Letters (80 page)

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 have 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?

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,
non
valent—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 interest 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.

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…