Letters

Bea Golden has phoned too. Somewhat timidly, I am pleased to imagine. No mention, of course, of their Mating Season Sequence down on Bloodsworth Island. Magda reports that Angela reports that the Fu

Well, John! As the Chappaquiddick people put it, much is yet unclear. Marvellous though Coincidence can be, in life as in Uncle Sam Richardson’s novels, we strongly incline to our Ambrose’s view that it was that fucker Prinz’s doing. With the mike boom, dear. Which gives us to worry that on this front too, once he recollects himself, what my Dorchester darling hath begun, he may resolve to finish.

We pray not: I mean my friend Magda and her pro-tem Doppelgänger, yr faithful

G.

R: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Battle of Niagara. Surgery for Magda. Lady Amherst desperate.

24 L Street

26 July 1969

John,

Ra’s in Bridgetown Harbour, the moon men are back on earth and quarantined aboard the Hornet, young Mary Jo Kopechne’s in her grave, and Teddy Ke

Today’s also the 194th a

That battle (on the Canadian shore of the Niagara River, just below the Falls) was bloody and inconclusive, a sort of stand-off, as was “our” “reenactment” of it yesterday before the cameras. General Jacob Brown’s Americans had crossed the Niagara from Buffalo earlier in the month and captured Fort Erie on 3 July; two days later, led by Winfield Scott, they managed a considerable psychological victory at Chippewa, just above the Falls, by driving back the British regulars with heavy casualties. On 25 July, they sallied forth to Lundy’s Lane and met a regrouped and reinforced British army. From 7 to 11 P.M. the fighting was close and sharp, including hand-to-hand bayonet engagements in the dark; each side suffered nearly 900 casualties, about 30 % of their actively engaged troops! The Americans won the field, but ill-advisedly withdrew to Chippewa and thence (tomorrow) back to Fort Erie, returning the initiative to the British and abandoning their invasion campaign. Both sides claimed victory.

I rehearse all this to remind myself that I was once an historian of sorts, and to put in what perspective I can the confused, distressing events of yesterday. The “real” historian on the scene this week has been our old friend the new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope, you know whom, who appeared from Redmans Neck or Barataria, all smiles and mellifluous couplets, to volunteer his services as Reg Prinz’s historical consultant, at least until the company returns (next week) to Niagara. Cook’s idea it was — since Prinz had postponed that return in order to film the D. Co. tercentenary — to kill two birds with one stone by exploiting the “1812” episodes of “The Dorchester Story,” that ongoing nightly pageant at the ball park which tonight attains the present and projects the future. There were all the “extras” one could use, more or less in period costume (the same outfits serve for the Colonial, the Revolutionary, and the 1812 episodes), dramatising the exploits of the Marshyhope Blues versus Joseph Whaland’s Picaroons in 1776 and the depredations of the British fleet in 1813/14; more than willing to extend their props and performances gratis to The Movie. Since it is, anyroad, not the war we’re interested in but its reenactment — in which 1969 and 1812 (and 1669, 1776, and 1976) are tossed together like salad greens — the historical inaccuracies, the thi

Yup: ours again, John. Aut nunquam tentes et cetera, exactly as I feared on Saturday last. As soon as his head cleared (Sunday morning), Ambrose was furious with himself for having abandoned like General Brown the field he’d won on Independence Day: i.e. (and woe is me), B.C., that all too tangible token of his “victory” over Reg Prinz on the O.F.T. II. Bea is, I am to understand, only the Symbol of What’s Being Fought Over (a flesh-and-blood symbol, alas, which can be, which has been, reslept with): the fight is the thing now, the armature of a drama which has clearly outgrown its original subject. Your fiction is at most the occasion of the film these days; perhaps it was never more than that. One would not be surprised if the final editing removed all reference to your works entirely, which are only a sort of serial cues for Prinz and Ambrose to improvise upon and organise their hostilities around. Those hostilities — between “the Director” and “the Author”—are the subject, a filming-within-the-filming, deadly earnest for all they’re in the “script” and despite Ambrose’s being literally on Prinz’s payroll as of Thursday 24th.

That day, aptly, was Commerce & Industry Day in Dorchester (each day of the tercentenary has had a Theme). On the Wednesday, misfortune resmote the family Mensch, from a most unexpected quarter: with Andrea still a-dying in hospital and Peter imprudently putting off his own treatment till she’s done, Magda, poor thing — La Giulianova, l’Abruzzesa, whom I so wrongly feared and now feel such co

Fibroid tumour; patient doing well enough physically, but in indifferent psychological case. Over and above her concern for the family (Peter is not immobilised yet or otherwise helpless; the twins are looking after things), Magda is suffering more than usually from the classic female set-down at the loss of her uterine function. The woman loved not only pregnancy, childbirth, and wet-nursing; she loved menstruation, that monthly reminder that she was an egg bearer, a seed receiver, generator and incubator of fetuses. More than any other woman I know, Magda relished the lunar cycle of her body and spirits: the oestrus and Mittelschmerz of ovulation, the erratic moods and temperature fluctuations of the menstrual onset, the occasional bad cramps and headaches, even the periodic flow itself. She ought to have borne more children. When I called on her after surgery, she wept and kissed me and said, “Now it’s up to you.”

No comment.

Among the effects of this turn of events on Ambrose was a sober review, with his brother, of the family’s finances. All bad news, of course. Indeed, their mother’s only cheer in her cheerless terminality is that at last they need no longer fear insolvency, having achieved it. Mensch Masonry has passed officially into receivership, and precious little there is for the receivers to receive (the status of the Lighthouse is moot: in an ill-advised moment the brothers designated the camera obscura as corporation property, thinking to take tax advantage of its unprofitability; it may therefore be claimed by M. M. Co.‘s creditors). On Commerce & Industry Day Ambrose put Perseus aside once more — surely that chap will ossify before Medusa gets to petrify him! — sought out Prinz (I wasn’t there), and grimly informed me afterward that he was on salary again, “no holds barred.”