John Barth - Letters

“Bonaparte tells us that generalship is the art of improvisation,” he concluded (our calèche was rolling through the almond & olive groves of La Huerta); “Henry Burlingame teaches us that improvisation, in its turn, is the art of imagining & cleaving to that point of view from which whatever comes to pass may be seen to be to one’s interests & exploited to advantage. I pray you, Andrew, ponder that: we can lose only insofar as we may fail to improvise ‘victory’ out of ‘defeat,’ & make it work.”

His own motives were comparatively simple: to render a service to his country whilst traveling at its expense & perhaps making a lucrative investment or two in Algiers (the bulk of his Hamburg fortune he had put into French government bonds & Paris real estate, counting on Napoleon to increase their value; but he left some $30,000 liquid for speculation), and to conclude the business speedily lest his Ruthy grow jealous again. His strategy was to placate the Dey with gifts & assurances until the American minister to Portugal (his old friend & fellow Hartford Wit, Colonel Humphreys), whose charge it was to conclude the treaties with Algiers, Tripoli, & Tunis, could raise $800,000 in bullion by selling discounted U. States Bank stock in London & Hamburg: a harder job, in Barlow’s estimation, than treating with a moody & dangerous Moslem prince. He wanted me with him because my adventure with the assignats convinced him I had inherited my father’s gifts, which he believed might be of use to him in the business; and he was delighted at my “cosmopolizing,” as he call’d it, since he’d left me to Mme de Staël.

Good Barlow, at once so canny & so ingenuous! Barely 40, he had come as long & almost as various a road as my grandfather: from the conservative hymnist & naive chaplain of “our” revolution, who had watcht Major André hang’d & dedicated his Vision of Columbus to Louis XVI, he had been “cosmopolized” himself by the French Revolution into atheism & antimonarchism. He had alarm’d his British & even his conservative American friends with his tract of 1789, Advice to the Privileged Orders; with his Letter to the National Convention of ’92, which had earn’d him Citizenship in the French Republic along with Washington, Madison, Hamilton, & Tom Paine; and with his poem The Conspiracy of Kings (same year), a call for the overthrow of all monarchies by general revolution. But despite their Jacobin tone, these works had in common — so I see plainly now, but felt even then despite my own ingenuousness — more enthusiastic & sententious naivety than deep conviction. Whereas his little mock panegyric in three cantos, Hasty Pudding —a nostalgic hymn to that American breakfast & to New England, written on a January morning in Savoy in ’93—was a pure delight: a chef-d’oeuvre written as a lark.

It markt for Barlow a turn he was just now perceiving clearly, as I was later to see in retrospect certain turnings of my own: he was become at once less ideological (I mean in Bonaparte’s sense of the word) & more political; less radical & more perspicacious; less ambitious & more shrewd. He had learnt enough from his victimizing in the Scioto swindle to make a legitimate fortune in Hamburg; James Monroe — a good judge of good judges of men — had chosen wisely his representative to the Dey. Barlow’s review of the political complexities of our mission, his subsequent sharp assessment of the Dey’s character & adroit manipulation of it, together with his new-found expertise in international finance, much imprest me & endear’d him to me, the more as they were maskt (the word is too simple) by a bluff Yankee cheerfulness that was in fact his prevailing humor. It disarm’d his adversaries and led them to believe him an easy mark; they came genuinely to like & trust him, & relaxt their intrigues against him, so that in the end he most often got what he was after.

(As I write this, B. is on a mission of far more delicacy & moment as Madison’s minister to France: negotiating with Napoleon & his foreign minister, the Duc de Bassano, for repeal of the Berlin & Milan decrees, which permit French confiscation of American vessels trading with Britain. And I pray the dear man will succeed: I who am fresh from doing my utmost to ensure his failure! But of this, more presently.)

Our mission, which we had expected to complete in a matter of weeks once we arrived, kept us in Algiers from March of ’96 till July of the following year, thanks to the difficulty of raising gold bullion in a Europe still spent from the wars of the French Revolution & about to embark upon the more exhausting campaigns of Napoleon. Thanks also to the slowness & unpredictability of the mails, which I am convinced have alter’d & re-alter’d the course of history more than Bonaparte & all the Burlingames combined. Our single strategy became cajolement of Hassan Bashaw (an ape of a fellow, given to despotic whims & tantrums, but no fool) into extending his deadline for payment instead of cancelling his treaty & declaring war on the U. States. Our tactics we improvised, and Barlow now reveal’d himself an apt student of his former tutor. When we were “greeted” by an outraged Dey (he refused to receive us; would not even open Barlow’s letter of credentials) whose initial deadline had already expired & who was threatening war in eight days, Barlow bought a 90-day extension by the inspired but dangerous expedient of offering the Bashaw’s daughter a 20-gun frigate, to be built in Philadelphia & deliver’d to Algiers! It was a wild excess of our authority: $45,000 for the frigate; another $18,000 retainer to the Jewish banker Joseph Bacri, the Dey’s closest advisor, whom Barlow befriended (on the strength of their shared initials — Bacri was a Kabbalist) & thus bribed to make the offer. There was also the certainty that the frigate would be used to highjack further merchant shipping, perhaps “our” own. But the stratagem workt: the Dey (who now declared his earlier anger to have been feign’d — and demanded 36 instead of 20 guns) was delighted; so was President Washington. We got our 90 days, Bacri got his $18,000 (plus Barlow’s banking busness, which he managed scrupulously), & Hassan Bashaw, two years later, got the frigate Crescent: a 36-gunner costing $90,000.

We were also permitted to deliver our consular gifts: jewel’d pistols & snuffboxes, linens, brocades, Parisian rings, bracelets, & necklaces for the ladies of the harem.

“Your father would be proud of us,” Barlow exulted. “The Bashaw has been Burlingamed!”

I could scarcely agree; another such 90 days’ grace, I ventured to say, would bankrupt the Union. Tut, said Barlow, ’twas cheaper than one week of war. Bacri’s fee in particular he judged well invested, not only because the Jew alone could have made our offer (& added gratis the nicety of making it to the Dey’s daughter: a diplomatic stroke Barlow admitted he himself never would have thot of), but because in Barlow’s opinion the best thing we’d bought so far with “our” $138,000 was not the 90-day extension, but Bacri’s friendship. My father, he told me, used to swear by the cynical dictum of Smollett’s Roderick Random: that while small favors may be acknowledged & slight injuries atoned, there is no wretch so ungrateful as he whom you have mostly generously obliged, and no enemy so implacable as those who have done you the greatest wrong. He meant to cement his new friendship with Bacri at once by rendering him a small but signal service — in gratitude for Bacri’s advice that we not tell the Dey we were in Algiers for no other purpose than to complete the treaty & ransom the prisoners, but instead rent a villa & make a show of settling in for a permanent consular stay.