Présentation de l'éditeur
In this antic riff on Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Tom Marshfield, a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale, is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace. At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold in your hand. In his wonderfully overwrought style he lays bare his soul and his past—his marriage to the daughter of his ethics professor, his affair with his organist, his antipathetic conversations with his senile father and his bisexual curate, his golf scores, his poker hands, his Biblical exegeses, and his smoldering desire for the directress of the retreat, the impregnable Ms. Prynne. A testament for our times.
Extrait
1
FORGIVE ME MY denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American. I write these pages at some point in the time of Richard Nixon’s unravelling. Though the yielding is mine, the temptation belongs to others: my keepers have set before me a sheaf of blank sheets—a month’s worth, in their estimation. Sullying them is to be my sole therapy.
My bishop, bless his miter, has ordered (or, rather, offered as the alternative to the frolicsome rite of defrocking) me brought here to the desert, far from the green and crowded land where my parish, as the French so nicely put it, finds itself. The month is to be one of recuperation—as I think of it, “retraction,” my condition being officially diagnosed as one of “distraction.” Perhaps the opposite of “dis” is not “re” but the absence of any prefix, by which construal I am spiritual brother to those broken-boned athletes who must spend a blank month, amid white dunes and midnight dosages, in “traction.” I doubt (verily, my name is Thomas) it will work. In my diagnosis I suffer from nothing less virulent than the human condition, and so would preach it. Though the malady is magnificent, I should in honest modesty add that my own case is scarcely feverish, and pustular only if we cross-examine the bed linen. Masturbation! Thou saving grace-note upon the baffled chord of self! Paeans to St. Onan, later.
I feel myself warming to this, which is not my intent. Let my distraction remain intractable. No old prestidigitator amid the tilted mirrors of sympathetic counselling will let himself be pulled squeaking from this glossy, last-resort, false-bottomed topper.
Particulars! The motel—I resist calling it a sanatorium, or halfway house, or detention center—has the shape of an O, or, more exactly, an omega. The ring of rooms encircling the pool is fronted by two straight corridors, containing to the left the reception desk, offices, rest rooms sexually distinguished by bovine silhouettes, and a tiny commissary heavy on plastic beadwork and postcards of dinosaur bones but devoid of any magazines or journals that might overexcite the patients—oops, the guests—with topical realities. The other way, along the other foot of the , lie the restaurant and bar. The glass wall of the bar is tinted a chemical purple through which filters a desert vista of diminishing sagebrush and distant, pale, fossiliferous mountains. The restaurant wall, at least at breakfast, wears heavy vanilla curtains out of whose gaps knives of light fall upon the grapefruit and glass of the set tables with an almost audible splintering of brightness. The place seems, if not deserted, less than half full. All middle-aged men, we sit each at our table clearing dry throughts* and suppressing nervous gossip among the silverware. I feel we are a “batch,” more or less recently arrived. We are pale. We are stolid. We are dazed. The staff, who peek and move about as if preparatory to an ambush, appear part twanging, leathery Caucasians, their blue eyes bleached to match the alkaline sky and the seat of their jeans, and the rest nubile aborigines whose silent tread and stiff black hair uneasi
