I think I know enough of my ex-lover’s preoccupations with the medium of fiction to guess what he might have attempted in those pages: not only (instead of a blank sheet) a full and gorgeous love letter from Whom It Concerned to Yours Truly — much too full for the camera to follow its inditing or a Voice-over to intone — but a text whose language is preponderantly nonvisual, even nonsensory in its reference. How many postcoital apostrophes I heard from him, in June, whilst I up-ended for his low-motile swarmers, upon the peculiarly noncinematic properties of written fiction! Composed in private, to be read in private, at least in silence and virtual immobility, author and reader one to one like lovers — his letter would ideally have been a sort of story, told instead of shown, exploiting such anticinematical characteristics as, say, authorial omniscience and interpretation, perhaps some built-in ironic “discount” in the narrative viewpoint, interior monologue, reflexion. Its language would be its sine qua non: heightened, strange, highly figurative — and speculative, analytical, as often abstract as concrete. It would summarise, consider, adjudicate; it would interrupt, contradict itself, refer its Dear Reader to before and behind the sentence in progress. It would say the unseeable, declare the impossible. I have even argued with Ambrose, warmly, that such defining of his medium, however understandable the impulse among writers who feel their ancient dominion usurped by film, is strictly unnecessary: that the words It is raining are as essentially different from motion pictures of falling rain as are either from the actual experience of precipitation…
O Elysian June, when I was miserable with instead of without him!
Oh and who knows whether he wrote anything of the sort! I cannot imagine Bea Golden sitting still for It was the best of times and the worst of times, not to mention It is raining; it is not raining! Indeed I cannot account at all for her enthrallment by any sort of text. Did Ambrose offer her the female lead in his next novel? Did Prinz arrange his own “defeat,” and only pretend chagrin, to chuck a Dido of his own? Is Bea — dear God, the notion just occurs to me, 40 pages late! Is she now playing the only woman I know to have been literally deflowered by a (capped) fountain pen, and seduced thereafter time and again by aging wielders of that instrument? Has she taken the role as well as the lover of
Yours truly?!
<p><strong>~ ~ ~</strong></p>E: Todd Andrews to his father. Further evidence that his life is recycling: 11 R.
Todds Point, Maryland
Friday, June 20, 1969
Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d
Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery
Cambridge, Maryland 21613
Dear dead Dad,
Even as declared beneath the old Mack Enterprises trademark (about to be retired by majority vote of the directors), Praeteritas Futuras Fecundant. If I am no longer interested in your ancient suicide, I’m presently more involved than ever in the recapitulation of my past. My Todays, since Jane Mack reseduced me five weeks ago today, are spent in watchful anticipation of Tomorrow’s reenactment of Yesterday. What praeteritas will be fecundated next? So my interminable Inquiry sleeps (inconclusive but, I think, done with) while my Letter to you flourishes as never since I commenced it in 1920: three installments already since Groundhog Day, and the year’s calendar but half turned!
I’m at my cottage, Dad, out on my point, at sixes and sevens. It is earlier than I’d thought. I’ve been fretting and fussing about here all day, getting the house ready, getting the grounds ready, getting the boat ready Just In Case, not answering the phone (even though it might be Jane calling off our “date”!) because I’m supposed to be over in Baltimore on business. I am surprised at myself: an emotion I thought I had lost the capacity for.
I, I, I: such self-absorption!
Tomorrow Now is the new Mack Enterprises slogan, beneath a streamlined logo devised by Jane’s PR folk. No more hands across the years from things past to things to come; no more sailing ships, airliners, smokestacks, hay fields, tractors. Within a circular field, white above and gules below, the company’s initials azure in a loopy script which also forms the field’s perimeter, so:
Each loop carrying into one moiety the other’s color. The whole resembling, from any distance, a Yang/Yin done by a patriotic Italo-American spaghetti bender and, closer up, evocative of U.S. imperialism and isolationism at once: US become me and inflated to a global insularity.
