Joe Morgan. Oh, John: much changed! And yet, plus ça change… Whether he is “your” Joe Morgan is not for me to say — my sense is that it were dangerous, not to mention tactless, to press that question; nobody here does, either with “St Joe” or with any of the others — but he is most certainly “mine,” under howsoever altered a complexion: the courteous, intense, scholarly, boyish intellectual historian (in both senses) who so aided my researches at the Maryland Historical Society and later hired me at Marshyhope. Then, his simplicity, lucidity, and energetic gentleness covered (as we thought) a complexity, a mystery, perhaps even a violence: a darkness obscured by light, for which your tale of adultery, abortion, and death provided at least a fictive explanation. Now things seem reversed: the gentleness is still there, but it seems fierce; the mystery, irrationality, even mysticism, are on the surface; he has “done” the heavy psychedelics; his mind is “bent,” by his own admission (but not “blown”) — yet his account of his motives, his “reappreciation of the secret life of objects,” his “delinearisation of history,” all seem (at least when he’s speaking of them) as pellucid as William James’s rational chapter on the mystical experience, or Morgan’s own essay on Cheerful American Nihilism. His defeat last year by John Schott at Marshyhope must have been the penultimate straw; I gather something snapped at Amherst, and his friend “Casteene” arranged his coming to the Farm. I would not care to be in Jacob Horner’s saddle oxfords.
Being in my sneakers and penny loafers is no picnic, either. So many words, so many pages (Werther’s longest letter, that one of 16 June 1771 describing his introduction to Charlotte on the 11th, is a mere nine pages), and even so I’ve not mentioned “U.U.,” the Underground University of Senior Citizens and draft evaders organised at the Farm by Morgan and Casteene, in which Jacob Horner will presumably teach when the time comes. Or the minstrel show (based dimly on your Floating Opera!) rehearsing under “Bibi’s” direction for performance a week hence — by when, God willing, Ambrose and I will be out of this madhouse, with whatever scars; away from this eerie powder keg of cross-purposes and unsettled scores; back home (so it seems already; I would never have supposed!) to dear damp Marshyhope and our late commencement exercises.
But next Saturday’s Doctor of Letters has just put down his pen for the day. I must therefore put down mine: close my letter, open my legs: then out to the Fort, the Farm, the Falls, and whatever further setups and put-downs the afternoon holds for your
Germaine
P.S.: Prinz and Ambrose be damned, I intend of course to seek you out whilst we’re filming at Chautauqua and Lily Dale next week, if the post office will tell me where on that rural delivery route your cottage is. I promise not to be a nuisance — you’re not the first writer I ever met! — but we really should talk, don’t you think?
S: Lady Amherst to the Author. Her conversation with “Monsieur Casteene.” A fiasco on Chautauqua Lake. A Visit to Lily Dale, N.Y., Spiritualist Capital of America.
24 L St, Dorset Heights
Saturday, 21 June 1969
John,
So: back in Maryland, on the morning of the year’s longest day, and thoroughly alarmed, confused, distressed. I shan’t degrade myself further by enlarging for you upon my week, since clearly you do not wait for these reports with bated breath — perhaps not even with tempered curiosity. From Monday through Thursday last I was on and about your Chautauqua Lake, in weather as gray and chill as northern Europe’s: not like our proper Maryland Junes! On the Sunday prior, at Fort Erie, I’d had my remarkable conversation with “Monsieur Casteene,” in course of which he retailed to me such an astonishing and unexpected history of his connexions with yourself that on the Monday, when Ambrose and I were installed in Chautauqua’s old Athenaeum, I got your number from the operator and straightway rang you up. No answer, then or later. On the Tuesday — whilst Ambrose scribbled at his Perseus story and counterplotted against Reg Prinz within the ad libitum plot of their screenplay — I drove our hired car around the lake to your cottage, aided by directions from the rural postman. It was Chautaugua all over again, minus Mr Cook’s blank receptionist: the modest cottage, the tidy grounds, the seawall and dock, boats tethered at their moorings — and no one at home.
