Letters

by John Barth

  Tom Barlow and Andrew bury him at once, thank John Blaski for his courageous charity, and flee: the Cossacks need no particular excuse for ravaging a Jewish settlement. The two will reach Paris three weeks later, no longer friends. Indeed, while he charges no one by name of slandering him, and specifically “absolves” Ruthy (of what, we must infer) by reason of her “inconsolable grief,” Andrew concludes this portion of his letter with the meaning observations that, as Ruthy’s favorite and Joel’s nearest relative, nephew Tom will surely inherit the Barlow estate upon Ruthy’s death; that “of all the calumnies ever suffer’d silently by those whose profession does not permit reply, none stings me so sore as that ‘J. B. Petry’ saw to it Joel’s treaty was never sign’d! As well accuse me of his pneumonia, who gave up my own pelisse to warm him at the end!”

  Be that as it may—and I for one, Henry, do not credit for a moment the insinuation that Andrew derived “the blanket trick” from Jeffrey Amherst’s bacteriological tactic against the Indian besiegers of Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s conspiracy—he acknowledges frankly that the death of his “father” liberates as well as grieves him. Negotiations with the Duc de Bassano cannot now be resumed until a new minister arrives from Washington: late spring at the earliest. Though Napoleon executes General Malet for treason and welcomes the declarations of war on France by Prussia and Austria as his excuse to raise yet another army and atone for the Russian debacle, he has little interest in the British-American diversion. For one thing, the Americans seem to be holding their own without assistance: though Tecumseh’s Indians have been victorious around the western Great Lakes, and Admiral Cockburn has blockaded the Chesapeake to play off the mid-Atlantic states against New York and New England, the new U.S. invasion of Canada bids to be successful. General Prevost is repulsed at Sackett’s Harbor on Lake Ontario, and the Americans loot and burn the Canadian capital at York (Toronto). The British virtually evacuate the Niagara Frontier from Fort George at the mouth to Fort Erie at the head of the Niagara River; only the timidity of old General Dearborn keeps the Americans from pressing their advantage and seizing Canada. The U.S. Navy, too, is flexing its new muscle: though of insufficient force simply to destroy the British blockade (which however generates in Baltimore an enormously profitable fleet of privateers and blockade-runners), American captains are distinguishing themselves in individual engagements. One brig alone, the Argus, after delivering Joel Barlow’s successor to Paris, wreaks such havoc with British merchant shipping in the English Channel that marine insurance rates shoot up like a Congreve rocket—a mode of economic warfare so effective that the prince regent now considers seriously Czar Alexander’s offer to negotiate a settlement of the war.

  Non grata in the rue de Vaugirard, Andrew follows these developments attentively from across the Channel, where he has gone in March to test the British political weather before returning to Andrée and the twins. The Americans, he concludes, are doing altogether too well to consider yielding to the British demand for an Indian Free State, especially while Napoleon remains a threat in Europe. Cockburn’s depredations in the Chesapeake are little more than a nuisance; only Tecumseh (and Dearborn’s pusillanimity) is keeping Canada in the British Empire. But word has it that young Oliver Perry is building an American fleet from scratch at Presque Isle on Lake Erie, to help William Henry Harrison defeat Tecumseh finally and for keeps. It is time, Andrew decides, the scales were tipped a bit the other way.

  Before leaving London he pays one call on Mme de Staël, who with her entourage is enjoying great success in the city. He finds her in good spirits but indifferent health: the last pregnancy, her fifth, took its toll on her, and its issue proved unfortunate. “Petit Nous” is imbecilic; they have named him Giles, invented an American parentage for him, and left him at Coppet with wet nurses. Germaine is tired and no longer attractive; her young guardsman-husband, though devoted, is crude and given to jealousy; she is using far too much laudanum, can’t manage without it. She is not displeased to see that Andrew too has aged considerably. She introduces him to young Lord Byron, whose company she enjoys despite his unflattering compliment that she should have been born male. At her request, for Byron’s amusement and by way of homage to the memory of Joel Barlow, Andrew for the last time recounts the tale of “Consuelo del Consulado.” The poet attends, applauds politely, suggests that “with some reworking” it might appeal to Walter Scott, but believes that Gioacchino Rossini may have already made use of it in his new opéra bouffe L’Italiana in Algeri. Germaine herself, this time around, declares the tale palpable rubbish. The truth is (she announces pointedly to Byron) she is surfeited with Romanticism, almost with literature. She prefers Jane Austen to Walter Scott, Alexander Pope to Wordsworth and Shelley, and would rather read Malthus and Ricardo and Laplace than the lot of them. Her own novels have begun to bore her: so much so that she is writing a quite 18th-Century essay against suicide to counter the “Wertherism” so morbidly in fashion, from which her own Delphine, for example, suffers. Oh that she were Byron’s age! She would devise an art that saw through such improbable flamboyances as Napoleon and “Consuelo” to those complex realities which (as her financier father knew) truly affect the lives of men and nations: the commodity market, currency speculation, the mysteries of patent law and debenture bonding.

  Byron is bored. Andrew has heard the argument before; he coins the terms “post-Romantic” and “neo-Realist” and, begging their pardons, wonders casually whether Germaine’s new passion for economic and political history as against belles-lettres is not as romantical in its way as Byron’s fascination with “action” as against “contemplation.” He also wonders whether (this fancy much pleases both Byron and de Staël) “romantic” unlikelihoods such as his interlude with Consuelo not more likely to occur in reality, even to abound, in the present Age of Romanticism than in other ages, just as visions and miracles no doubt occurred more regularly in the Age of Faith than in the Enlightenment. The most practical strategists in the Admiralty, for example, have been unable to deal with the American Argus nuisance in the Channel, whereas any romantical novelist deserving of the adjective would recall at once how Mercury slew the original “hundred-eyed Argus” by first charming the monster to sleep (some say with fiction). Suppose, instead of wool and timber and wheat, the Argus were to capture a ship loaded to the gunwales with good Oporto wine, whilst over the horizon a British man-o’-war stood ready to close when the Yankees were in their cups…

  Germaine is impatient: the effect of Lloyd’s marine insurance rates on British foreign policy intrigues her, but not the application of classical mythology to modern naval warfare. Byron, on the other hand, is enchanted with the idea. He has a naval cousin, Sir Peter Parker, in H.M.S. Menelaus in the Mediterranean, and other Admiralty connections to whom he must rush off at once and propose the scheme. Mr. Cook is quite right: it is an age in which the Real and the Romantic are, so to speak, fraternal twins. He himself, now Cook has put the bee in his bonnet, would not be surprised to learn that Lady Caroline Lamb, who has been forging letters over his signature, is Consuelo del Consulado, up to her old tricks!

  They part (Andrew will not see either again; he cannot interest Byron in Barlow’s raven, for which the poet declares the only useful rhyme in English is craven; the kindness of the Jew John Blaski appeals to him more; he is considering a series of “Hebrew melodies” to be set by his friend Isaac Nathan. But off to the Admiralty, and well met!): on the first of August, his conscience stung by Byron’s reference to twins, Andrew takes ship from Ireland to Nova Scotia. There is a lull in the war: Madison’s peace commissioners are in St. Petersburg with John Quincy Adams, but the prince regent, perhaps in view of Dearborn’s failure of nerve, declines after all to send representatives of his own. Napoleon’s momentum in Europe, like Dearborn’s in Canada, shows signs of flagging; President Madison has recalled the old general, but there is no one to recall the emperor. Andrew will not learn of this until he reaches Canada, or of Admiral Cockburn’s s
ack of Hampton, Virginia, or of Commodore Perry’s improbable launching of his Lake Erie fleet, or of the capture on August 13 of the drunken Argus by His Majesty’s brig Pelican. Meanwhile, as if his baiting of Germaine de Staël has provoked the gods of Romance…

  Twenty-four hours out from Cobh, as he stands on the quarterdeck with other passengers anxiously scanning the Channel for the dreaded Argus, he fetches out and winds the old Breguet. A veiled lady beside him catches her breath. Not long after, a sealed, scented envelope is delivered to his bunk in the gentlemen’s cabin…

  “Rossini, von Weber, Chateaubriand: your pardon!” Andrew here pleads. “Above all yours, Andrée!” But there she is, like the third-act reflex of a tired librettist. A still-striking, if plumpish, thirty-three, she has been the mistress of the Spanish minister to London; but her implacable ex-lover Don Escarpio, now a royalist agent in Rome, continues to harass her for her disobedience in Algiers. It is to flee his operatives and begin a new and different life that she has taken ship for Canada. But what honorable profession, in 1813, is open to a woman of no independent wealth who would be dependent on no man? Only one, that Consuelo knows of: following the examples of Mrs. Burney and Mrs. Edgeworth, above all of her idol Mme de Staël, she is determined to become… una novelista! Indeed, she is well into her maiden effort: an epistolary account, in the manner of Delphine, of her imbroglios with Serior Barlow and the wicked Escarpio. There is a new spirit abroad in Europe—perhaps Senor Cook has not heard of it—called romanticismo: as she has had alas no luck with the booksellers of Madrid and London, who advise her that the novel is a worn-out fad, Consuelo intends to introduce el romanticismo to North America and become the first famous Canadian novelist. For old time’s sake, will her carisimo Andrew read through the manuscript and help her English it?

  Three weeks later they part, affectionately, at Halifax. Andrew says no more of their shipboard intimacy (he is, after all, writing to his wife, and tardily) or of his friend’s novel, except that, searching promptly for the truth about the poisoned snuffbox, he finds it metamorphosed into a poisoned letter-opener (“¿Mas romántico, no?”) and suggests she rework that passage, among others. But that their reconnection was not merely editorial we may infer from Andrew’s immediate guilty assumption—when upon reaching Castines Hundred in September he finds Tecumseh there with Andrée—that in his long and newsless absence his wife has returned for consolation to her Indian friend.

  He does not “blame her”—or question her, or even make his presence known. For three days he haunts the area (the same three, ye muses of romantical coincidence, of Tecumseh’s single and innocent visit to his Star-of-the-Lake), surreptitiously satisfying himself that the twins are well, his wife and Tecumseh likewise. He hears the news that Perry has met the enemy at Put-In-Bay and that they are his; he understands that this victory spells the end, at least for the present, of British control of the Great Lakes, and that Perry’s fleet will now freely transport General Harrison’s army to meet Proctor and Tecumseh somewhere above Detroit. It wants no strategist to guess that another, two-pronged American invasion of Canada is imminent: one thrust from New England against Montreal, the other up from Detroit. Does Tecumseh understand that the battle to come is the most crucial of his life?

  Comes again the baleful plea: EVEILEBEM! If he acknowledges now his rueful return to Halifax and “Consuelo the Consoler” (la Consoladora), it is because he had rather Andrée tax him with infidelity than with the least complicity in Tecumseh’s death. To the charge that I might somehow have aided our noble friend, and did not, I plead nolo contendere, he writes. To the charge that I idled & self-sorrow’d in Halifax whilst Proctor cowardly fled the field at Thames and left Tecumseh to be shot & flay’d & unmember’d by the fierce Kentuckians, I plead guilty. But believe me, Andrée: to the charge that I wisht Tecumseh dead; that I pointed him out to Colonels Whitely & Johnson on the field; that I myself gave a strip of his skin to Henry Clay for a razor-strop—innocent, innocent, innocent!

  He does not say whose charges those were. “Soul-shockt” by the loss of Tecumseh so hard upon that of Joel Barlow—and with Tecumseh the only real leadership of an Indian confederacy—Cook languishes in Nova Scotia while Andrew Jackson massacres the Creeks in Alabama and Madison’s two strange replacements for General Dearborn launch their Canadian campaign. John Armstrong, the new secretary of war, is the same to whom in 1783 Henry Burlingame IV perhaps dictated the infamous “Newburgh Letters”; General Wilkinson is the same Spanish spy who conspired with “Aaron Burr” and then testified against him to save his own skin! Like its predecessor, this expedition will be a fiasco of mismanagement; by November’s end it too will have failed, and in December, with the British capture of Fort Niagara, the tide of war will begin to turn. But the retreating Americans will have burned Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) in addition to York; they will still control the Lakes; no one will have remarshaled the scattered Indians in Tecumseh’s stead—and Andrew lingers on in Halifax.

  But he is not altogether idle, and nowise inattentive. Prevost’s burning of Buffalo on New Year’s Eve in retaliation for Newark, he observes, while thorough and brutal, is scarcely of so demoralizing a character to the U.S.A. generally as to prompt Madison’s peace commissioners to cede the Great Lakes to Canada. Who cares about Buffalo? Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British blockading fleet, before leaving Halifax for winter quarters in Bermuda, proposes a letter to Madison threatening further such retaliation: he would begin on the coast of Maine come spring and burn one town after another until the Americans yield, working south if necessary as far as Boston. This too, it seems to Andrew, will be a blow from the wrong quarter: the Federalists will simply be driven into supporting Madison’s war, and the southern states will be privately delighted to see New England get its comeuppance. Admiral Cockburn’s season in Chesapeake Bay, on the other hand, while of limited military effectiveness—a few buildings burned, a few women raped, much tobacco confiscated, and the port of Baltimore closed to normal shipping—strikes Andrew as having been of considerable symbolic import and strategic promise: his fleet has cruised half a year with impunity at the front door of Washington; the city newspaper is even delivered regularly to his flagship, so that he can read the editorial denunciations of himself and keep abreast of the war! Now he is wintering on Cumberland Island, off Georgia, and allegedly arming Negroes for a general rising. The plan is not serious—Andrew has seen copies of the British directive to accept in service any free or escaped Negroes who volunteer, but not to permit a slave insurrection, lest the example spread to British colonies—but it terrifies the southern whites. Andrew admires Sir George Cockburn’s panache; Prevost and Cochrane, he believes, are looking at the wrong part of the map…

  Making use of his earlier connections with the Canadian secret service, Andrew spends the early months of 1814 establishing himself as a special liaison between the governor-general and the Royal Navy attaché in Halifax, while “assisting Consuelo with her novel-in-letters.” Except for Jackson’s campaign against the Creeks, who are finally destroyed in March at Horseshoe Bend, there is a general pause in the American war: all eyes are on Europe, where Wellington’s Invincibles have crossed the Pyrenees into France and Napoleon’s fall seems imminent. In the wake of the second Canadian fiasco, American Federalists are calling for Madison to resign or be impeached; Armstrong and Wilkinson are too busy now vilifying each other to prosecute the war. Ruthy Barlow, having wintered with the Robert Fultons in New York, returns to Washington and reopens Kalorama. In London, Mme de Staël, unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Bourbon restoration, hopes Napoleon will defeat the Allies but be killed in the process; in any event she and her friends make ready to end their exile. Byron writes his Corsair, Walter Scott his Waverly, Consuelo her Cartas argelinas, o, la Delfina nueva.

  Her collaborator and translator, as he privately prepares to avenge Tecumseh’s death, amuses himself with certain problems raised by the manuscript. He has
persuaded Consuelo that a new realismo must inevitably succeed the current rage for the Romantic; to buy into this growth-stock early, so to speak, she has reworked her story to include all manner of ghosts, monsters, witches, curses, and miracles, in whose literal reality she devoutly believes, but which she’d omitted from her first draft as insufficiently romántico, there being none in Delphine, Corinne, or The Sorrows of Young Werther. Andrew is delighted—and gently suggests that she revise her ambition and residence to become the first great Mexican or Venezuelan Post-Romantic novelist. It is too cold in Canada anyway, no? And the Halifax literary community has not exactly laureled her like Corinne. Why do they not sail down to Bermuda together, where he has business, and assess the literary situation from there?

  Consuelo agrees, the Allies enter Paris, Napoleon abdicates and is banished to Elba. Admiral Cockburn returns to the Chesapeake and renews his subscription to the National Intelligencer; General Ross in Bordeaux receives orders to take Wellington’s brigades to Admiral Cochrane in Bermuda for the purpose of “chastising Brother Jonathan” in some as yet unspecified way; Andrew Cook completes his strategy. As soon as Lake Erie is free of ice, he is certain, the Americans will re-retaliate in some fashion for the burning of Buffalo. Prevost himself waits for that occasion to prod Admiral Cochrane into action (the letter to Madison has not been sent, though Andrew has offered the governor-general numerous drafts). Sure enough, in May a raiding party from Erie, Pa., crosses the lake to Ontario and pillages the Long Point area. Prevost, into whose confidence our ancestor has by now entirely made his way, sends him at once from Halifax to Bermuda with orders for Cochrane both to demand reparation from Madison and, without waiting for reply, to initiate forthwith his proposed schedule of retaliation. Aboard the dispatch boat, as Consuelo prays to Maria Stella Maris to preserve them from sea monsters, cannibals, and other such realidades, Andrew adroitly redrafts the orders (and terminates abruptly, in mid-forged sentence, this first and longest of his posthumous letters, whose postscript you remember he added later, and whose interrupted sentence he resumes at the commencement of his second), substituting, in the catalogue of Cochrane’s targets, for Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts, and Newport in Rhode Island, the words Baltimore in Maryland…