Letters полностью

As we have seen, all doors open for the maker of movies. Reg Prinz & Co. had preceded us to Buffalo, and a bit of judicious PR had evidently preceded him. Both local campuses of the state university, I don’t have to tell you, have modest but active departments of film, and I gather the city prides itself generally on its hospitality to new art. A word to the right people that Prinz will be “echoing” the Scajaquada Creek Battle of 1814 has put at his disposal, with attendant fanfare, as much of Delaware Park (through which Scajaquada Creek runs, I learned yesterday, dammed now to form Delaware Park Lake but memorialised by an eponymous expressway) as he needs for as long as he needs it, plus the resources of the flanking institutions: the Erie County Historical Society and the Albright-Knox Museum of Art. Plus more graduate-student volunteer helpers than he can sort out, all eager to improve their credentials, and at least half of them (so it seems to me) stoned out of their American minds.

We were scarcely checked into this unpronounceable motel (accent on the antepenultimate) before being whisked off last evening to a cocktail buffet in the Park Pavilion, hosted by the directors of the institutions aforecited. Hello from a cultural attaché of the mayor. Welcoming statements from the two curators, praising what they took to be our combination, in this Belligerently Antihistorical Decade, of the historical foretime and the avant-garde present, a combination nowhere more aptly symbolised than in the architecture and the collection of the museum beside us: half Greek revival and half front-edge contemporary. Trustees and local patrons of the arts turned out spiffily in evening clothes among the jeans and patches of the with-it young. Whatever justice there may be in the proverbial put-downs of Buffalo, N.Y., I found it agreeable indeed to be back in a genuine city, among what appeared to be genuinely civilised folk: the black-tie crowd and the blue-jean crowd on easy terms; the night balmy; the catering not bad at all; the sweet smell of Cannabis sativa mixed with that of roses, pipe tobacco, and chafing-dish chicken tetrazzini; taped rock music on the pavilion P.A. Add Ambrose’s new mildness, the contrast with Dorset Heights, the being back in my own clothes, even the absence of humidity and mosquitoes — I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Joe Morgan was there! Come over from the Farm as historical consultant (A. B. Cook, it seems, remained behind in Maryland), he was more conventionally dressed than at last sight, but still long-haired, necklaced, somewhat crazed-appearing about the eyes. In the spirit of the evening I was delighted to see him; we hugged hello and had a good talk. Crazed or not, Morgan has still his low-keyed, quick-smiling, intense, but almost boyish authority, once so appealing to his students and colleagues. He has I gather rather taken over the Farm, by his natural leadership, since the Doctor’s death, but we didn’t speak of that. We talked History for a bit, apropos of the occasion, two ex-professionals reminiscing: How a pathetic remnant of the Iroquois League, some 100 warriors, fought on the American side under General Brown in these last engagements on the Niagara Frontier, hoping to retain what was left of their reservations in western New York. How underrated by historians was the influence of anti-British sentiment among French Canadians generally throughout the war, and the particular Anglophobia of wealthy French refugees from the Terror, who like Mme de Staël had bought huge landholdings along Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, but who unlike her had emigrated, raised impressive châteaux in the forests, and after 1814 confidently expected fallen Napoleon to appear among them and establish a sovereign French-Canadian state. Et cetera.

When Ambrose and Bea — separately — joined us, the talk turned to gossip. My lover had been dancing with, of all people, Ms. Merope Bernstein — remember? — who, her bum apparently mended, had come over from the Farm with Morgan and their polyglot comrades: a large black girl, a somewhat sinister-looking Latin, and an echt Manhattan greaser of indeterminate ethnicity. Her quondam stepmother had been dancing with this last, looking alas neither unattractive nor out of place in a boutique redskin outfit — Tuscarora mod? — and came to our table clearly to flirt with Morgan in demonstration of her indifference to us. I paid her no mind. Ambrose merely smiled. Joe indulged her lap-perching and osculatory effusions with mild indifference. Bea soon went off to find her Reggie.