by John Barth
Indeed (here is my 2nd point), as a man born short of the average stature may outdo taller men in feats of manliness, so Henry Burlingames III & IV (the latter my father) were men of uncommon sexuality. H.B. III, who concerns us here, was by his own denomination a “cosmophilist,” who not only lusted after both his charges, Anna & Ebenezer Cooke, but claim’d to have had carnal connection as well with sundry sorts of barnyard animals, plants, inanimate objects, the very earth itself—long before his discovery of John Smith’s eggplant recipe made it possible for him to beget a child.
Thirdly, from this “cosmophilism,” or erotical love of the world, must have stem’d H.B. III’s endless interests: his passion for everything from astronomy, music, politics, rope-splicing, & chess, to the practice of medicine, law, & nautical piracy, for example; in particular for what he call’d “the game of governments,” and my father “the practice of history.” He successfully impersonated, at various times, both Lord Baltimore & Baltimore’s arch-enemy John Coode; perhaps “Monsieur Casteene” as well. At 1st, one gathers, the motive for his intrigues, at least their occasion, was his research into his parentage: the Secret Historie & Privie Journall were involved in Coode’s conspiracies against Baltimore, and thus involved anyone who sought them. Later, when Ebenezer Cooke had brot to light his tutor’s lineage, Governor Nicholson of Maryland prevail’d upon Burlingame to forestall—if possible, to subvert—that “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of Indians & Negroes. Burlingame accepted the task with relish; but the Cooke twins apparently fear’d that his fascination with his newfound brothers might win out over his loyalty to white civilization. According to my grandfather, who wrote of these things some decades later, they wonder’d whether Burlingame, once on Bloodsworth, would work to divide the jealous factions of ex-slaves & Indians from several tribes, or to unite them, ally them with Casteene’s “Naked Indians of the North,” & return America to its aboriginal inhabitants.
What follow’d historically is known: there were no concerted risings of Negroes & Indians, only isolated massacres of white settlements such as Albany & Schenectady. Bloodsworth Island by 1700 was uninhabited rnarsh, as it is today. But it is not known whether this failure of the Conspiracy represents failure or success on the part of H.B. III. The man was 40 when he left Cooke’s Point for Bloodsworth Island early in 1695 (Ebenezer having regain’d his estate & been reunited with his sister & his former tutor). In April of the same year, as he had pledg’d, Burlingame reappear’d at Malden, in Ahatchwhoop dress, to wed Anna—who, however, for reasons unknown, postponed the marriage until the fall, when Burlingame’s assignment from Governor Nicholson should be completed. Her fiancé yielded to her wish & return’d to the island—never to be heard from again.
But they must have spent that final night in each other’s arms, “supping ere the priest said grace,” as Ebenezer puts it in his poem, with some assistance from the Eggplant Secret: for Anna found herself with child immediately thereafter, and in January 1696 (1695 in the old style) she was deliver’d of a son—your great-grandfather, of whom I shall write in my next letter. Enough to say now (my 4th & last matter for this night) that to cover the scandal—Ebenezer’s own harlot bride having died in childbirth two months previously—he & Anna gave out that he Ebenezer was the child’s father & she its aunt, and Andrew Cooke III was so named & raised.
Everyone at Malden & the neighboring plantations, by this same Andrew’s account, knew the story to be false, and unkindly assumed, from the twins’ general closeness, that he was not only a bastard but the child of incest as well. This suspicion was not without effect on the young man’s life.
But that is matter for another evening: sufficient here to record that it is with Andrew III that the Cooks & Burlingames begin alternating surnames thro the line of their 1st-born sons, Andrew Cooke III’s being named Henry Burlingame IV, and Burlingame IV’s Andrew Cooke IV. I.e., myself, who at my dear wife’s suggestion have dropt the e from Cooke as superfluous, and the male-primogenitural restriction as an affront to the splendid women of the Castines. Yourself therefore will be Burlingame V, whether Henry or Henrietta. With that name will be bequeatht to you a grand objective, & a formidable bloodline to aid your attaining it.
Of these—& of that Pattern, the inspiration of this letter which has fail’d to get to it—more to come, when I shall complete the chronicle of these III’s and IV’s. ’Tis far past midnight now; the wind has dropt, the fire burnt down; ’tis cold. From the neighboring farm a late dog barks; pretty Andrée stirs, stir’d in turn perhaps by you. 1812, 1812! I shall hold you both close now till you’ve quieted, without knowing who restored your peace. May we together, some sweeter year to come, do as much for History!
Till when, & forever, I am,
Your loving father,
Andrew Cook IV
E: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews. Requesting counsel in an action of plagiarism against the Author. His bibliography and biography. Enclosures to the Author, to George III, and to Todd 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; that his human roles have been as it were mere protective camouflage. As autumn passes, he withdraws into a tent of his own making in the saltmarsh, where the “novel” leaves him in a dormancy from which, perhaps, he wakes ½ -tranced come spring and takes flight with his 1,000,000 brothers. Dream? Hallucination? Transfiguration? The question is tantalizingly unresolved, while the reader her/himself takes wing on the heart-constricting beauty of the closing passage, a description of the mating flight.
c. Backwater Ballads, by “Jay Bray” (Wetlands Press, 1961), our magnum opus: a cycle of 360 tales set in the Backwater National Wildlife Refuge, our birthplace, at all periods of its history (i.e., 1600-1960: 1 tale for each year, each degree of the cycle, and each day of the ideal year, of which our actual calendars are but the corrupt approximation). The tales are told from the viewpoint of celestial Aedes Sollicitans, a freshmarsh native with total recall of all her earlier hatches, who each year bites 1 visitor in the Refuge and acquires, with her victim’s blood, an awareness of his/her history. The 1st is the Tayac Kekataughtassapooekskunoughmass, or “90 Fish,” King of the Ahatchwhoop Indians. The 9th is Captain John Smith of Virginia; the 10th Henry Burlingame I, my own foster father’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. The 360th (and the 1st to give himself to her unreservedly) is the Author, whom in return she gratefully “infects” with her narrative accumulation.
Compare these with the Defendant’s impostures. And having compared (and subdued the indignation that must follow your comparison!), let us arrange a meeting, either in your office or here in Lily Dale—where in your other capacity you can satisfy yourself with the progress of LILYVAC II on the NOVEL project—prepare our briefs, file our suit, and, companions-in-arms such as the world has never RESET He shall pay.
Were we not so sleep-ridden, we could not close without a word on the success of our fall work period; the 1st phase of the 3rd year (V) of the 5-year NOVEL plan (see Enclosure #2). But we must rest, rest for the prodigious labors of the coming spring, when in any case Ms. Bernstein will submit to the Foundation our full and confidential ½-annual report. Then let us together RESET JBB 3 encl.
(ENCL. 1)
Jerome Bonaparte Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752
March 4, 1969
“J.B.,” “Author”
Dept. English, Annex B
SUNY/Buffalo
Buffalo, N.Y. 14214
“Dear” “sir”:
Enclosed (so that you cannot pretend not to know us) are printouts of letters from us to His late Majesty George III of Maryland and to Mr. Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation—who also acts as our attorney, and from whom, in that latter capacity, you will presently be hearing.
We know very well that August 5 of this year will be the 3rd anniversary of 1st publication of “your” “novel” G.G.B. and that therefore on that date the statute of limitations will run on actions against you connected with that “work.” 5 months hence! But it is your time, not the statute, that runs out. Only the press of other business (and our absolute need for rest at this season) has kept us from bringing you sooner to account. But our eye has been upon you as yours has been upon the calendar.
Nearly 7 years have passed since the true Giles delivered to our trust the Revised New Syllabus of his ascended father Harold Bray, Grand Tutor of the universal University. 4 years ago tonight we roused from the profoundest torpor of our life to read that Tutor-given text, and to commence the great work of expunging from it the corruptions and perversions of the Antitutor and false Giles, your Goat-Boy. Like you, he believed he had triumphed over Truth, not knowing that his nemesis but awaited the proper hour to sting!
With tonight’s Worm Moon (which by summer will become a Conqueror indeed) that hour is come. We ourselves must return for a time yet into rest; indeed we can scarcely hold pen to paper for drowsiness; must count on another to post this ultimatum. But justice now is hatched and stirring: when you next hear from us (a month hence, if you have not by then made the reparations our attorney will demand) we shall be fully awake and at work on our grand project. Do not imagine that because your thefts are of gn_t-like inconsequence by comparison with our Revolutionary NOVEL, they will go unpunished. For as our noble forebear, while conquering Europe and administering the Empire, could attend with equal firmness to such details as correcting our namesake’s American marriage, so we, while supervising the Novel Revolution, will not fail to attend also to your exposure and ruin.
B.
cc. T. Andrews
2 encl.
(ENCL. 2)
Enclosure #1
On board the Gadf_y III, Lake Chautauqua, New York, 14 July 1966
To His Majesty George III of England
Tidewater Farms, Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612
Your Royal Highness,
On 22 June 1815, in order to establish a new and sounder base of empire, we abdicated the throne of France and withdrew to the port of Rochefort, where 2 of our frigates—new, fast, well-manned and -gunned—lay ready to run Your Majesty’s blockade of the harbor and carry us to America. Captain Ponée of the Méduse planned to engage on the night of 10 July the principal English vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow, against which he estimated the Méduse could hold out for 2 hours while her sister ship, with our party aboard, outran the lesser blockading craft. The plan was audacious but certain of success. Reluctant, however, to sacrifice the Méduse, we resolved instead like a cunning wrestler to turn our adversary’s strength to our advantage: to reach our goal by means of, rather than despite, Your Majesty’s navy; and so we addressed to your son the Prince Regent the following:
Isle of Aix, 12 July 1815
In view of the factions that divide my country and of the enmity of the greatest powers in Europe I have brought my political career to a close and am going like Themistocles to seat myself on the hearthstone of the British people. I put myself under the protection of English Law and request that protection of Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my enemies.
Having sent our aide-de-camp before us with this message and instructions to request from the Prince Regent passports to America, on Bastille Day we put ourself and our entourage in the hands of Commander Maitland aboard Bellerophon and left France. Alas, Your Majesty’s own betrayal and confinement on the mischievous charge of insanity should have taught us that our confidence in your son and his ministers was ill placed, more especially as it is with the Muse of the Past that we have ever gone to school for present direction. When therefore we learned from Admiral Sir George Cockburn that our destination was to be, not London and Baltimore, but St. Helena, like a derelict student we applied in vain to our old schoolmistress for vindication:
On board Bellerophon, at sea
…I appeal to History. History will say that an enemy who waged war for 20 years against the English people came of his own free will, in his misfortune, to seek asylum under her laws. What more striking proof could he give of his esteem and his trust? But what reply was made in England to such magnanimity’? There was a pretense of extending a hospitable hand to that enemy, and when he
had yielded himself up in good faith, he was sacrificed.
Our maroonment on that desolated rock, under the boorish Cockburn and his more boorish successors, we need not describe to 1 so long and even more ignobly gaoled. We, at least, had the consolation that our exile was both temporary and as it were voluntary: we needed no Perseus to save us; we could have escaped at any time, and waited 7 years only because that period was needed for us to exploit to best advantage our martyrdom, complete the development of that stage of our political philosophy set down in the Memorial of St. Helena, and execute convincingly the fiction of our death in 1821; also for our brother Joseph in Point Breeze, New Jersey, our officers at Champ d’Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, and our agents in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Barataria, Bloodsworth Island, and Rio de Janeiro to complete the groundwork for our American operations.
By means which we will not here disclose (but which must bear some correspondence to those by which Your Majesty effected his own escape from Windsor), we departed St. Helena in 1822 for my American headquarters—1st in a house not far from your own in the Maryland marshes, ultimately in western New York—an area to which our attention had been directed during our 1st Consulship by Mme de Staël (who owned 23,000 acres of St. Lawrence County) in the days before that woman, like Anteia or the wife of Potiphar, turned against us. Here, for the last century and ½, we have directed our operatives in the slow elaboration of our grand strategy, 1st conceived aboard Bellerophon, whereof the time has now arrived to commence the execution: a project beside which Jena, Austerlitz, Vim, Marengo, the 18th Brumaire, even the original Revolution, are as our ancient 18-pounders to an H-bomb, or our old field glass to the Mt. Palomar reflector: we mean the New, the 2nd Revolution, an utterly Novel Revolution!
