John Barth - Letters

Your story of having discovered that manuscript in Pennsylvania in December 1955 I Find less convincing than the novel itself. As for your work in progress, your inquiries, your proposal: I am Not Interested.

You would hazard the remobilization of “Jacob Horner”; how shall Jacob Horner Go About the resurrection of “Rennie Morgan,” whose widower intends to kill me if I don’t Bring Her Back To Life by Labor Day?

If only roads did end. But the end of one is the commencement of another, or its mere continuation. Today, 15th of May, Ascension Day, 51st anniversary of the opening of airmail service between New York City and Washington, D.C., birthday of Anna Maria Alberghetti, Richard Avedon, Michael William Balfe, Joseph Cotten, James Mason, Ilya Mechnikov, I Am Back at the Beginning of mine, where I Was in 1951—what a year, what a decade, what a century — only Older; not so much Paralyzed as Spent.

Who wants to replay that play, rewalk that road?

L: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child.His own history to the present writing: the French Revolution, Joel Barlow in Algiers, “Consuelo del Consulado,” Burr’s conspiracy, Tecumseh’s Indian confederacy. The Pattern.

At Castines Hundred

Niagara, Upper Canada

Thursday, 14 May 1812

Dawdling daughter, slugabed son!

Last time I letter’d you, lazy child, five weeks since, ’twas mid-Aries; now ’tis the very tail of Taurus, the beast that was meant to bring you last week to breath. The good Baron your uncle has her nurse & midwife standing by; your mother frets to be discharged of nine months’ freight; I am a-fidget to be off for Washington & Bloodsworth Island, where I have business. Yet you sleep on thro the signs: another week & you’ll be Gemini! Are you storing strength for some great work? Are you tranced like the Seven Sleepers? Or does it merely suit you to linger there, in that sweetest cave of all?

Your father, too, has been gestating, with Andrée’s help, here in the womb of the Castines, whence issue forth all Cookes & Burlingames, and I feel myself upon the tardy verge of 2nd birth. Like you, I have flail’d blindly in my sleep, pummel’d a parent I had better pitied, if not loved. As late as these latest weeks, from a kind of dreamish habitude, I have scuttled up & down the shores of Ontario, Huron, Erie; John Astor’s voyageurs & trappers are now organized into a line of quick communication for General Brock in the coming war; the routes are ready for smuggling materiel from New England merchants to our government in York & Montreal. My doing, tho the doer feels, ever more strongly, that the man he is about to become must undo the man he’s been: that I myself, not my father, am the parent I must refute.

My last three letters have traced the history of your forebears down to Andrée & myself, and have shown (what your mother first discover’d to me) how each has honor’d his grandsire as a fail’d visionary, whilst dishonoring his sire as a successful hypocrite. Each Cooke the spiritual heir of the Cooke before; every Burlingame a Burlingame! Not even your mother quite escaped this dismal pattern, tho by discerning it thus early in her maturity, she finds herself with less history than I to be rewrit. But I, I am steept & marinated in the family error, to the confession whereof we now are come. In this letter — surely my last to an addressee unborn! — I must rehearse my own career, complete the tale of what Andrée has taught me, & set forth our changed resolves with respect to the coming war, together with our hopes for you.

Bear in mind, little Burlingame — what I have ever to remind myself — that Aaron Burr in Paris may not be Henry Burlingame IV! If (as Mother at her best believed, despite those late cruel letters) Father died in 1783, or ’84, or ’85—if, for example, he was the man hang’d by Washington as Major John André—then of what a catalogue of crimes against us he stands acquit! Every one of his earlier friends who thot they recognized him thereafter — Benedict Arnold, Joel Barlow, Joseph Brant, Aaron Burr, Baron Castine — acknowledged that he was much changed, and their descriptions of him differ’d greatly. Who knows better than I that letters can be forged, knowledge pretended, manners aped? And so when I received that note from him on Bastille Day 1790, written in the Bell Tavern in Massachusetts and handed me in Paris by an attendant of Mme de Staël; when I read it, wept, curst, tore it to shreds, burnt the shreds, & pisst upon the ashes — even then, at 14, I allow’d that it was not of necessity my father I pisst upon, but perhaps a heartless & unaccountable impostor, perhaps a series of such impostors.

In either case, I thereby spurn’d the declaration in that letter: that my father’s great aim & life’s activity had been 1st to prevent, and later to subvert, the American Revolution. It was Arnold had 1st put the contrary bee in my bonnet, in London in 1787, which now commenced a buzzing: that my father from the start had been a sly & wondrously effective agent of George Washington! Father’s advice to Burr & Arnold, when they were joining the Continentals at Cambridge, had invariably been sound advice. He had permitted Arnold to raise the St. Leger siege against Fort Stanwix. Arnold himself, moreover, was persuaded that Father had gull’d him into betraying West Point to Major André in order to betray the betrayal, all at Washington’s directive, to the end of uniting the “states” behind him & discrediting the Loyalists. Whether or not Father was the author of the Nicola or the Newburgh letters, their effect was altogether in Washington’s favor; Arnold believed they had been authorized by the General himself, to provide occasion for his famous replies. On the other hand, Arnold thot it very likely that Washington or his aides had arranged to have Father quietly done away with at the same time as Major André, to prevent the great duplicity’s becoming known.

Thro this new lens, so to speak, I now perceived in a different light my father’s other alleged efforts in the cause of the Loyalists & the Indians. His activities in Maryland with the Marshyhope Blues against Joseph Whaland, supposedly to keep the Picaroon inform’d in advance of the attempts to capture him, had led in fact to Whaland’s only arrest. Most painful of all to acknowledge, the Mohawk massacres led by “Joseph Brant” in Pennsylvania had led to such ruinous retaliation that the proud Six Nations were in effect no more: a decimated rabble of drunken vagrants along the Grand River. Had Father’s plan from the start been to exterminate the Iroquois, he could scarcely have devised a better means!

All this I saw, & pisst & pisst. Mme de Staël’s attendant, a boy my age who had stood courteously & curiously by, inquired whether I had any further reply to his mistress, who hoped I would wait upon her that afternoon, as upon a friend of both my father & Mr. Barlow. I bid him good day; but Barlow said I ought to go, and I would not disoblige one who had been so kind to Mother & to me. He was full of praise, was Barlow, for the young baronne, who he said had taken an interest in my situation. He hoped I might see much of her household — more particularly as his own must now change character: he was off posthaste to London to fetch Mrs. Barlow at last. It had been his design that Mother & I should return to Canada when her child was born. Now that she & it were dead, he urged me to go to my father, in Baltimore or wherever, to put an end to that painful mystery & decide with him my future course. If I would not (and I made plain that I would die first), I might always count myself welcome in his childless house. But a season in the society of Mme de Staël would improve my literary & political cultivation, he declared, and afford himself & his Ruthy a chance to reacquaint themselves after their long separation. Mrs. B. was not an ardent traveler; new cities alarm’d her, Paris especially, & the Revolution; and while not given to irrational jealousy, she was quite susceptible to the rational sort…