — will not be accompanied by nausea and vertigo, indications of subdural hematoma and more serious consequences. So far, so good: when he is awake, my dear despot ca

Et cetera. Well, it was Reg Prinz — not the Director himself, ever at the camera, but one of his grad-student bullies at the audio boom (at noon today, at Long Wharf, at the opening of the “Dorchester Story” pageant, part of the Dorchester County tercentenary festivities which commenced last night and will continue inexorably through next Sunday) — who smote my man upside the head as if by accident. And this smite, like my Yes-dears, was by way of reply. For it was Ambrose who cast the first stone, as it were, and not unjustifiably, last Monday, in of all places the bell-less belfry of the Tower of Truth. Let me rehearse our week, blow to blow, whilst my inquisitor sleeps.

Prinz and his pals reconvened per schedule in Cambridge last Sunday, the 13th, to begin shooting on the Monday what Ambrose vaguely calls “the Mating Season Sequences.” If he was apprehensive of retaliation for having gone off to Barataria with Bea Golden, Ambrose gave no sign, not even when we heard nothing from the man (as we expected to) on the Sunday evening or the Monday morning. I believe we decided that, after the hiatus of the week prior, Prinz was in no hurry to revive the contest or even his working co

On them, a word only. A. assures me that you do not yourself take with much seriousness those Death-of-the-Novel or End-of-Letters chaps, but that you do take seriously the climate that takes such questions seriously; you exploit that apocalyptic climate, he maintains, to reinspect the origins of narrative fiction in the oral tradition. Taking that cue, Ambrose himself has undertaken a review of the origins of printed fiction, especially the early conventions of the novel. More anon. To us Britishers, this sort of programme is awfully theoretical, what? Too French by half, and at the same time veddy Amedican. Still and all, I enjoyed the stories — in particular, of course, the “Ambrose” ones. Your Ambrose, needless to say, is not my Ambrose — but then, mine isn’t either!

Over lunch that same last Monday, an agreeable surprise. In honour of the 180th a