Letters

Prinz was aboard in his displaced-person getup, Jane Mack’s daughter in what I believe the children call a “gra

This much I remarked, with a small pang like the Wednesday’s on first hearing l’Abruzzesa’s voice. But I did not remark much more, for Ambrose’s query and his portentous Deeper Pattern, together with the tale of his week’s adventures with the film crew, quite preempted my attention. What ought we now? With spring so gorgeously exploding in every bush, the very air a scented kiss, the intemperate sap full-risen to green the temperate zone, what ought we now? The only question was, Why had he put it as a question, if not that to him the answer was not obvious? And if it wasn’t… had Bea Golden of Marshyhope Productions (Prinz’s paper corporation for receiving Tidewater Foundation subsidies) turned his head? Or was his erstwhile leading lady, Magda Giulianova Mensch (whose initials just now roar out at me from this page), making a comeback for “Arthur Morton King’s” sake?

What was clear to me after all, then, was merely what I would, not what I ought. I ought… never to have left Castines Hundred and my baby in 1940; never to have gone to Paris in ’39 to sit at the feet of Stein and Joyce; I ought never to have been begot by those dreadful fuddling dears my parents, thanks to whom the very enterprise of letters will ever in my memory’s nostrils redole of green tea, stale tobacco, book dust, and damp woollens in untidy flats. Ambrose — sweeper-away of all this, together with Yours Truly — I love you! God help me — and God knows what we ought!

Presently we disembarked from cocktails and motored over the creek bridge and the “New Bridge” to reembark at our restaurant: a large ferryboat lately beached on the river’s north shore and converted for dining. I remarked upon the American passion for conversion wondering whether it stemmed from the missionary energies of the early Puritans and later revivalists or the settlers’ need, born of poverty and dearth of goods, to find new uses for things worn out or obsolete — a need become mere paradoxical reflex in a people notorious for waste. Ambrose pleasantly replied that while the practice was in his opinion not particularly American — Orientals were even more ingenious about it, for example, and the Spanish, Greeks, and Germans were no slouches either — the inclination to see in it a national trait, especially one to be criticised, was American indeed. He pretended to fear for my cultural identity; he reminded me (taking my hand across the table) that it was in my “full Brita

I thought to tell him I did not care to rule the waves just then, but ride them with him. Skin, skin! His hand restirred the juice of April in me, when I’d have freely bid us abandon both of these vessels-going-nowhere and stand full sail bedward. But his damned question, What ought we now? — that he had put it put me off, stayed my hand from more than meeting his.

And so we sat through the rites and trappings of a typical C-minus U.S. restaurant — stupid puzzles on the place mats, mindless jokes on the napkins, sugar in paper packets depicting ill-coloured birds of America, little sealed containers of “non-dairy creamer,” dime-store candles in painted glass, plastic roses, butter in paper pats, tired salad from a tiresome self-service salad bar, crackers in cellophane, store-bought rolls, the inevitable menu of ti

The 1812 War, the sack of Washington and bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour, the pirate Jean Lafitte’s assistance of Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans and his subsequent involvement in one of the several harebrained schemes to spirit Napoleon from St Helena to America — none of these “splendid ideas” of A. B. Cook’s, I understand from Ambrose, is to be found in your fiction. Yet the single set Reg Prinz is causing to be constructed for his film is “Barataria”: a suggestion (Ambrose’s inference, from Prinz’s hums and tisks) rather than a replication of Lafitte’s pirate village in the Mississippi delta, itself named for Sancho Panza’s make-believe island in Don Quixote. Prinz’s point, Ambrose imagines, is not only that the fictional original inspired or called forth its factual counterpart (itself become legendary), but that even in Quixote Sancho’s island is a fiction precipitated out of fable and realised as deception, a kind of stage set elaborated by the Manchegan lords and ladies to make sport of Sancho Panza. In other words (ours, not Prinz’s, for what we take to be Prinz’s principle, not ours), the relation between fact and fiction, life and art, is not imitation of either by the other, but a sort of reciprocity, an ongoing collaboration or reverberation. Did this imply that you would now include the Baratarians in some future fiction, as the apostles say Jesus performed certain miracles in order that the prophecies might be fulfilled which held that the Messiah would do thus-and-so? We were uncertain. You have in any case considerable latitude, as Prinz’s “Barataria” is to be a general-purpose set (indeed, no more than a lane of clapboard shanty-fronts on or near Bloodsworth Island, if he can secure permission from the U.S. Navy, who use the place for gu