Letters (19 page)

I shook my head. “Just fishing, Jimmy. Much obliged.” And I turned my back on all of them, not knowing whether they or my banging heart would let me regain the second lamppost.

They did, and here are five postscripts to the anecdote:

1. Both bridges still stand, across which so much traffic moves from Baltimore and Washington to the ocean that the state is constructing new ones beside the old to accommodate the flow: 90% white, though the cities from which they stream are more than 50% black. Had our quarter-hour drama occurred on a summer Sunday night, the Route 50 traffic would have been backed up for a dozen miles. I despise this saturation of our Eastern Shore enough to wish sometimes that
all
the bridges were blown; but I take at last the Tragic View of progress, as well as of insularity. These 1960’s have been a disaster; the 70’s will be another—but the 50’s don’t bear recollecting either, not to mention the 40’s, 30’s, 20’s, 10’s. History is a catenation of disasters, redeemable only (and imperfectly) by the Tragic View.

2. The young men in the hearse went home, revised their plans, and fetched in H. “Rap” Brown to liven up the movement’s oratory and focus the media on their grievances. Arson ensued. But so far from “burning Whitey down”—for any serious attempt at
that
they’d have been massacred—the incendiaries were Effectively Contained in the Second Ward. When alarmed black families then appealed to have the white volunteer fire department sent in to deal with the blazes, they were told, in effect:
You
brought that bastard to town; put out your own fires. And so the sufferers from the riots—and from the crudest second-person plural in the grammar books—were all black. But this is not news to you. Only the Tragic View will do, and it not very satisfactorily. Must one take the tragic view of the Tragic View?

3. Some while after, when Mr. Brown had been arrested and his venue changed, Goatee, Tank-Top, and possibly Sy the timer man blew themselves inadvertently sky-high, as follows: I had considered reporting to Jimmy Harris the contents and objectives of both the Pontiac hearse and the Chevrolet pickup; but though I believe profoundly in the institutions of justice under the law, I can manage at best no more than the Tragic View of their actual operation. Therefore on second thought I considered reporting neither. But while the bark of both the black militants and the red-neck vigilantes was worse than their bite, the former were a threat much more to property than to people, the latter vice versa, and one’s BLTVH sympathies are of course all with the hearse in this matter (even though, to complicate things, some of those red-necks are friends of mine: good-hearted, high-principled, even lovable people except where certain prejudices are touched. And at least one of those blacks happens to have been a hopeless sociopath. The Tragic View!).

Thus it was the Pontiac, not the Chevy, I’d intercepted and tried to reason with; thus it was the Chevy I reported, by telephone from Joe Reed’s office to the Easton state police barracks when Joe closed the draw. That evening I informed Drew that I’d done so, and that the red-necks in turn, if questioned, would surely identify the hearse, its occupants and intentions, as would I if interrogated under oath as a witness in the matter. Drew and company prudently thereupon changed vehicles and left town, resolved to dynamite any courthouse where their hero was to stand trial. But as in the field of cesarean sutures, for example, big-city expertise in the field of high-explosive terrorism is less readily available to us home folks: Sy’s timer (or something) misfired outside a little village across the Bay as the group—minus Drew, temporarily outcast for his connections with me—motored toward its first new target. The remains were unidentifiable, almost unlocatable. There was chortling among conservatives, tongue-tisking among us Stock Liberals.

“Goatee,” their leader, was, I then learned, Dorothy Miner’s son, Yvonne’s brother, Drew’s brother-in-law, whom Dorothy had toiled to put through high school and college: an easygoing youngster turned terrorist by his reading of history at a black branch campus of the state university. “Tank-Top,” whom I’d taken for vintage ghetto, turned out to be the child of third-generation-affluent New England educators; he had discovered his negritude as a twelfth-former at the Phillips Exeter Academy, become a militant at Magdalen College (Oxford), and exquisitely exchanged his natural Boston-Oxbridge accent and wardrobe for what we heard and saw above. His major passions in student days had been rugby and the novels of William Dean Howells.

4. My bait had been taken by a fair-size croaker, or hardhead, increasingly rare in these waters where once they abounded. A fellow fisherman had thoughtfully unwound my tackle from the lamppost and played him for me through the foregoing. Now he returned the gear to me and stood by with his companions for the reel-in. As sometimes happens in bridge fishing, where the game isn’t caught until it’s in the basket, my prize, well hooked and played, flipped itself free midway between river and roadway and splashed home.

“That a heart-buster now, ain’t it?” my colleague commiserated, and went back to his own lamppost.

5. But it wasn’t, as my survival to this sentence attests; no more than the Argonne Forest had been, or my evening in Captain Adams’s Floating Theatre, or any other
mauvais quart d’heure
of my life to this, including that mauvaisest just recounted. At the end of your
Floating Opera
story, 37-year-old Todd Andrews, his attempt at suicide-by-holocaust having fizzled, imagines he’ll probably go on living one day at a time, as he has thitherto; the cardiac report of the doctor you call Marvin Rose (now dead of—you guessed it) is of no interest to him. And the 54-year-old Todd Andrews who has been telling the story of his Dark Night of the Soul gives us no clue to that report, though his tone and attitude—not to mention the fact of his narrative—imply the fulfillment of his expectations. Now, as I left the bridge with Polly Lake, I realized that my heart had finally ratified my change of policy of some years past, when I’d ceased to pay for my Dorset Hotel room one night at a time and moved for the most part out to that cottage I’d bought from the Macks:
i.e.,
that I was fated to no less than the normal life expectancy of male WASP Americans of my generation; that that old Damoclean diagnosis of bacterial endocarditis had been for me ever at least as much a spiritual need as a physical fact; and that just as the fact had gradually long since become irrelevant, the need had imperceptibly passed as well.

So I saw, retrospectively, with sharp suddenness as we left the bridge. The river was still; Polly Lake’s nose perspired despite her car’s air conditioning as she chattered crisply about Nice Young Jimmy Harris, whom she’d known as a schoolboy and lost track of till today. I couldn’t answer; she attributed my incapacity to excitement, nervous exhaustion—which it surely was, but not from the encounter itself. I trembled toward a vast new insight, which I was far from confident I could cope with: the virtual opposite of the one I reached in my old memoir. There I premised that “nothing has intrinsic value”; here I began to feel (I can scarcely enounce it; have yet to lay hold of its excruciating, enormous implications)… that Nothing
has
intrinsic value… which is as much as to say:
Everything
has intrinsic value!

I don’t know what I’m saying; I’m no philosopher; I despise cheap mysticism, trashy transcendencies. But the river, every crab and nettle on the swinging tide, every gull and oyster and mosquito, not to mention Drew and Tank-Top, Polly Lake, Joe Reed, Jimmy Harris, the Choptank Bridge—and my late father, and the Mother I Never Knew, and Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, all her husbands, and
her
mother, who once came to me naked and by surprise on a humming summer noon a hundred years ago, and all the creatures of the past, the present, the future—they all are precious! Were precious! Will be precious!

I wept for history. I came perilously close to something “beyond” the Tragic View. Polly understood, suggested we stop somewhere for a bracer. We did, aboard my skipjack in the Municipal Basin, where she has often been my companion. I felt a need to drift with time and tide on something intimately seasoned, crafted, nobly weathered yet still graceful: my
Osborn Jones
and good Polly Lake both filled that bill. Cold Molson’s Ale returned the Mystic Vision to incipience, restored me to my home waters: rationalist-skeptical BLTVHism, where I am still moored—though with dock lines thenceforth and to this hour singled up, ready to cast off for that strange new landfall briefly glimpsed.

I had meant to end the historical part of this letter with a fuller account of Harrison Mack’s “decline” and Lady Amherst’s artful comforting of his last years. But my morning allotted to letter writing has moved ahead into early afternoon; I must go down to the boatyard and attend to brightwork on
Osborn Jones.
Therefore I shall skip the account of Jane Mack’s visit to my office last week: her curious confession, her disquieting combination of shrewdness, candor, and obliviousness. Your retelling of it notwithstanding, I cannot say confidently that Jane even
remembers
our old love affair! It is in any case
as if
it had never happened. Remarkable, that the bridge between fact and fiction, like that between Talbot and Dorchester, is a two-way street.

I’ve gone on at this length and with this degree of confidentiality because, with respect to your solicitation, like E. M. Forster I could not know what I thought till I saw what I said. Having said so much, as if to tease or dare you into making use of it, I find my reservations still strong, though not quite final. The rumors current, that Reg Prinz’s company will film that old showboat story on location, promise me renewed discomfort, the more so if, coincident with the county’s Tercentenary and the dedication of Marshyhope’s “Tower of Truth” (both occasions of local pride), you were to publish another satiric novel with an Eastern Shore setting and a character named Todd Andrews. Certain of my current “cases”—in particular the threatened litigation between Jane and Drew over Harrison’s estate—are of perhaps more delicacy and moment than any I’ve handled since the ones you described, almost plausibly, in your
Opera.
Not just my welfare and the Macks’ are involved, but the Tidewater Foundation, its multifarious philanthropies, and (so Drew declares) even Larger Stakes.

All which items, to be sure, have dramatic potential, and are almost fictional in their factual state. But I’m not an
homme de lettres;
my dealings are with the actual lives of actual people, and if my view of them is tragical, it’s not exploitative.

But no matter. I beg pardon for speaking like a literary advisor, even like a father, when in fact it’s you who are in a sense
my
father, the engenderer of “Todd Andrews.” But
(a)
I’m old enough to
be
your father;
(b)
my own principal literary production has been that
Letter to My Father
(now younger than I am!), which this “letter to my son” threatens to rival in prolixity; and
(c)
never having had a son of my own, it’s a tone I’m prone to, as Drew does not fail to remind me.

So what am I saying? That I shall consider your invitation further over Easter (anniversary of another famous sequel, more ambiguous than Napoleon’s Hundred Days) and rereply. Meanwhile, I must caution you against rising fictively to any of the factual bait I’ve herein chummed the tide with, or reusing my name without my express permission. I say this in no sense to rattle sabers; only to apprise you, like a telltale on the luff of your imagination, that you’re sailing very close to the wind. And not yet with my approval and consent, though decidedly with my most cordial

4/3/69

To Marlon Brando, Doris Day, Henry IV, George Herbert, Washington Irving, happy birthday. Dante has found himself lost in the Dark Wood. Napoleon is occupying Rome. In Palm Springs, college students are rioting. Passover began at sunset. The Pony Express commences mail service today between Sacramento and St. J______, Missouri. James Earl Ray is appealing his 99-year sentence. “U.N.” troops are pushing the Chinese back across the 38th Parallel in Korea. The U.S. has opened warfare against Chief Black Hawk to drive the Fox and Sac Indians across the Mississippi. The Vietnamese peace talks have resumed in Paris: no progress. And you Failed Again to Complete your Suicide, well begun in 1953 and repromised in your Letter of March 6.

Scriptotherapy.

Since that letter, the
Ark
and the
Dove
have reached Maryland with Lord Baltimore’s first colonists; Hannah Dustin has been captured by Indians in Haverhill, Mass., Geronimo has surrendered to General Crook in Mexico and escaped; Patrick Henry has delivered his liberty-or-death speech to the revolutionary convention in Richmond, which inclines to the former; Jacob Horner has been Born on President Madison’s 172nd birthday, has Left College on his own 28th (Madison’s 200th), has first been Fetched From Immobility by the Doctor, and has Turned 46 on Madison’s 218th, no returns anticipated. The U.S.S.
Hornet
has captured the
Penguin.
Andrew Jackson has defeated the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend; Jean Lafitte has burned Galveston and disappeared with his Baratarians; President Madison (60) has disclosed the Henry Letters to Congress; the
Monitor
has damaged the
Merrimac
in Hampton Roads; Napoleon has 86 left of his 100 Days; Parliament has repealed the Stamp Act, too late now; Oliver Hazard Perry is building his Lake Erie fleet at Presque Isle, Pa. Not to Mention Blticher’s entry with the Allies into Paris; the Commune’s burning of the Tuileries; the Confederate evacuations of Petersburg and Richmond; Czar Nicholas’s abdication; De Forest’s first exhibition of talking films at the Rivoli in New York City; the founding of Rhode Island and the U.S. Navy; Germany’s declaration of war on Portugal; Dr. Goddard’s launching of the first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Mass.; Hitler’s invasion of Austria, occupation of Bohemia, and rejection of the Versailles Treaty; Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection; Martin Luther King Jr.‘s march from Selma to Montgomery; Sieur de La Salle’s murder by his own men in Texas; Madrid’s surrender to General Franco; Franklin Roosevelt’s first Fireside Chat; Russia’s sale of Alaska to the U.S., blockade of Berlin, and invasion of Persia; the U.S.‘s conquest of Iwo Jima, invasion of Okinawa, and suppression of the Philippine insurgents; Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, N.M., and General Pershing’s invasion of Mexico to kill or capture him. When you Were, in a sense, Jacob Horner, you Interested yourself, at the Doctor’s prescription, in such events. Now you Merely Acknowledge calendric resonances, the anniversary view of history, and Catalogue them by Alphabetical Priority.