Andrews.
Jerome Bonaparte Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752
March 4, 1969
Mr. Todd Andrews
Executive Director, Tidewater Foundation
c/o Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys
Court Lane Cambridge, Md. 21613
Dear Mr. Andrews:
Every ointment has a chink. Agreeable as it was to meet last month the executive director of the Tidewater Foundation—benefactor of our LILYVAC project and thus midwife as it were to the 2nd Revolution—we regret that our meeting was occasioned by the funeral of His Royal Highness Harrison Mack II: the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most RESET If we seemed to you (or to the widowed queen or the royal mistress) distracted, even “tranced” that afternoon, we plead our bereavement (but Le roi est mort; vive le roi!) and the season. Even now our winter rest period is not ended; we can scarcely hold pen to page for drowsiness; we must count on another to RESET Yet we cannot leave this topic without presuming to warn you against Ambrose M., that person who chauffeured you to Mr. Mack’s funeral and is so bent on ingratiating himself in our circle. Never mind his attentions to Lady A. and to Miss Bea Golden, whose beautiful name he is not worthy to pronounce: our information is that A.M. is the tool and creature of the Defendant hereinafter named: we say no more.
R. Prinz, too, must be dealt with. But that is another matter.
Enclosed (with its own enclosures) is a letter we are posting today to Buffalo, N.Y. It is our intention to bring an action for plagiarism against the addressee. Since, in your capacities as director of and counsel to the Tidewater Foundation, you are the only attorney with whom we have connection, it is our wish to retain you as our counsel in this suit. Unless, indeed, you agree with us that the Foundation itself should bring the action in our behalf.
Our principal complaint, set forth in the attached, is the Defendant’s perversion (into his “novel” Giles Goat-Boy, 1966) of our Revised New Syllabus of the Grand Tutor Harold Bray. But that is merely the latest and chiefest of his crimes against us, which extend the length of our bibliography. To wit:
a. The Shoals of Love, or, Drifting and Dreaming, by “J. A. Beille” (Backwater, Md.: Wetlands Press, 1957): a novel in the format of a showboat minstrel show (But none of our books is mere fiction. See our letter to you of July 4, 1967, enclosed). Its ostensible subject is the star-crossed lovers Ebenezer and Florence, end-man and -woman of a blackface minstrel troupe aboard a drifting theater in the Chesapeake estuaries, whose love is thwarted by the heroine’s father, Mr. Interlocutor. Ebenezer is driven to the brink of humanism until Florence discovers a way to communicate with him not only despite but through her father, as a cunning wrestler turns his adversary’s strength to his RESET By means of double-entendres in the minstrel-show routine (echoing of course the great double-entendre of the “novel” itself) the lovers conduct their pathetic intercourse. The story climaxes with Flo’s ingenious re-choreography of the “breakdown” dance, which itself climaxes the nightly show, into an elaborate kinetic code, not unlike the worker-dance “language” that inspires her: its message is that Eb must sink the Floating Theatre that very night and fly with Flo to some hive of refuge. Whether or not Eb gets the message is heartbreakingly left for the reader to wonder—as the Author, no less heartbroken, wonders whether his lost parents are getting his message through the pseudofictive text. See Enclosure #3.
b. The W_sp, by “Jean Blanque” (Wetlands Press, 1959): the terse companion piece to Shoals. Its anonymous hero, a handsome young entomologist from a small agricultural college in Maryland, doing field work on Batesian mimicry in the Dorchester marshes, comes to realize that, as if “bitten by the love-bog,” he esteems the objects of his researches above his human partners;
Jerome Bonaparte Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752
March 4, 1969
Mr. Todd Andrews
Executive Director, Tidewater Foundation
c/o Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys
Court Lane Cambridge, Md. 21613
Dear Mr. Andrews:
Every ointment has a chink. Agreeable as it was to meet last month the executive director of the Tidewater Foundation—benefactor of our LILYVAC project and thus midwife as it were to the 2nd Revolution—we regret that our meeting was occasioned by the funeral of His Royal Highness Harrison Mack II: the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most RESET If we seemed to you (or to the widowed queen or the royal mistress) distracted, even “tranced” that afternoon, we plead our bereavement (but Le roi est mort; vive le roi!) and the season. Even now our winter rest period is not ended; we can scarcely hold pen to page for drowsiness; we must count on another to RESET Yet we cannot leave this topic without presuming to warn you against Ambrose M., that person who chauffeured you to Mr. Mack’s funeral and is so bent on ingratiating himself in our circle. Never mind his attentions to Lady A. and to Miss Bea Golden, whose beautiful name he is not worthy to pronounce: our information is that A.M. is the tool and creature of the Defendant hereinafter named: we say no more.
R. Prinz, too, must be dealt with. But that is another matter.
Enclosed (with its own enclosures) is a letter we are posting today to Buffalo, N.Y. It is our intention to bring an action for plagiarism against the addressee. Since, in your capacities as director of and counsel to the Tidewater Foundation, you are the only attorney with whom we have connection, it is our wish to retain you as our counsel in this suit. Unless, indeed, you agree with us that the Foundation itself should bring the action in our behalf.
Our principal complaint, set forth in the attached, is the Defendant’s perversion (into his “novel” Giles Goat-Boy, 1966) of our Revised New Syllabus of the Grand Tutor Harold Bray. But that is merely the latest and chiefest of his crimes against us, which extend the length of our bibliography. To wit:
a. The Shoals of Love, or, Drifting and Dreaming, by “J. A. Beille” (Backwater, Md.: Wetlands Press, 1957): a novel in the format of a showboat minstrel show (But none of our books is mere fiction. See our letter to you of July 4, 1967, enclosed). Its ostensible subject is the star-crossed lovers Ebenezer and Florence, end-man and -woman of a blackface minstrel troupe aboard a drifting theater in the Chesapeake estuaries, whose love is thwarted by the heroine’s father, Mr. Interlocutor. Ebenezer is driven to the brink of humanism until Florence discovers a way to communicate with him not only despite but through her father, as a cunning wrestler turns his adversary’s strength to his RESET By means of double-entendres in the minstrel-show routine (echoing of course the great double-entendre of the “novel” itself) the lovers conduct their pathetic intercourse. The story climaxes with Flo’s ingenious re-choreography of the “breakdown” dance, which itself climaxes the nightly show, into an elaborate kinetic code, not unlike the worker-dance “language” that inspires her: its message is that Eb must sink the Floating Theatre that very night and fly with Flo to some hive of refuge. Whether or not Eb gets the message is heartbreakingly left for the reader to wonder—as the Author, no less heartbroken, wonders whether his lost parents are getting his message through the pseudofictive text. See Enclosure #3.
b. The W_sp, by “Jean Blanque” (Wetlands Press, 1959): the terse companion piece to Shoals. Its anonymous hero, a handsome young entomologist from a small agricultural college in Maryland, doing field work on Batesian mimicry in the Dorchester marshes, comes to realize that, as if “bitten by the love-bog,” he esteems the objects of his researches above his human partners;