Letters полностью

A. shrugged: did I think he’d permit me to go uninseminated for the week and more he’d be there? The very middle of my month? They would be shooting background footage at Forts Erie and Niagara, at the Falls, perhaps at the old Chautauqua Institution and at Lily Dale, a spiritualist centre in the area. Prinz’s intentions were as usual unclear. There had even been mention of a rôle for me, following upon a remark I’d made about Mme de Staël’s pleading on the one hand with Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin to forestall the 1812 War on behalf of Britain’s struggle against Napoleon, and on the other her subsequent intriguing with the emperor during the 100 Days. A. B. Cook might play his own ancestor Ebenezer Cooke, the virgin poet, and/or his other ancestor the antivirgin Henry Burlingame III. And there was to be an intensification of the rivalry between himself and Prinz for the favour of Bea Golden, whom they had more or less persuaded to play the rôle of herself playing the role of several younger women in your fiction. Prinz had warned him to be on his guard; he now passed the same warning on to me. We would return in time for the Marshyhope commencement exercises, which Prinz also wants to film for use in the campus sequences — whether the dreary little teachers college in End of the Road or the universal university of Giles Goat-Boy, Ambrose couldn’t say: both, neither. I was not, absolutely, to take along my Old Lady clothes: he would pack my bag himself.

Would he, now!

We go tomorrow (I packed my own bag): by car back across the Bay Bridge to Washington National Airport, thence by plane to Buffalo and by rented car to Niagara Falls. It will be no honeymoon. I am properly intrigued by the reflection that as we fly along the axis of the War of 1812, from Chesapeake Bay to the Niagara Frontier, you may well be doing likewise, en route home from D.C.; that we might — improbably en route, but not so improbably during the business ahead — meet. Or do you take as little notice of the film-in-progress as of these letters?

I do not even mention my emotions at the prospect of revisiting the little town of Fort Erie, Ontario, where not so very long ago — though it seems a world away already! — this aging uterus having Done Its Thing yet again with the high-motile, unerring sperm of André, André, I underwent a different sort of D.C…

André. Who, mon Dieu, may be there too, somewhere about! Then why do we not rendezvous, you three (or four) gentlemen and the lady whose tormenting is your common pleasure? At the “farm” of that nameless Doctor, say, for Prinz’s cameras, let us do a scene, not from your writings, but from de Sade’s: you, Ambrose, André, A. B. Cook — strip me of my ridiculous mini, bind me fast, and take turns with literal whip and brands instead of figurative!

Enough. My office work is done; I must back to 24 L lest my master’s jealous ire be reprovoked. By now you are, I presume, an official doctor of letters, as Ambrose will be a fortnight hence. Look to your patient, sir; ’ware malpractice; if you will not presume to save her, leave her at least no worse than you found her: as played out, worked over, tricked up, but withal still fecund as (let us pray)

Your patient

G.

I: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage continues. Filmmaking at Niagara Falls and Old Fort Erie. Dismaying encounters at the Remobilization Farm.

Erie Motel

Old Fort Erie

Ontario, Canada

14 June 1969

Dear J.?

It’s eerie, right enough: this foul and ghostly lake that must once have been so fair, but now regurgitates dead smelts and ripe green eutrophy; bleak, blasted Buffalo across the way, coughing up steel and cars and breakfast cereals in clouds of smog; flat frozen Canada, just now blanketed in flowers — how all countries except yours glory in flowers! — but ever mindful, in its dour domestic architecture and glacier-scraped terrain, of the cold that never leaves this dominion, but only withdraws a bit, and briefly, to its northern reaches.

Eerier yet your absence — as well say nonexistence! — and my presence here amid the caricatures of your characters. I have not read all your works, sir; I begin now to think I shan’t, lest I find myself cast up for keeps upon this charmless shore with the other flotsam; doomed like the skeletal constellations to a reiterative danse macabre, a spooky rerun — ever less intelligible — of the story of my life. Somewhere over there you plug away at your trade, stringing letters into words, words into sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters. Between us the international boundary surges past to flush itself over Niagara Falls, called by Canadians the toilet bowl of America.

Where are you? Where am I? What am I doing here in the Erie Motel, Ontario, Canada? I’ll tell you what.