Letters

In 1965, my husband died of a bowel cancer. The estate was depleted by taxes, creditors, and anonymous bequests to his known natural children. He was not ungenerous to me, proportionately, but there was much less than I’d imagined: neither of us had done a day’s work for wages in our lives, and Jeffrey had neglected to tell me that it was the principal of his inheritance we were living on, not the income. Good Joseph Morgan got wind of my plight and himself invited me to lecture (upon the French Revolution!) at Tidewater Technical College. I declined — he was only being very kind — but was inspired by his invitation to accept others which suddenly appeared from the University of Manitoba, Simon Fraser University, Sir George Williams, McMaster: André’s doing, no question, and I went to Canada both in order to survive and in the hope that there might happen — what did happen, though it didn’t end as I had dreamed.

Nor will this letter as I’d pla

Thus has chronicling transformed the chronicler, and I see that neither Werner Heisenberg nor your character Jacob Horner went far enough: not only is there no “non-disturbing observation”; there is no non-disturbing historiography. Take warning, sir: to put things into words works changes, not only upon the events narrated, but upon their narrator. She who saluted you pages past is not the same who closes now, though the name we share remains,

As ever,

Germaine

Y: Todd Andrews to the Author. Acknowledging the latter’s invitation and reviewing his life since their last communication. The Tragic View of things, including the Tragic View.

Todd Andrews

Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Friday, April 4, 1969

Sir:

Your singular letter of March 30, soliciting my cooperation as model for a character in your work in progress, reached me approximately on April Fool’s Day. Today, which my calendar tells me is the a

The motto of one of our corporate clients, very big in the chemical-fertilizer way, is Praeteritas futuras stercorant. Not just my merely legal Latin, but my experience of life (your letter not excepted) makes me wonder whether the past (a) fertilizes the future, (b) turns into shit in the future, or (c) turns the future into shit. This year — my 70th, sir — the past has crowded in on me apace (cropped up? rained down?), faster than I can… um… digest it.

E.g., my old friend Harrison Mack died, as you may have read in the Times, in January. His funeral brought Mrs. Mack back to Tidewater Farms and, briefly, their two grown children: the “actress” “Bea Golden” (née Jea

Jane Mack (who is, more power to her, a handsome and vigorous 63 and a wealthy woman in her own right) wants the estate diverted to her new fiancé: a titled but no longer affluent fellow whom we shall call “Lord Baltimore,” though he is no Marylander. Drew wants it to finance a Second American Revolution. Neither seems to imagine that I might consider it my prior responsibility to defend the interests of the Tidewater Foundation, Harrison’s principal beneficiary, for whom my firm has long served as counsel; far less that I might simply wish to see my late friend’s testamentary desires, however eccentric, faithfully executed. Had he instructed me to liquidate his holdings and float the proceeds out on the Choptank tide, I would endeavor to do it.

In all this, of course, and much that I have not mentioned, I see mainly the reenactment of a certain earlier drama: the stercoration of the present by the past. And the prospect of refloating that particular opera gives me, let’s say, a sinking feeling.

Which almost, but not quite, brings me to your request. It is not to tease you with off-the-record confidences that I mention my current relations with the surviving Macks. It is to spell out, literally, the implications of your proposal, the better to reach some genuine accord. “You have invited me and engaged to pay me,” Thoreau used to tell his lecture audiences, “and I am determined that you shall have me, though I bore you beyond all precedent.” It is Good Friday morning, an office holiday, promising to warm up enough by afternoon for me to turn to a bit of fitting out of my old boat, but meanwhile cool enough to keep me in my room here in the Dorset Hotel — not my sole home any longer as in years praeteritas, but still my Cambridge pied-à-terre and the seat of my ongoing Inquiry—with little to do (that inquiry being presently stymied) besides respond at length, whether yea or nay, to your letter. Henry James, as I remember, used to want not to hear too much of an anecdote of which he wished eagerly to hear a certain amount, for imaginative purposes. But his brother William astutely remarks that to get enough of anything in nature, one has to take too much.

I wonder that your letter makes no mention of New Year’s Eve 1954, inasmuch as two of the three things of some moment that happened to me that night are known to you. Here in my room, around ten in the evening of that day, I finished drafting my memoir about not committing suicide aboard Capt. James Adams’s showboat in 1937—a story I’d been writing since the previous March as one facet of my old Inquiry—and prepared to resume the inquiry itself, together with the even older Letter to My Father of which it is a part. But to reward myself for completing the showboat narrative, I strolled down to the New Year’s Eve party in progress at the Cambridge Yacht Club. The Macks were settled in Baltimore at this time; I never saw or heard from them. But I was delighted to find Jea