I tell you, I know Ventris was an architect.
Believe me, so does Leslie. She could have changed it.
But it would be just like her, on reading my gentle joke anent her politics, to leave in both the joke and my little slips of the pen, the latter as a kind of comeuppance for the former, and with, no doubt, the same self-satisfied smile I had when I wrote it. (If she had cut out the jokes, I wouldn’t have minded, really…) Well, perhaps my comments were over the mark. I know she takes such things seriously. More to the point, when she has talked seriously to me about them, she has been able from time to time to make me take them almost as seriously. Thus it is the one part of the whole enterprise I’ve actually been able to feel guilty about all this time. But such lingering guilt as mine, I know, suggests its origins were there well before Leslie, with Yavus trailing, came up that snowy slope.
All this, of course, is in the realm of speculation — which is to say I know Leslie well enough to speculate on it. What absolutely baffles me, however: What is Nevèrÿon? What is Bantam Books? (Hopefully a more recherché line out of some small North English university press. But I doubt it.) And who is this Delany? Why must we angle our correspondence through him? Iraq is bad enough! Leslie used to be enamored of a bizarre species of anti-literature (more generously called ‘paraliterature’ in the Pop. Cult. journals where some of her more eccentric offerings have appeared), published under gaudy paper covers — ‘scientifiction’ or some such. She would sit around the top floor of our student house, in jeans with frayed knees, and a foul sweatshirt, reading the stuff for hours, even writing reviews of it for benighted mimeographed publications its readers seemed to put out all over what I first thought limited to the civilized world but which, after I had seen a bit more, I soon realized included many places fairly uncivilized as well. It sounds like she’s gotten me involved, somehow, in this ‘SF,’ as she used to call it. (She actually would try to get me to read the stuff!) If that’s what she has gotten me involved with, I shall never be able to set boot in the mahogany-panelled halls of the Spade and Brush Club again. (Professor Loaffer will guffaw and bang me on the shoulder, and invite me for a pint, and ask rude questions about flying saucers until I have to say something rude in retort. Professor Cordovan, on the other hand, will not say anything at all!) Well, she’ll certainly have paid me back tenfold if that, indeed, is what she’s done with it!
She said ‘general readership.’ I thought she at least meant something on the order of The Atlantic, Harpers — a sketch for a more extensive coverage in, say, Scientific American.
I am appalled…!
I add these last paragraphs while the scar-faced gentleman in the very dusty jelabba, who sits stoically by the dirty white canvas tent in a strip of shade that does not quite extend to his brown, cracked toes, drinks slowly and steadily from a half-gallon canteen of Instant Country Time Lemonade, waiting for the evening to grow cool enough to resume his journey, taking with him the excavation team’s several letters (including this one, soon as I finish it), toward…is there really such a thing as civilization?
And, no, he’s not sure of the date either.
One of the things he brought, however, was a note from Abdullah Obtwana. Did you ever meet him? A lanky, large-handed, ebony-lipped youth — yes, another of Leslie’s acquisitions. His mother, who made a micro-fortune at some dubious profession in Nairobi, sent him to one or another of our insistently liberal universities on the Southern Rim to take a pre-med course. After three terms, his advisers asked him if he wouldn’t be happier moving to the agricultural college — and why didn’t he take remedial English on the side? Abdullah was amenable enough, but in the resultant student brouhaha, he came under Leslie’s…tutelage? More Brie. More sherry. (Was that the reception where I met you? You would remember, because Abdullah wore the adidas then — and raspberry red pants!) More luminous smiles — from a broad-cheeked face dark as the tenebricose pit. At any rate, through the desert grapevine (despite its wrinkled, desiccated fruits, its pale, tepid wines), news of my presence has reached him, less than a hundred miles away. He says he is coming to see us, here at the excavation site. He says he remembers our three evenings together with ‘an infinitude of pleasure.’ Don’t you find Africans delightfully formal? At the end of two of those evenings, neither one of us could stand! He’s bringing along a friend — from the details, not Leslie. The friend is male and probably young, since ‘he looks rather very good riding a camel.’ Rather very good indeed, I say! There will be pleasantry forthcoming in a day or ten, when Abdullah and friend ride up through the scrub — someone with whom to talk about my most recent discoveries and complain to of Leslie’s possible treacheries. Unless, of course, this tooth…but I dare not speculate!
All right, then, I’ll speculate: one of the books I am never without is my thin, green, India-paper edition of Layard’s Memoirs. Perhaps you, Hoequist, can say what character-masochism makes me return again and again to this account from 1840:
I had slept little, as I was suffering greatly…The sheikh declared that there was a skillful dentist in the encampment, and as the pain was almost unbearable, I made up my mind to put myself in his hands rather than endure it any longer. After cutting away at the gums he applied the awl to the root of the tooth, and, striking the other end with all his might, expected to see the tooth fly into the air. The awl slipped and made a severe wound in my palate. He insisted upon a second trial, declaring that he could not but succeed. But the only result was that he broke off a large piece of tooth, and I had suffered sufficient agony to decline a third experiment…
Enough of these McTeaguean horrors! (Really, I must go borrow Wellman’s Doughty to drive such daymares off.) I close now — indeed, I have to if I want this letter to go out this week, as the barefoot Berber gentleman has just upended his canteen over the ground and shaken loose not one drop of Country Time for the thirsting sands.
My best regards,
(signed:) S. L. Kermit
[Some physical description of Hoequist’s following letter may be appropriate here. The first two pages are typed on Corrasable bond; page 3 is typed on the back of a Xerox of pages 8/9 of Winnie Ille Pooh — on which someone has marked the long vowels in red ballpoint. Page 4 is typed on the verso of a purple hectographed reading list, in over-sized Cyrillic characters. Thence to Corrasable for the closing page…]
New Haven
August 1981
Dear Kermit,
Your letter, despite several forwardings, still reached here before I did. And when I did see it, my first response was to put it into a box, where it might conceivably survive the moving that was going on.
Yes, I am at Yale, though not many are aware of it. I cultivate unobtrusiveness. That, and the ability to read upside-down print, will take you a considerable distance.
I find your description of my letter’s condition quite believable. A friend of mine spent some time recently doing excavation in Turkey, and attempts to get communication established have convinced me that the best thing to do is stitch one’s correspondence on some fairly tough animal hide.