Letters Read online

  You Waited.

  “Why not Historiographical Therapy?”

  You Did Not Bother to Mention Cliotherapy, a traditional feature of many patients’ schedules despite the Doctor’s own aversion to etiological analysis.

  “We historians are always reinterpreting the past,” Joe went on. “But if history is a trauma, maybe the thing to do is redream it.”

  “The thing to do,” declared the Doctor when your Account of this conversation had reached this point, “is keep moving in the daytime and take Demerol at night. Get to the dénouement, Horner: narrative suspense does not interest me. What does he want?”

  You Could Not Say, Saint Joseph having terminated the interview just there; but you Reported your Opinion that he was nowise “spaced out” (though the episode with the Senecas may well have occurred as he declared) and that, distressing as must have been his defeat by John Schott at Marshyhope, it had not unhinged him. Some sort of punishment—of yourself in the first instance for Disrupting His Marriage; perhaps of the Doctor for performing the fatal abortion—might well be among Morgan’s intentions, but you Did Not Quite Believe it to have brought him to the Farm. From Monsieur Casteene, in whose disinterestedness you Had No Great Confidence, you had Learned that a film director named Prinz was in fact at work on some sort of production involving scenes from the War of 1812 in Chesapeake Bay and on the Niagara Frontier: perhaps the blowing up of old Fort Erie, or the British capture of Fort Niagara, or the burning of Buffalo. Quite possibly Morgan was advising him on these scenes; Casteene himself hoped to be of use to the project when the company arrived, sometime during the summer, inasmuch as his forebears had played a certain role, so he asserted, in the original events.

  “But that’s Casteene,” you Concluded. “Do you know who he really is?”

  The Doctor twitched his nose. “No idle ontologies, Jacob Horner. ‘Casteene’ is sufficient for our purposes. So. Like yourself, I find our Saint Joseph to be altogether rational, certainly hostile, not so certainly threatening. He has paid in advance for the month of April, so we shall be seeing him for a while yet. If he does not murder us or have us arrested—either of which I regard him as quite capable of doing but not very likely to do—his presence here may have its benefits. Bibi and Pocahontas have certainly been easier to live with lately, though I foresee trouble if he shows a preference for one or the other. But you.”

  You Waited.

  “You Locked Up again, did you?”

  “Not Locked Up,” you Corrected, “Petered Out. When Joe spoke of redreaming history, we were both looking out of the window. I was Waiting for him to explain and at the same time Thinking of all that water going by, that started out clean in Lake Superior and then flushed down through Huron and Erie. Heraclitus says you can’t step into the same stream twice: I’d be Content to Step Into It once. And Horace speaks of the man standing on the riverbank, shoes in hand, forever waiting to take the first step, till all the water’s run by. I’m that man.”

  “Literature,” the Doctor said contemptuously. “That reminded me that the corps of engineers is supposed to turn off Niagara Falls this summer, the American side, to see whether it can be made as spectacular as the Canadian Falls: the most American project I Ever Heard Of. It’s expected to be a great tourist attraction, a sort of negative natural wonder. Then I Got To Thinking about negativism, how it would be positive in the antiworld, where entropy would be ectropy and we’d be running an Immobilization Farm—”

  “Horner, Horner.”

  “That was it, till Tombo X came by and laid his Straight-Razor Therapy on me.” It is that young man’s wont, with white male immobiles, to terrify them into motion by whipping out an old-fashioned straight razor, rolling his eyeballs and flashing his teeth blackamoor-style, and, seizing the patient by the scrotum, threatening in Deep Dixie dialect to relieve him of his honky nuts. “One day he’ll go too far with that.”

  “One day,” the Doctor said, “you will Tell my son to get his pickaninny hands off you or you will Burn a cross on his lawn. That day the conversation can begin.”

  “He cheats,” you Complained. “By squeezing. It wasn’t fear of castration that fetched me up. It was pain.”

  “Never mind. You had Been Out for five hours. And you might Still Be There if he had not been dodging Pocahontas. It was exactly like old times?”

  “Exactly. I was Aware of everything going on, but Weatherless. Couldn’t Bring myself to Move. Zen Buddhists speak of the air breathing you…”

  “For pity’s sake, Horner, do not Add Zen Buddhism to your White Socks and Skinny Neckties. This is 1969. You are Forty-Six. Most men of your Age and Class have children in college who have gotten over their own adolescent mysticism by this time. We are right where we started.”

  You Waited. The Doctor took his time. His own hair and mustache, now entirely white, he has let grow longer in the current fashion, and has added a small goatee: he looks like a bald black Colonel Sanders, or a dapper negative of Albert Einstein. Your Mind Began to Wander, then to Dissipate. Though you Would Not Join the Generation, seriously to yourself you Enounced the current test pattern of your Consciousness:

  You’ve Got a lot to live,

  And Pepsi’s got a lot to give.

  Then it too trickled away into the void. Across a measureless distance the Doctor said: “I have no razor. But I will cheerfully crotch you if you do not Wake Up.”

  Okay.

  “Okay. Your Friend Saint Joseph has the right idea, whether he and the former Joe Morgan are the same or not.”

  “They’re the same.”

  The Doctor shrugged his eyebrows. “Heraclitus’s dictum cuts two ways: even if the river had not flowed, the You would have. I am remembering how Morgan sent his wife back to you when he could not assimilate her first infidelity. As if a replay might clarify it…”

  The Doctor slid his chair away, stood, relit his long-dead cigar. The interview was apparently over.

  “An impressive chap, your Friend. But this Wiederträumerei is a dangerous business. You set about to kill two birds with one stone, and sometimes you wipe out the whole flock. So. Forget what we decided earlier about you and Pocahontas, at least until Saint Joseph makes his choice. You and I must go back to weekly P-and-A’s, as in the old days.” He frowned. “Reenactment. But if there is no Freshman English requirement on the campuses nowadays, surely there is no Prescriptive Grammar. And you Ought to Stay Residential. How will you Teach?”

  R: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of A. B. Cooke III: Pontiac’s conspiracy.

  At Castines Hundred

  Niagara, Upper Canada

  2 April 1812

  My Dearest Henrietta or Henry,

  Read, dear child, when you shall have been born & begun to be educated, a great tiresome epical poem call’d Columbiad, by Joel Barlow of Connecticut & Paris, wherein the dying & despondent Columbus, in a dream or trance, is fetcht to the Mount of Vision by Hesper, Spirit of the Western World: thence like Aeneas in Hades he beholds panoramically the future history (up to 1807, the date of the poem’s appearance) of the empire for whose initiation he is responsible. This vision, stout Barlow assures us—of white Americans pushing ever westward, clearing the forests, draining the marshes, harvesting the fish & game, building canals & roads & cities from coast to coast—cheers Columbus & reconciles him to his obscure death.

  The conceit is admirable. The poem itself is a bore because, unlike the Aeneid, its concerns do not range much beyond sentimental patriotism, and because, unlike Virgil, its author is a merely educated, sensible fellow with an amateur’s gift for making verses. Joel Barlow was one of the self-styled “Hartford Wits”; another was your grandfather, Henry Burlingame IV, who befriended Barlow at Yale College just before the American Revolution and suggested both The Vision of Columbus (the poet’s 1st & briefer version of Columbiad) & a passable satire of Daniel Shays’ rebellion call’d The Anarchiad, of which more anon. The Cooke-Burlingame line is given n
either to longueurs nor to longevity: my father is said to have died in 1785 at the age of 39, before either of the poems that covertly memorialize him was publisht.

  As for Barlow: that gentleman survives as U.S. Minister to France, whence he will have reported by now to President Madison that “Le Comte Édouard de Crillon”—who lately sold Secretary Monroe the notorious John Henry Letters for $50,000 and then exacted from Madison’s operatives another $21,000 (half of which Andrée & I have safely bank’d for you in Switzerland)—does not exist. The late actual Duc de Crillon was a Spanish grandee, conqueror of Minorca, attacker of Gibraltar, & member of the French Assembly, who in 1788 tried unsuccessfully to seduce my mother at a diplomatic soirée in London. The current Duke, his only son, lives in Paris, smarting at the £1,200 he was lately swindled out of by one “Jean Blanque,” and doubtless enraged at the scandal now attaching to the family name. Father & son are both acquaintances of Barlow, to whom my father introduced them years ago. Thus the Minister will have immediately guess’d, as I want him to, that Madison has been duped. What he will not guess is that I did both the duping & the unduping, to lead the U. States closer to war and so promote the schism betwixt New England & the rest of that nation. That I chose the name Édouard de Crillon precisely to excite his suspicion (as well as to settle a little score for Mother), and the name Jean Blanque to echo Barlow’s own & provide him a blank to fill.

  Rather, to provide such a blank to History, since the Hartford Wits, for all their wit, are short on the finer ironies. There is more to it: I chose the name Édouard for my imposture of the Count, for example, because it was Mother’s descent from Le Comte Cécile Édouard of Castle Haven in Maryland that had aroused the late Duke’s lecherous interest. If the fellow currently posing as Aaron Burr in Paris is in fact my father, he will recognize in that touch the family trademark, & understand that I understand that he is alive.

  Thus the messages we Cooks & Burlingames amuse one another by sending with our left hands, as we play the Game of Governments with our right and undo, as far as is in us possible, the Vision of good Joel Barlow!

  So then, dear child in the making: the fat is fairly in the fire since my letter of last month. Whilst you have been growing hair & toenails, and opening your eyes (What do you see, little Burlingame? That most of the world’s eyes are closed?), Wee Jamie Madison has sent the Henry Letters to Congress—that is, my fair paraphrase of the fourteen cipher’d originals, plus John Henry’s nattering Proposal for the Final Reunion of His Majesty’s Dominion in North America with the States of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Now Henry Clay & the War Hawks are making the most of them to embarrass the New England Federalists, to justify their own Anglophobia, & to push gentle Jamie ever closer to a “Second War of Independence”—their pretext for snatching the Canadas & the Floridas.

  More anon, more anon, of

  The Henry papers, bought & sold,

  And paid for with the nation’s gold,

  when I come to my own & your mother’s histories. This is to apprise you of your great-grandfather’s, the 3rd Andrew Cooke’s, whereto your genealogy had got when I closed my last. I pray you, review the chart of it, overleaf.

  There are, all over this tree, other fruits, to be sure: brothers, sisters, by-blows on nearly every branch & twig. With a few exceptions, I have enter’d only those in the main line of your descent. And the wives of all those Barons Castine are not really nameless, but (always excepting Madocawanda) they made vocations of being their husbands’ wives, and are of no individual interest here. That fellow in the box, my grandfather, was, you recall, sired out of wedlock on the “Maryland Laureate’s” twin sister by the 3rd Henry Burlingame, who then disappear’d into the Dorset marshes with the avow’d intention of thwarting the “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of escaped African slaves & displaced Indians. To cover the scandal, Grandfather was given the surname Cooke and raised as the son of the poet Ebenezer, whose wife had died still-bearing their own child.

  A.B.C. III thus never knew his father, tho thro his childhood he was retail’d stories by Eben Cooke of the mysterious “Uncle Henry” who, for aught they knew, might dwell among them incognito, looking after the welfare of his “favorite nephew.” How else explain the anonymous gifts of money & goods that from time to time appear’d as from Heaven, addrest either to Anna Cooke or to the boy?

  So far did the aging poet fall into this folly, in 1730 he composed a sequel to his major work, The Sot-Weed Factor, call’d Sot-Weed Redivivus, or, the Planter’s Looking-Glass, which, in the guise of an economic tract in verse, incorporates to the knowledgeable eye broad signals to Henry Burlingame III, of the “Édouard de Crillon” variety. The opening words of Cooke’s preface, for example—

  May I be canoniz’d for a Saint, if I know what Apology to make for this dull Piece of Household Stuff, any more than he that first invented the Horn-Book…

  —allude to the once-popular belief that Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Lord Baltimore & 1st Lord Proprietary of Maryland, had struck a bargain with Pope Urban VIII to make Maryland into a Jesuit colony in return for posthumous sainthood. Cooke 1st learnt of this presumable slander from Burlingame, who of course had also, as his childhood tutor, “invented the Horn-Book” for his little charges. Similarly, a few lines farther on—

  … one Blast from the Critick’s Mouth, would raise more Flaws in this Looking-Glass, than there be Circles in the Sphere…

  —we are reminded that Burlingame was ever Cooke’s severest literary critic. That his political intrigues led him into mirror-like reversals & duplications (he also posed as Baltimore’s enemy John Coode, & cet., & cet.). That Cooke’s “inventor of the Horn-Book” was also his instructor in geometry & astronomy. In the poem itself, such allusions swarm like bees (themselves a reduplicated image, punning on Burlingame’s initial): the most obvious is the poet’s not only re-meeting but re-sleeping with a tobacco-planter (“cockerouse” in the argot of the time, & a naughty pun too) with whom he had dealings in the original Sot-Weed Factor, & who was Burlingame “much disguis’d”:

  I boldly crav’d his Worship’s Name

  And tho’ the Don at first seem’d shy,

  At length he made this smart Reply

  I am, says he, that Cockerouse

  Once entertain’d you at his House,

  When aged Roan, not us’d to falter,

  If you remember, slipt his Halter;

  Left Sotweed Factor in the Lurch,

  As Presbyterians leave the Church…

  The horse-couplet is a quotation from the earlier poem; the original Roan had inspired a trial of rhyming betwixt Cooke & Burlingame-disguised-as-“Cockerouse”; Ebenezer & his sister had indeed been “left in the lurch,” and Andrew III born therefore outside “the Church.”

  More subtle is the reference to his guide as “the Spurious Offspring of some Tawny-Moor” (Ebenezer’s prostitute-wife, Joan Toast, was once ravisht by the Moorish pirate Boabdil, and Burlingame’s ancestry, like yours & mine, was racially mixt). “… to glut the Market with a poisonous Drug” refers of course to the overproduction of “sot-weed” in the colony, the poem’s explicit theme; but it alludes covertly to the opium traffic in which Burlingame involved Ebenezer Cooke in the 1690’s.

  I call’d the drowsy Passive Slave

  To light me to my downy Grave…

  and

  …we thought it best

  To let the Aethiopian rest…

  overtly refer to the “one that pass’d for Chamber-Maid” at the inn where this encounter takes place (note that she too is suspected of being other than she seems), whilst they secretly remind Burlingame of the poet’s near-martyrdom at the stake in 1694 by that conspiracy of escaped slaves & Ahatchwhoop Indians on Bloodsworth Island, which Burlingame had gone ostensibly to “put to rest.”

  Most interesting of all is Cooke’s prediction that his fellow Marylanders

  Will by their Heirs be curst for [their] M
istakes,

  E’er Saturn thrice his Revolution makes…

  That is, literally, within three generations, when the land will have been deforested & the soil exhausted by one-crop tobacco farming. But the “three revolutions” (Saturn’s period is 29½ years), reckon’d roughly from the date of Cooke’s composing Sot-Weed Redivivus, echo a prediction by Henry Burlingame III of three “revolutionary” upheavals: 1st, the Seven Years War betwixt Britain & France, which by 1759 would have reacht the fall of Fort Niagara to the British & the consequent shift of Indian allegiances from the losing to the winning side, paving the way for the surrender of the Canadas to Lord Jeffrey Amherst & for “Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” as shall be shown; 2nd, the American & French Revolutions (i.e., about 1789, when George Washington was elected, the Tennis Court Oath sworn, the Bastille taken); 3rd, what we now approach: the decline & fall of Napoleon’s Empire & the commencement of America’s 2nd Revolution. “Rise, Oroonoko, rise …” Cooke urges his disguised mentor at the beginning of Canto III, which in cunning emblem of eternal recurrence, or revolution without end, he ends with the exhortation “Begin…” and the invocation of time’s Stream

  That runs (alas!) and ever will run on.

  Anna Cooke indulged this folly, if folly it was, but resisted the temptation to folie à deux. Upon her brother’s death in 1732, she confided to her “nephew” Andrew (by then a successful lawyer in Annapolis) that his “Uncle Henry” had been her common-law husband; she declared moreover her private conviction that he had not, as Ebenezer believed, gone over to the side of the conspirators whose ally he had pretended to be: had he done so, she was firmly convinced, the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy would have succeeded, and Maryland at least, if not all thirteen of the English colonies, would no longer exist. It was Anna’s belief that H.B. III had successfully divided & thwarted the designs of the Indians & Negroes, then been discover’d & kill’d by them; otherwise he would have rejoin’d & officially married her long since. As for the anonymous donations, they were in her opinion the compensation traditionally provided sub rosa by governments to the widows of secret operatives lost in the line of duty, whose supreme sacrifices must perforce & alas go as officially unacknowledged as her brief “marriage.”