Letters полностью

There is no rush to fill the vacant roles, inasmuch as your Drama, like soap opera, is being reenacted in real time. Hence Prinz’s and Ambrose Mensch’s interest, depite the cast’s including Mensch’s ex-mistress and ex-wife and Prinz’s current mistress. On June 1, Trinity Sunday, as the Fenians began their invasion of Ontario from Black Rock and Captain Lawrence aboard the Chesapeake enjoined his crew not to give up the ship and President Madison read his 2nd War Message to the U.S. Congress, the Doctor once again prescribed in the Progress and Advice Room that you Enter the Teaching Profession as therapy for your Seizures of Immobility.

“There must be a rigid discipline,” he quoted himself from the script, “or else it will be merely an occupation, not an occupational therapy. There must be a body of laws… Tell them you will teach grammar. English grammar… You will teach prescriptive grammar. Now really, Horner: is that your Idea of Plausible Dialogue?”

The next scene will not occur until July 19, a full month hence, when Generalissimo Franco will take Cadiz, Cordova, Granada, Huelva, and Seville while the German army begins its retreat from Belgium and you Leave Baltimore for the Eastern Shore to Look for a Room in Wicomico and Prepare yourself for the Interview which you Innocently Believe to be scheduled for the following day.

Meanwhile, things have not been standing still at the Remobilization Farm. How Drive from Baltimore next month across the Chesapeake to Wicomico without leaving Ontario? Why, by magicking the P & A Room from the one into the other, as the wizards of Stratford magic a bare arena stage into Windsor Castle or Prospero’s Island. And how Reenter the Teaching Profession while in residential therapy? Why, by mobilizing the Farm into the Niagara Frontier Underground University! The dropouts — a touch homesick, it may be — had proposed to Saint Joe a free school: he is obliging them, in his capacity as U.U.‘s unofficial chancellor and history department, with seminars in U.S. Hawkery from 1812 to the present; in the 19th-century American Counterexpansionists; in the Role of Upper Canada as a Haven for Loyalists, Escaped Slaves, Secessionists, Indians, Conscientious Objectors, and Other Refugees from U.S. Violence. Casteene is conducting private tutorials in something called the Game of Governments. Tombo X is teaching karate. And to mollify the geriatrics, who have pressed for straightforward continuing education in the manner of their beloved Chautauqua Institution, you yourself are Offering “far-in” counter-countercultural drills in Prescriptive Grammar, or Repressive English. Restrictive clauses. Close punctuation. The Wave of the Past.

And “Rennie Morgan”—as Bibi/Bea Golden/Jeannine Mack now calls herself even offstage, as it were — in her new capacity as U.U.’s faculty of drama, is producing a small theatrical of her own, a replay-within-the-replay: some sort of “radical minstrel show” inspired by her tidewater Maryland connections, by Mr. Prinz’s unexplained wish to include some showboat footage in his film, and by her desire to demonstrate to her lover that she is possessed of an awakening social consciousness. You and Morgan are to play in blackface Bones and Tambo, respectively, the End Men. The Doctor (pace Jean Genet) is to be coaxed into whiteface to take the part of Mister Interlocutor. Tombo X will perform poorly on both the tambourine and the bones, to demonstrate that he has no sense of rhythm whatever, either natural or acquired. Casteene will do a series of impersonations. Pocahontas, you Suppose, will sing “Indian Love Call.” And “Rennie” will play “Bea Golden” playing “the Mary Pickford of the Chesapeake” as on Captain James Adams’s old floating theater. Performance scheduled for tomorrow night, or the one after, to coincide with the Sun’s entry into Cancer (and the birthdays of Errol Flynn and Jacques Offenbach, and the Black Hole of Calcutta atrocity, and Lord Byron’s first meeting Mme de Staël at Lady Jersey’s salon in London, and the Tennis Court Oath, and the U.S.A.’s adoption of the Great Seal, and West Virginia’s admission into the Union). You have Suggested it be called A Midsummer Night’s Mare.