Letters полностью

He bowed, kissed my hand. Thus we parted, I trust forever — though I quite expect some version of A. B. Cook to appear at this afternoon’s festivities, disclaiming any connexion with M. Casteene or involvement in the foregoing conversation. The gentleman was not pleased. In particular he bade me reconsider the matter of the letters: if neither our past intercourse nor our son retained importance for me, would I not at least abet in this small way a cause larger than either, the cause of the Second Revolution? In which Henri, if things were managed skillfully, might well play a major rôle?

Bugger your Revolution, I’m afraid I said, and got out of there — that dreadful, spooky Farm, where the chief crop raised is ghosts of the past — and back to the Erie Motel.

And, I wish I could say, back to my understanding and sympathetic Ambrose. But though my lover affirms with each insemination his resolve to marry me once I’m preggers and The Movie Thing is done, this past week has been the hardest of our history. On the Monday and the Tuesday, making the most of the rare sunshine, Prinz shot footage of the Chautauqua Institution, the lake itself, and the vineyard country round about, though Ambrose acknowledges that nowhere do these appear in your writings. Bats figured as prominently as actors, flitting around the Miller Bell Tower, the cupola of the old Athenaeum, and (I ventured to suggest) the belfries of Reg Prinz and Ambrose Mensch. The former had been enchanted by the latter’s passing mention of the obscure, winged ascent of the villain “Harold Bray” at the end of your Goat-Boy novel; and though I can attest that as of where I am therein (halfway through) it is nowhere suggested that that charlatan is Batman, so he seems to be becoming in the film. Prinz himself rappelled down the tower by Monday’s twilight in cape and domino to carry off Bea Golden (aptly cast as your nymphomanic heroine Anastasia) and make threatening squeaks at Ambrose in the role of, near as I can guess, Himself playing the Author dressed as Giles the Goat-Boy: sheepskin vest and a horned helmet borrowed from the Chautauqua Opera Company’s prop room, Wagnerian section.

Perfectly preposterous, of course, and as aggressively unfaithful to the novel as Ambrose endeavours to be to me. I cannot make myself recount his pursuit of “Anastasia,” which, with Prinz’s obvious consent, no doubt even at his instruction, Bea permits, nay encourages, but does not (I believe, who am ready to believe the worst) yet reward. It is All Part of the Movie: but inasmuch as there is no discernible boundary between that wretched film and our lives, Ambrose’s conquest of her, when and if it occurs and whether on or off camera, will be Part of the Movie too, as is my ongoing humiliation. I hate it!

On the Tuesday evening a cast party was organised which culminated in a triumphant fiasco, enlarged the cast by at least one lunatic more, and altered the direction of the movie’s “plot.” Prinz chartered the Chautauqua excursion yacht Gadfly III; caterers provisioned it with bar and buffet; the Baratarians — augmented by musician friends from the resident theatre troupe, all there for preseason rehearsals — piled merrily aboard, and we set out from the institute dock in the last light (swallows, bats, cameras!) for a nautical carouse. Imagine Our Surprise when we discover our skipper for the evening to be Someone We’ve Met Before: no, not André-Castine-Andrew-Burlingame-Cook, at least not apparently, but a chap whom Ambrose tells me I should remember from Harrison Mack’s funeral (my mind was on other things), which Mr Bray attended as a beneficiary of the Tidewater Foundation’s misguided philanthropy.

One Jerome Bonaparte Bray of Lily Dale, N.Y., surely the original of your goat-boy’s nemesis. But your “Harold Bray” is only abstractly sinister, a sort of negative principle. The original, while of a lesser order of magnitude, is ever so much more alarming because he’s real, he’s mad as a hatter, and he is — or was—in charge of the bloody ship!