On what grounds does G. get sacked for A.‘s misconduct? (Ambrose was arrested too, but no charges placed; his part-time connexion with MSU is of course terminated; the board of regents will doubtless revoke his degree at their next meeting.) Schott needed no grounds: I was nontenured; my contract was renewable year by year. Even so, there are protocols of due notice; the American Association of University Professors has its rules and guidelines, I don’t have to tell you. Was I inclined to invoke them, Schott wanted to know on the Sunday, when he got ’round to ringing me up? I jolly was! Why then, says he, our grounds will be either Moral Turpitude or Academic Incompetence Stemming from Mental Instability, depending. Depending on bloody what? Why, depending just for one example on whether my behaviour as confessed in my letter to you of 7 June, of which they had the carbon, was real or fantasized: e.g., my Living in Sin with Ambrose (Schott actually used that term), my use of illegal drugs, my generally immoral and profligate course of life. If I did not repudiate my letter, Moral Turpitude; if I did, Mental Instability, which my sudden change of manner and costume frankly inclined him to favour. Even the fact that I would type out such a document in my office, to a man I did not know personally, and make a carbon, argued the latter. To be sure, the 18-page document was unsigned; but there were emendations in my hand. No one could deny me my day in court, if I was determined to Hang It All Out; but…
I hung it all up. God damn writing! This bloody farking scribbler’s itch that you (most recently) seduced me into scratching! (Write > M.E. writen > O.E. writan: to tear or scratch. Ditto scribe, and pace Ambrose.) Yes, yes, yes: that one time — when, like this, I was in the office, and for a change not longhanding it — I made a carbon, such a relief it was to feel businesslike when Ambrose had begun to make a public arse of me with such a vengeance. It gave my weekly confession at once a more official and (what have I to lose now?) a more fictitious aspect: as if I were a writer writing first-person fiction, an epistolary novelist composing — and editing, alas, in holograph — instead of a stateless 50-year-old widow, failed mother, failed writer, and scholar of no consequence, tyrannised and humiliated by a younger “lover” as she enters her menopause with little to look back upon except abortive liaisons with a number of prominent novelists, and nothing to look forward to.
And of course it took me no time at all to feel a greater fool yet for making that carbon, for editing it, for writing to you in the first place; and I “destroyed” the copy (i.e., wadded and wastecanned it) but posted the letter; and Shirley Stickles got to the wastecan before the custodian did, unless that worthy was in on the plot too; and it was too late to undo the award to Ambrose, they’d just have to hope, but once they were safely past 21 June they’d cut off the pair of us, using my letter as their trump card…
Et voilà!
Well: I am at the end of my forties, and the rest. I have been carrying on like a madwoman, and madly confessing it by the ream. The crowning irony now occurs to me: that perhaps you too believe, at least suspect, that I’m making all this up! Fantasizing! Writing fiction!
Jee-bloody-farking-sus!
Alors: if I am truly turpitudinous, and not hallucinating my tender connexion with Doctor Mensch, then I am now altogether reliant upon that spectacularly unreliable fellow. My “hope” this time last week was that Marshyhope’s commencement might remind him fondly of ours. Ha! Now my only hope is that I’m pregnant, and that conceiving a bastard by that bastard will restore him to me and to his senses. Some hope, whilst he climbs all over Bea Golden (but not yet into her knickers, not yet, not yet) as the Baratarians reenact on Bloodsworth Island Admiral Cockburn’s Rape of Hampton, Virginia, in 1813!
Total, total disgrace, such as my namesake never knew. This dispossessed augur can scratch her poor encausticked penis across these miserable beech leaves no further. Where is the peace Mann promised his ruined
G?
O: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Fourth Stage concludes; the Fifth begins. Magda’s confession. The Gadfly fiasco reenacted: an Unfilmable Sequence.
24 L Street
Dorset Heights, Maryland 21612
5 July ’69
J.,
Oh, yes: still here. And still scratching.
