Letters

by John Barth

  By 1812, however, Andrew is in the quandary aforementioned. Indeed, without giving over his admiration for his grandfather, he now believes himself to have been as mistaken about his father as he thinks his father to have been about his father! I leave it to his eloquent “prenatal” letters to set forth fully his historical investigations and psychological circumstances. He concludes with the resolve to devote the second half of his life to undoing his “wrongheaded” accomplishments in the first—presumably by endeavoring to prevent the very war he has been promoting, or (as he believes it too late now to forestall the declaration of which today is the anniversary) by doing what he can to prevent a decisive victory for either the British or the Americans, in the hope that a stalemate will check their territorial expansion on the North American continent and permit the establishment of an Indian Free State. His career thus bids to be in effect self-canceling, by his own acknowledgment, as the careers of his successive Ancestors may be presumed to have been reciprocally canceling. It is his pious hope, in the fourth and final letter, that this program of self-refutation, together with the pattern he has exposed in the family history, will enable his unborn child—i.e., Henry or Henrietta Cook Burlingame V—to proceed undistracted by the spurious rebelliousness that has so dissipated the family’s energies: that he or she may break the pattern and not defeat, but best, their father, by achieving the goals he can now hope only to take a few positive steps toward.

  Dear colleague, esteemed collaborator, fellow toiler up the slopes of Mt. Parnassus: what a mighty irony here impends! My voice falters (I am dictating this by telephone, from notes, into my secretary’s machine across the Bay, whence she will transcribe and send it off to you posthaste). Poor Cooks! Poor Burlingames! And poor suspense, I admit, to leave you thus hanging on their history’s epistolary hook: Did my namesake’s letters reach their addressee? Did “Henry or Henrietta” take to heart his heartfelt counsel? And Andrew himself: did he achieve his self-abnegatory aims? If so, by what revision of his revised program, since we know the outcome of the War of 1812?

  Those earlier two questions I shall return to: they are the body of this letter, whose head nods so ready a yes to your invitation. The latter two I shall answer in detail in letters to come—five, by my estimate, though four would be a more appropriate number, to balance the four hereunto appended. The fact is, sir, my major literary effort over the past dozen years—that is to say, since I gave you my “Sot-Weed Factor Redivivus” material as the basis for your novel—has been the planning of a poetical epic of this Border State: a local version of Joel Barlow’s great Columbiad. It was to portray the life and adventures of this child of the Republic, Andrew Cook IV, from their coincident birth in 1776, through the 1812 War, to Cook’s disappearance in 1821. It was to be entitled Marylandiad, though its action was to range from Paris to Canada to New Orleans and lose itself in the mists of St. Helena. It was to be complete and published in time for the Dorchester tercentenary or, failing that, at least the U.S. Bicentennial…

  Alas, the practice of literature has, as you know, never been more than my avocation. The practice of history is my métier (I do not mean historiography!); my muse—who is not Clio—is too demanding to leave me time for dalliance with Calliope; I shall not write my Marylandiad. Instead, I reply in kind to your invitation by here inviting you to write it for me—incorporate it, if you like, into your untitled epistolary project! Thus my determination to supply you (in the form of letters, after his own example) with my researches into the balance of A.C. IV’s life. I will follow them with a one-letter account of my own activities on behalf of the Second Revolution, and that with an envoi to my son Henry Burlingame VII, whose relation to me—you will by now have guessed—follows inexorably the classic Pattern.

  Seven letters in all: you see how readily I adapt my old project to your new one!

  But this ancient history lies in the future (Have you a timetable for our project? Are the dates and sequence of the several letters to be of any significance? Have you a Pattern of your own in mind?), beginning at this letter’s end, when you shall commence the tale of Andrew Cook IV as told by himself. Meanwhile, in the most summary fashion, here is the line of his descendants from the end of his last letter to his child (dated May 14, 1812; what would your Jacob Horner make of this anniversary of King Henry IV’s assassination, George Washington’s opening of the first Constitutional Convention, the death of Mme de Staël’s mother, Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination, and the departure of the Lewis & Clark Expedition from St. Louis?) to the beginning of this my first letter to you:

  My ancestor chose the wrong conjunction. A week into Gemini, just after he closed that long fourth letter, Andrée Castine Cook gave birth to opposite-sex twins, duly named Henry and Henrietta Cook Burlingame V. The old cosmophilist H.B. III must have smiled in his unknown grave! In the time-honored manner of our line, their father lingered on at Castines Hundred until he was assured of his wife’s and children’s well-being—then left at once (but not directly) for Paris, to try to assist Joel Barlow in the business he had lately done his best to obstruct: negotiation with Napoleon concerning the Berlin and Milan decrees.

  He will not get there in time: unbeknownst to him, the emperor has already left St. Cloud to lead his army’s ill-fated march into Russia; the Duc de Bassano, unable to stall Barlow further, has produced on May 11 the “Decree of St. Cloud,” falsely dated April 28, 1811, to “prove” that France had rescinded the Berlin and Milan decrees more than a year since, at Barlow’s first request! The old poet is delighted, never mind the chicanery: the more so since on that same May 11 Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch supporter of Britain’s Orders in Council against American shipping, has been assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons, and his successor Lord Castlereagh is known to be amenable to lifting those orders. Barlow has rushed the St. Cloud Decree across the Channel via the U.S.S. Wasp; on May 19 it has reached Lord Castlereagh. Surely the author of the Columbiad is about to score a brilliant diplomatic triumph: no reason now for Britain not to raise her embargo as France has done, and Madison not to revoke in turn his Non-Intercourse Act against Britain. The western war hawks have lost their only casus belli of interest to the eastern states. There will be no War of 1812!

  But ah, the mails. Unaware of Barlow’s coup, Madison has delivered on June 1 his Second War Message to Congress, emphasizing the issue of British impressment of U.S. seamen; today 157 years ago he signs the Declaration of War, but the British ministry will not hear of it until well after their tardy revocation (on June 23) of the Orders in Council. Adieu, Joel Barlow, who have but six months more to live and must spend them chasing Napoleon all over eastern Europe! Au revoir, Andrew Cook IV, chaser of wild geese, of whom we shall hear more!

  For the next dozen years his good wife remains at Castines Hundred, raising her children. Twice during the first three of those years—that is, during the “Second War of Independence”—her husband returns (once without her knowing it), between his wartime adventures, not to be here chronicled. Andrée herself, once so politically active, seems to take no further interest in the Game of Governments. She is paid a single visit (in mid-September, 1813) by her friend and hero Tecumseh, who has fought so ably for the British along the Great Lakes that the question is no longer whether the U.S. will capture Canada, but whether the western states, so eager for the war, will become new territories of the Crown! Detroit has fallen; Fort Chicago has been massacred, Frenchtown, Fort Miami, Fort Mims. Tecumseh has more than regained the prestige lost at Tippecanoe: he is the undisputed leader of a confederacy that now includes the southern Creeks.

  But he confides to “Star-of-the-Lake” that he has ceased to believe in his mission. His Indians are good fighters but not good soldiers; with British encouragement, their ferocity against captured troops and civilians has redoubled; he cannot restrain them. The American retaliation has already begun, and is plainly exterminative. Forts Wayne and Meigs and Stephenson did not fall, a
nd they should have; the Creeks cannot possibly withstand the army that Andrew Jackson is assembling against them; the British general Proctor, Tecumseh’s immediate superior, is a coward and a beast. Most ominous of all, the American Commodore Perry has just defeated the British fleet on Lake Erie: the Long Knives will now control the Lakes, and who controls the Lakes controls the heart of the country.

  It is to confirm rumors of this defeat, about which Proctor has lied to him, that Tecumseh has come secretly from Bois Blanc Island, his camp on the Detroit River, to the other end of Lake Erie; having confirmed them, he has stopped at Castines Hundred to say good-bye to his friend forever. His old enemy General Harrison is assembling an army of vengeful Kentucky riflemen on the Ohio shore of the lake; Perry’s fleet will carry them unopposed to the Detroit river forts. Somewhere thereabouts, and soon, the decisive battle will be fought. He Tecumseh is not sanguine of its issue; in any case, he knows—though he cannot say how he knows—that he will not survive it, and that the cause of Indian confederacy will not survive him.

  But this is not Tecumseh’s history, any more than it is Andrew Cook’s (who, we shall learn in another letter, is observing this fateful tête-à-tête from a place of concealment on the grounds of Castines Hundred). During the British invasion of Chesapeake Bay late the next summer—specifically, during the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore following the burning of Washington—my great-great-grandfather will officially die. The news will reach Andrée (still in mourning for Tecumseh) a week or so later—along with the rumor that her husband has merely faked his death in order to mislead certain authorities; has changed identities and set out for New Orleans, the next destination of the British fleet. The “widow” considers the news, the rumor, his long silence, her familiar position. After the destruction of Jean Lafitte’s Baratarian stronghold by the American navy that same September and the American victory at New Orleans the following January—the war of course is over by then, but the mails, the mails!—the expected letter arrives at Castines Hundred, purportedly from her husband but in a fairly suspicious hand, as if penned with difficulty by either a wounded Andrew IV or a moderately artful forger: She is to join him at once in Mobile to help reorganize the surviving Creeks and Negroes enlisted by the British and now abandoned by them. She is to bring the twins…

  Andrée makes the painful choice: she resolves to disbelieve, and holds fast to that resolve for the rest of her recorded life, though four more “posthumous” letters follow this first over the next several years, comprising the body of my Marylandiad. She remains a widow; the twins grow up fatherless. Napoleon abdicates, is exiled to Elba, returns for the Hundred Days, is defeated at Waterloo, surrenders aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon, appeals to the prince regent for a passport to America, and is transported instead to St. Helena by Admiral Cockburn, the erstwhile scourge of the Chesapeake. The Rush-Bagot Treaty neutralizes the Great Lakes forever. Mme de Staël dies in Paris of liver and hydrothoracic complaints, George III at Windsor of intermittent hematuria, inguinal hernia, hemorrhoids, bedsores, and terminal diarrhea; the prince regent becomes George IV. Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise prohibits slavery in all the new territories except Missouri which open up west of the Mississippi; the Indians are resettled and re-resettled. The state of Indiana considers naming its new capital city Tecumseh after their late great adversary, but decides on Indianapolis instead. Schemes are concocted to spirit Napoleon from his second exile to New Orleans, to Champ d’Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

  The last letter from “Andrew Cook IV” reaches Castines Hundred in the winter of 1821. Andrée is not to believe that the emperor has actually died on St. Helena, any more than that the writer of the letter actually died in Baltimore in 1814: Yours Truly and his associate Jean Lafitte have successfully rescued Napoleon from that rock, like a latter-day Perseus his Andromeda; they are hiding out in the Maryland marshes, planning together the Second Revolution; he will shortly appear at Castines Hundred to fetch her and the twins.

  Brazil declares its independence from Portugal, Mexico from Spain; Simón Bolivar (of whom more later) leads the revolutions in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. The “Chesapeake Negroes” are left chillily in Nova Scotia; those from the Gulf Coast are urged to rejoin their American masters; Tecumseh’s Indians are abandoned to their own devices. The aging Marquis de Lafayette returns to visit each of the 24 United States. In May of 1825, on their 13th birthday, Andrée discloses to the twins the four letters their father wrote to them in 1812 (those here appended). She is herself 36 now, her husband’s age then. Carefully she reviews for the children her life with their father, her genealogical researches, his fervent hopes for them.

  Then, having discharged her duty to his memory and been to that point a model mother to their children, she adds her personal wish: that they will take as their example neither the Cooks nor the Burlingames nor herself, but the idle, pacific Barons and Baronesses Castine, indifferent to History and everything else except each other and their country pleasures. She goes further: lays a deep curse upon marriage, parenthood, the Anglo-Saxon race, and the United States of America. She goes further yet: renames herself Madocawanda the Tarratine, exchanges her silks and cottons for beads and buckskins, kisses the twins a fierce farewell, and disappears into western Canada! There will be rumors of her riding with Black Hawk in Wisconsin in 1832, a sort of middle-aged Penthesilea, when the Sac and Fox Indians are driven west across the Mississippi. It will even be reported that among the Oglala Sioux, during Crazy Horse’s vain war to break up the reservation system in 1876, is a ferocious old squaw named Madocawanda who delights in removing the penises of wounded U.S. Cavalrymen. Andrée Castine at that time would have been 87! But we need not identify “Star-of-the-Lake” with these shadowy avatars.

  And the twins? They kept company with each other, raised by the Baron and Baroness Castine much in the manner that their ancestors Ebenezer and Anna Cooke had been raised in St. Giles in the Fields (per your account in our Sot-Weed Factor)—only without the radical stimulation of a tutor like Henry Burlingame III. Opposite-sex twins, the psychologists tell us, tend to regression. And why not? They were not lonely in the womb. Expelled from that Paradise, they know what Aristophanes only fancied: that we are but the fallen halves of a once seamless whole, searching in vain for our lost moiety. They have little need of speech, but invent their own languages; they have less need of others. Their eventual lovers will seem siblings, as their siblings had seemed lovers. Henry V is the only Burlingame of whose genital problems (and their traditional oversolution) we have no report; of Henrietta’s sexual life, too, we know next to nothing. Neither married; they lived together until their 49th year in a kind of travesty of Andrée’s advice, apparently uninterested in anyone except each other and in anything except, mildly, literature, the great American flowering of which was at hand.

  In 1827, their 16th year, they received a letter from one “Ebenezer Burling” of Richmond, Virginia, delivered to Castines Hundred via the newly opened Erie Canal. With your dear mother, it began, has gone my soul, my name… (A true Burlingamish pun there, involving mon âme and the truncation of Burlingame: we remember A.C. IV’s long tenure in France, and the twins’ bilinguality.) He is their father, the letter goes on to declare, now past 50 and constrained by circumstances to this evocative nom de guerre. He understands and sympathizes with their mother’s defection; he hopes they will permit him, belatedly, to take her place and assume his own, as he has sought to do since 1815. He is about to leave Richmond for Norfolk with a gifted young poet-friend, whom he is helping to escape certain disagreeable circumstances and on whom therefore he has bestowed another of his own amusing aliases, “Henri le Rennet”: a mixed pun on “Henry the Reborn” and “Henry the Reemptied” or “cleaned-out” (The young fellow is destitute; he has written some admirable verses about Tamerlane; he believes that the story of “Consuelo del Consulado” needs reworking, and proposes for example that her poisoned snuff
box be changed to a poisoned pen; he is headed for Boston to try his luck as an editor and writer; his actual name is Edgar Poe). He Burling himself is en route to Baltimore, to try whether what he learned about steam propulsion from Toot Fulton many years ago can be applied to railways. He hopes his children will join him there and encloses money for their journey, along with a separate sum for the Baron Castine in partial remuneration of the expense of their upbringing. He also encloses, by way of proof of his identity, a pocketwatch which he claims was similarly and belatedly given him by his own father: a silver Breguet with “barleycorn” engine-turning on the case, steel moon hands, and a white enameled face with the seconds dial offset at the VII, the maker’s name engraved in secret cursive under the XII, and the monogram HB similarly scribed before the appropriate numeral IV. I have this watch before me as I speak.