Letters

Then today — three Fridays and three dozen pages since 12 R! — the message of that Dark Night dawned on me. John Schott convened a morning meeting of what amounted to an ad hoc executive committee of the college: himself, his new provost Harry Carter, sundry deans, and (for reasons not at all clear and never explained) A. B. Cook the poet, who is to replace Germaine Pitt in September as Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English but who presently has no official co

Asked for confirmation, I acknowledged that no rules of the American Association of University Professors or bylaws of the state university had been violated, inasmuch as they did not cover adjunct and visiting professorships. Ms. Pitt’s appointment as acting provost had been unusual in the first place, given her visiting status, and might be argued as de facto regularization of her professorial appointment; but if she really had resigned instead of being fired, she could of course not litigate. Had she, though? I asked. And why, since the college clearly had no case against her? Indeed, I declared (as forcefully as I could in my still-torpid state), it had been my intention to urge once again her reinstatement, the dropping of all charges against the demonstrators, and the recall of “our” recommendation to the regents concerning Mensch’s Litt.D. The 1960’s were winding down; so was our war in Southeast Asia; such demonstrations were not very likely to recur in the coming decade unless our government embarked on another adventurist binge, and inasmuch as (this time) no property damage to the campus or personal injuries were involved, prosecution of the demonstrators, including our founder’s son, seemed to me likely to gain us little more than undesirable publicity. Even as we foregathered, I pointed out, the U.S. Court of Appeals was reversing the conspiracy convictions of Dr. Spock and Messrs. Coffin, Goodman, and Sperber: a sign of the changing climate of public and judiciary opinion.

Schott disagreed. What it was a sign of, in his view, was simply the old liberal Commie-coddling responsible for such conspiracies in the first place. Today was the a

Cook then, apropos of who knows what, remarked that today was also the a

Schott’s secretary made an audible, disagreeable hmp. Her employer, with a reproving smile, asked her for The Letter. There were then triumphantly distributed to us photocopies of a document which Schott directed us to read forthwith and return: it could not decently be read aloud, he averred, and ought not to go beyond our meeting room. But it would, he trusted (with a glance at me), put to rest any notion of continuing Professor Pitt on the faculty, and explain both his demand for her resignation and her tendering it without protest.

Well, it was a remarkable letter: more precisely, a 7-page abridgment or reverse bowdlerization of the discarded carbon copy of an 18-page draft of a letter from Germaine Pitt to the author of The Floating Opera and other fictions, with whom she has evidently been in personal, if one-way, correspondence. It was typed on the letterhead of the provost’s office and dated 7 June 1969. It commenced with the outcry John, John, and set forth its writer’s complaints about her tyra

My interest was caught too (should have been even more so, but other scales had not yet fallen from my eyes) by the coincidence that her former lover’s name was André Castine: I recalled, before she invoked, the Castine-Burlingame intrigues in the Sot-Weed Factor novel and the peculiarity of Andrew Burlingame Cook VI’s having a French-Canadian son named Henri Burlingame VII (we met him at Harrison’s funeral, Dad, remember?). I was struck too, of course, by the further coincidence that Jane Mack’s mysterious fiancé was named André: no more meaningful an accident, I suppose, than that Cook’s first name and my last are nearly alike, or that I happen to live on Todds Point, next to Cook Point — we’ve seen how that other Author works! But still… And there were tantalizing implications of some co