Letters

by John Barth

But the telephone! Haifa dozen times it’s rung already, the last two since the maid left (who loyally reported me not at home), and I can’t answer lest I betray my childish fib. It’s Jane, canceling our date at Lord Tarzan’s jealous insistence. It’s the Muse of History, calling to explain what happened to 11 R. It’s Jane, wondering whether I’m bespoken for the rest of the weekend. It’s you, suggesting I just phone you instead of writing these asinine letters. It’s Jane.

  If it rings again, I’ll not be able not to answer. How goes it with you, Dad? And did you ever, even at twenty-nine, have these Scott Fitzgerald moments, these—

  Excuse me: the phone.

  T.

  T: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. Der Wiedertraum under way.

  6/19/69

  TO:

  Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

  FROM:

  Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

  To Pier Angeli, Charles Coburn, Edgar Degas, James I, Wallis Warfield Simpson Windsor: happy birthday. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico has been executed by the Juarez party. Israeli warplanes used napalm today on Jordanian-Iraqi artillery positions while police battled students in Ann Arbor. Representatives of seven northeastern American colonies are meeting in Albany with sachems of the Six Nations to plan campaigns against New France. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg have been electrocuted at Sing Sing, and Texas has been annexed by the Union. The U.S.S. Kearsarge has defeated the C.S.S. Alabama off Cherbourg. The Duke of Wellington and Benjamin Constant are dining in Paris with Mme de Staël in celebration of yesterday’s Allied victory at Waterloo: it is Day 97 of the Hundred Days.

  And your Drama, Der Wiedertraum, is under way. Starring “Saint Joseph” as Joe Morgan, “Bibi” as Rennie Morgan, and “yourself,” in a sense, as the Interloping Jacob Horner. Reluctant cameo appearances by the Doctor as Himself. Also featuring “Pocahontas” as the Sexually Exploited High School English Teacher Peggy Rankin (a bit of miscasting) and “M. Casteene” as President Schott of Wicomico Teachers College. With a supporting cast of dozens: draft refugees and their girl friends—those willing to regroom themselves—in the role of Wicomico College freshmen of 1953; the patients as the Patients. Still wanting are actresses for the bit parts of Mrs. Dockey, the Mannish Head Nurse, and Shirley Stickles, Dr. Schott’s Waspish Secretary, who misinformed you as to the date of your Job Interview in 1953 and would not acknowledge her error when you Presented yourself in her office on July 20, Petrarch’s birthday and a day early. Ideal roles, either of those, for Pocahontas; but she demands a bigger piece of the action. Produced by Saint Joe. Directed, more or less, by Casteene. Increasingly frowned upon by the Doctor, who fears things will get out of hand. Followed with intermittent interest and filmed in part by Mr. Reg Prinz for possible incorporation into his film in progress, which, it turns out, is not entirely about the War of 1812. Script adapted from the novel adapted from your Scriptotherapeutic narrative adapted from the events leading to Rennie Morgan’s death from aspiration of vomitus in course of illicit surgical abortion October 25, 1953. Road not to end that way this time, on Producer’s orders, or else.

  There is no rush to fill the vacant roles, inasmuch as your Drama, like soap opera, is being reenacted in real time. Hence Prinz’s and Ambrose Mensch’s interest, depite the cast’s including Mensch’s ex-mistress and ex-wife and Prinz’s current mistress. On June 1, Trinity Sunday, as the Fenians began their invasion of Ontario from Black Rock and Captain Lawrence aboard the Chesapeake enjoined his crew not to give up the ship and President Madison read his 2nd War Message to the U.S. Congress, the Doctor once again prescribed in the Progress and Advice Room that you Enter the Teaching Profession as therapy for your Seizures of Immobility.

  “There must be a rigid discipline,” he quoted himself from the script, “or else it will be merely an occupation, not an occupational therapy. There must be a body of laws… Tell them you will teach grammar. English grammar… You will teach prescriptive grammar. Now really, Horner: is that your Idea of Plausible Dialogue?”

  The next scene will not occur until July 19, a full month hence, when Generalissimo Franco will take Cadiz, Cordova, Granada, Huelva, and Seville while the German army begins its retreat from Belgium and you Leave Baltimore for the Eastern Shore to Look for a Room in Wicomico and Prepare yourself for the Interview which you Innocently Believe to be scheduled for the following day.

  Meanwhile, things have not been standing still at the Remobilization Farm. How Drive from Baltimore next month across the Chesapeake to Wicomico without leaving Ontario? Why, by magicking the P & A Room from the one into the other, as the wizards of Stratford magic a bare arena stage into Windsor Castle or Prospero’s Island. And how Reenter the Teaching Profession while in residential therapy? Why, by mobilizing the Farm into the Niagara Frontier Underground University! The dropouts—a touch homesick, it may be—had proposed to Saint Joe a free school: he is obliging them, in his capacity as U.U.‘s unofficial chancellor and history department, with seminars in U.S. Hawkery from 1812 to the present; in the 19th-century American Counterexpansionists; in the Role of Upper Canada as a Haven for Loyalists, Escaped Slaves, Secessionists, Indians, Conscientious Objectors, and Other Refugees from U.S. Violence. Casteene is conducting private tutorials in something called the Game of Governments. Tombo X is teaching karate. And to mollify the geriatrics, who have pressed for straightforward continuing education in the manner of their beloved Chautauqua Institution, you yourself are Offering “far-in” counter-countercultural drills in Prescriptive Grammar, or Repressive English. Restrictive clauses. Close punctuation. The Wave of the Past.

  And “Rennie Morgan”—as Bibi/Bea Golden/Jeannine Mack now calls herself even offstage, as it were—in her new capacity as U.U.’s faculty of drama, is producing a small theatrical of her own, a replay-within-the-replay: some sort of “radical minstrel show” inspired by her tidewater Maryland connections, by Mr. Prinz’s unexplained wish to include some showboat footage in his film, and by her desire to demonstrate to her lover that she is possessed of an awakening social consciousness. You and Morgan are to play in blackface Bones and Tambo, respectively, the End Men. The Doctor (pace Jean Genet) is to be coaxed into whiteface to take the part of Mister Interlocutor. Tombo X will perform poorly on both the tambourine and the bones, to demonstrate that he has no sense of rhythm whatever, either natural or acquired. Casteene will do a series of impersonations. Pocahontas, you Suppose, will sing “Indian Love Call.” And “Rennie” will play “Bea Golden” playing “the Mary Pickford of the Chesapeake” as on Captain James Adams’s old floating theater. Performance scheduled for tomorrow night, or the one after, to coincide with the Sun’s entry into Cancer (and the birthdays of Errol Flynn and Jacques Offenbach, and the Black Hole of Calcutta atrocity, and Lord Byron’s first meeting Mme de Staël at Lady Jersey’s salon in London, and the Tennis Court Oath, and the U.S.A.’s adoption of the Great Seal, and West Virginia’s admission into the Union). You have Suggested it be called A Midsummer Night’s Mare.

  You Do Not Quite Understand what’s going on. You Suspect that in a sense you Are its Focus—read Target—yet at the same time but a Minor Figure in some larger design. You Are Not At All Sure what Reg Prinz is up to, or Casteene—who, it now seems certain, arranged Morgan’s coming here, and possibly prompted his challenge to you. Did Casteene also arrange the appearance last Friday—from Maryland, on the arm of Ambrose Mensch!—of “Lady Amherst,” who as “Lady Russex” came here two years ago for an abortion? Why did that same lady seem both astonished to see him and not quite convinced that she was seeing him? Did Mensch really not know that his ex-wife is a patient here? He seems to suspect Prinz of what you Suspect Casteene of!

  Hum.

  To carry Implausible Coincidence down from the stars to the spear carriers: it turns out that one Merry Bernstein, whose hippie friends brought her in from Chautauqua last month hallucinating and raving, her backside inflamed with what looks to h
ave been a poisonous snakebite, perhaps a copperhead’s, is our Bibi’s stepdaughter! More exactly, the daughter of Bea Golden’s second husband, one Mr. Bernstein.

  Did you Mention that this same Ms. Bernstein (still recuperating, and keeping mum on the nature of her injury) is said by her companions to have been Making It in Lily Dale with that very odd duck, your former night-school student and later fellow patient Jerome Bray? The mere mention of whose name now sends her into hysteria? Did you Mention that his name got mentioned as pilot of the Chautauqua Lake excursion boat that Mr. Prinz chartered two nights ago for the film company’s cast party? And that at this same party Bray is reported to have pursued our Bibi so ardently as to quite frighten her, provoke her other suitor’s jealousy (you Mean Mensch, whom you Described as Lady Amherst’s companion?) and her lover Prinz’s mild amusement, and neglect his piloting duties to the point of being cashiered at the cruise’s end? And that Pocahontas, aboard this same vessel, upon this same occasion, did flirt concurrently with both Prinz and this same Bray, presumably to rouse her ex-husband’s ire? And that the report of this same flirtation has aroused instead, or as well, and altogether unexpectedly, your Own Jealousy, for reasons you Have Not Yet Dared to Begin to Examine? And finally, that the only copperheads you ever Heard Of during the Farm’s residency in the Lily Dale—Chautauqua area were the 19th-century advocates of a negotiated peace with the Confederacy?

  Clearly, Jacob Horner, what you are Involved in is no ordinary soap opera: it is Bayreuth by Lever Brothers; it is Procter & Gamble’s production of the Bathtub Ring.

  But never mind the Big Picture, which you will likely Never See; or which, if it exists at all, may be like those messages spelled out at halftime in U.S. college football matches by marching undergraduates: less intelligent, valuable, and significant than its constituent units. The movie people have dispersed, to reassemble in Maryland next week. Mensch and Lady Amherst have gone with them. Bibi will leave to rejoin the company (against the Doctor’s orders: how his authority is shrunk!) after tomorrow’s, or Saturday’s, minstrel show, flying back as necessary for her therapy sessions and her role in Der Wiedertraum. Casteene appears, disappears, reappears as always, often taking Pocahontas with him in some secretarial capacity. (You are Jealous. Why are you Jealous?) Even Merry Bernstein, now that she can sit and walk almost normally, speaks of lighting out with her friends to, like, Vancouver? As far from Lily Dale as possible. For dramaturgical purposes, in this corner of the Big Picture only you and Joe Morgan Remain. It is his motive, not Casteene’s or Prinz’s, that truly Concerns and truly Mystifies you.

  But now that your Drama has taken prospective shape, Joe will not speak to you again on the subject of you and him and Rennie and the Fatal Fifties “until the time comes”—presumably July 21, when your Wicomico Teachers College Interview, at which you First Met him, is to be reenacted. Or perhaps July 22, anniversary of (among other things) your First Meeting Rennie, with her husband, in your Newly Rented Room, whither they’d sought you out to congratulate you on your Appointment.

  “Day Two of your Hundred Days,” is what Joe said, and would say no more.

  You have Counted and Recounted. Sure enough, the original drama was of some hundred days’ duration: July 19-October 26 inclusive, from your Arrival in Wicomico at the Doctor’s prescription to Seek Employment as a Teacher of Prescriptive Grammar, through the death and burial of Rennie Morgan and your Departure, with the Doctor, from everything. In fact it comes to 99 or 101 days, depending; but you are Not Inclined to Quibble with Morgan’s history. The real redramatization, then, has not begun, after all: until Day One, next month, it dozes like a copperhead coiled upon a sunny rock. You Are still in the prologue to the dream. You Are still on Elba, at the turn of History’s palindrome.

  And like Stendhal in that other Hundred Days, you Postpone Suicide now out of Almost Selfless Curiosity. Nor have you, thus Distracted, Reexperienced reparalysis since your Relapse of April 2. What on earth, you Wonder, is Morgan up to? What in the world will happen next?

  L: A. B. Cook VI to the Author. Eagerly accepting the Author’s invitation. The Cook/Burlingame lineage between Andrew Cook IV and himself. The Welland Canal Plot.

  A. B. Cook VI

  “Barataria”

  Bloodsworth Island, Md.

  6/18/69

  Dear Professor:

  Letters? A novel-in-letters, you say? Six several stories intertwining to make a seventh? A capital notion, sir!

  My secretary read me yours of the 15th over the telephone this morning when I called in from my lodge here on Bloodsworth Island (temporarily rechristened “Barataria” by the film company to whom I’ve lent the place, who are shooting a story involving Jean Lafitte). I hasten to accept, with pleasure, your invitation to play the role of the Author who solicits and organizes communications from and between his characters, and embroils himself in their imbroglios! To reorchestrate in some such fashion, in the late afternoon of our century if not of our civilization, the preoccupations at once of the early Modernists and of the 18th-Century inventors of the noble English novel—that strikes me as a project worthy of the authors of The Sot-Weed Factor, and I shall be as happy to be your collaborator in this project as I was in that.

  How is it, sir, your letter does not acknowledge that so fruitful collaboration? I must and shall attribute your omission (but how so, in correspondence between ourselves?) to my one stipulation, now as in the 1950’s: that you keep my identity (and my aid) confidential and allegedly fictional. “Pseudo-anonymity,” I don’t have to tell you, is prerequisite to the work for which my laureateship is the agreeable “cover,” and which—as the enclosed documents will amply demonstrate—I come by honestly. But enough: By way of immediate response to your inquiry concerning the history of the Cooks and Burlingames between the time of Lord Baltimore’s Laureate of Maryland and myself, I attach copies of four long letters written in 1812 by my great-great-grandfather and namesake to his unborn child. But before I enlarge upon their mass, let me speak to another point in your letter:

  From Lady Amherst, you say (whom I also am honored to be acquainted with, and who I understand will publish these enclosures in some history journal), you have the general conception of the “letters” project: an old-time epistolary novel, etc. From Todd Andrews of Cambridge, another old acquaintance of mine, you are borrowing “the tragic view of history”—and welcome to it, sir, for I respect but most decidedly do not share it! And one Jacob Horner (whom I’m happy to know only at second hand, through the gentleman he once so unconscionably victimized: the former director of the Maryland Historical Society and ex-president of Marshyhope State College) has suggested to you certain possibilities of letters in the alphabetical sense, as well as what you call “the anniversary view of history.” (Whatever might that mean? Today, for example, is the anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo by Wellington and Blücher in 1815; also of our Congress’s declaration of the War of 1812. Moreover, my morning newspaper informs me that it is the birthdate of Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s prime minister and foreign secretary during the period of both the Napoleonic and the “Second American” wars. A piquant coincidence of anniversaries—but so what? As there are only 365¼ days in the year, each must be the birthdate of some eight or nine millions of the presently living and hundreds of millions of the dead, and the anniversary of any number of the events that comprise human history. What is one to see with an historical “view” apparently as omnivalent—which is to say, nonvalent—as history itself?)

  Well, that is your problem. Mine is what to contribute, for my part, to the design and theme of our enterprise, beyond the genealogical material I shall of course again gladly share with you. I have given the matter some thought this morning, and the fact is I believe I have exactly what we need! This July—exactly a month from today, in fact—Dorchester County commences a week-long tercentenary celebration, in which I shall take a small part in my capacity as laureate of the state. But my real inter
est in that anniversary (both my official and my deeper interest) is its anticipation of the more considerable one seven years hence: the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, of which no one yet hears mention, but which will be on every American’s mind—and all the media—before very long. This anniversary, the 200th of a revolution that much changed history, will coincide (and not coincidentally) with a revolution to revolutionize Revolution itself: what I propose, sir, as the grand theme of our book: The Second American Revolution!

  The Second American Revolution! In a manner of speaking, it has been the theme of my family ever since the Treaty of Paris concluded the first in 1783. My parents devoted their lives to it, my grandparents and great-grandparents before them, as shall be shown. I have done likewise, and so I pray shall do my son—who is by way of being at once the most prodigiously gifted and the most prodigal revolutionary of our line. And, as the letters of my great-great-grandfather make plain, both the gifts and the prodigality antedate the War of Independence: he traces our revolutionary energies back at least as far as Henry Burlingame III, whom you characterize as the “cosmophilist” tutor of Ebenezer Cooke, first laureate of Maryland.

  Andrew Burlingame Cook IV (whose birthday fortuitously coincides with the Republic’s) wrote these four letters on the eve of the “Second War of Independence,” as our ancestors called the War of 1812. It was the eve as well of his 36th birthday—i.e., the evening of his life’s first half, as he himself phrases it, and the dawn of its second. Like Dante Alighieri and many another at this famous juncture, he found himself at spiritual, philosophical, even psychological sixes and sevens. He misdoubted the validity of his career thus far: He had been active in the ménages of Madame de Staël and Joel Barlow during the French Revolution and the Directorate; coming to America after 1800, he had involved himself with Aaron Burr’s conspiracy and Tecumseh’s Indian alliance, more out of antipathy for what he took to be his father’s causes than out of real enmity toward the U.S. or sympathy for the Indians. At the time of these letters, about to become a father himself, Andrew Cook IV profoundly questions both the authenticity of his own motives and his appraisal of his father’s, whom circumstances have precluded his knowing at all closely. With the aid of his remarkable wife, he researches the history of the family and discovers a striking pattern of filial rebellion: since the convergence of the Cooke and Burlingame lines—that is to say, since the child of Henry Burlingame III and Anna Cooke was named and raised as Andrew Cooke III after his father’s disappearance (per the epilogue of our Sot-Weed Factor novel)—every firstborn son in the line has defined himself against what he takes to have been his absent father’s objectives, and in so doing has allied himself, knowingly or otherwise, with his grandfather, whose name he also shares! Thus Andrew Cook IV, in aiding Tecumseh against the U.S., reenacted Andrew Cooke III’s association with Pontiac in the French and Indian War, thinking to spite his father Henry Burlingame IV as Andrew III had thought to spite his father, H.B. III, et cetera.