A Day at the Beach [antikvár]

Apprentice T ^here arrived in my mailbox a billet-doux from my little brother Toby. More specifically, this vs^as a five-page letter to him, from me, with his Post-it self-stick memo stuck to page i. The letter was dated 13/XÍ/65—á la European mode—and postmarked Cambridge, England, mailed decades before to an eleventh-grader. Single-spaced elite, without margins, it was typed with such manifest urgency that words fly truncated off the right edge of the tissue-thin foolscap; the keys must have been righteously rapped—"o"s are little holes. The tone of this document owes much to austere dogma, a religion of literary Art. It answers a letter in which Toby seems obscurely to have offended me by an expression of enthusiasm for his country and for some of its better contemporary and popular prose writers. Now Toby is himself one of our better contemporary prose writers, but at that time he was too young to vote, and I wasn't, so I took it upon myself to tell the stripling a thing or two. "We live in an age when contraception and the Bomb and rejected opportunities usurp each other [sic] as negative functions . . . the cliché governs by executive function in the ruined warrens are pockets of beautiful life . . ." The bulk of my letter consists of a suggestion that before Toby read another word of William Styron or Norman Mailer (for whom he had