John Barth - Letters

I would smile here at Germaine, who declared that while she thot the whole Don Escarpio business smackt more of Italian opera than of Spanish diplomacy, she knew from experience that much ground could be cover’d in a bouncing carriage. She allow’d, moreover, that it was my modesty to call the passion & attendant noises merely feign’d, as I had been a notable gallant even before improving my skills in naughty Barbary. She would even grant that Consuelo had messaged out the business beforehand in her fetching skew’d English (I show’d the messages as proof) for “Barlow” to read as she moan’d & thrasht & annotated in whispers: Germaine herself permitted no drawing-room conversation at Coppet whilst she composed; her staff & houseguests communicated by messages written & replied to on the spot — what we call’d “la petite poste.” She cited Prince Hamlet’s scribbling in the grip of his emotions, “A man may smile and smile,” & cet. What she found hardest to believe was my trusting Consuelo not to poison me by the same device.

I did not quite so trust her, I would admit: as I happen’d to have been gripping both her wrists in one hand from the start (& covering her mouth with the other until I was assured it was no longer necessary), when she discover’d to me her stratagem I obliged her to rake her own flesh at once, to prove her assertion that she had not tapt the dread snuffbox (she declared it was in her reticule) in advance.

And how could I be sure, demanded Ruthy Barlow, that the woman was not up to suicide as well as the seduction & murder of flirtatious diplomats? Trop romantique, her husband scoft, who had taken up that term from Germaine upon his belated return to Paris. (Faithful to my word, I had written him in Algiers of Ruthy’s new friendship with young Fulton, which I judged harmless; it was not until 1800, after the “XYZ Affair,” that Fulton moved in to make their ménage à trois.) Trop or non troppo, I replied, I could not take measures against every eventuality, especially in the heat of the moment. Consuelo had claw’d thro her skin unhesitatingly at my order: once on the inside of her thighs, again on the underside of her bosoms. I took the rest on faith.

“As ought we,” George III is wont to put in at this point. So reports the author Madame d’Arblay (“Fanny Burney,” whom I met thro Mme de Staël) from Windsor. The King had the story originally from her after his seizure of 1808, when in his blindness he took a sudden fancy to novels & insisted that his daughters & Mrs. Burney read him long passages from Fielding “and those like him.” At my own single audience with the King, in 1803, I had not brot the subject up, inasmuch as I was posing as Robert Fulton at the time, and in any case did not then know of His Majesty’s interest in erotic narrative. We spoke of the submarine boat, which George argued was militarily more important than the steamboat; also of Don Quixote & King Lear, both of which characters interested him greatly. It is on Mrs. Burney’s authority that I list the King as my 2nd uncritical auditor. He still calls for the story, I understand; rather fancies that Consuelo might be his eldest son’s discarded wife the Princess of Wales, & particularly applauds my having accepted this piquant demonstration of her good faith.

“But you want us also to accept these messages as Consuelo’s,” Joel & Ruthy & Germaine protested good-heartedly, “when we know at 1st hand what an accomplisht forger of letters you are.” (At 1st hand because, most recently, I had forged certain messages over the signature of M. Talleyrand to “Messieurs X, Y, & Z,” the anonymous intermediaries in Talleyrand’s dealings with President Adams.) I take it as a measure of Germaine de Staël’s limitations as a novelist, compared with such an untried, even unwilling imagination as that of my first uncritical auditor, that she did not observe what Midshipman James Fenimore Cooper remarkt at once: that the acceptation of “historical” documents as authentic is also an act of faith — a provisional suspension of incredulity not dissimilar, at bottom, to our complicity with Rabelais, Cervantes, or George III’s beloved Fielding.

Midshipman Cooper, then eighteen & freshly expell’d from Yale for insubordination, had the story from me in the Hustler Tavern in Lewiston, New York, next door to Fort Niagara, one night in 1807. That was the year of “Burr’s conspiracy” to separate the western territories & Mexico from the Union; also of Barlow’s publication of the first full edition of his Columbiad (including my impromptu on “Glad Chesapeake”) and Mme de Staël’s of her Corinne; of Fulton’s steamship Clermont’s going into regular service on the Hudson; and of my fateful meeting with Tecumseh & his brother the Prophet. Cooper was on shore leave from the brig Oneida, the U. States Navy’s total Lake Ontario fleet. I was en route to Castines Hundred to rejoin cousine Andrée & recover from the shock of “Aaron Burr’s” failure. We were sampling a drink called “cocktail,” just invented at that tavern (a mixture of brandy with some flavoring such as curacao & sugar, shaken with ice chopt from the lake), singing Yale songs I’d learnt from Barlow, & discussing Indians, a subject of interest to us both. I retail’d to Cooper what I knew of “Joseph Brant” & the destruction of the Mohawk Valley Iroquois, with whom he was especially preoccupied. He made copious notes, declaring he had a friend who aspired to write novels about Indians; he heard out with interest my enthusiasm for the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, whom Andrée had grown fond of & taught English to when she was sixteen, & whom I regarded as the red man’s last hope to found a sovereign state east of the Mississippi. It was in the course of explaining my half-belief that Tecumseh was Jewish that the subject of my Algerine adventure came up. I had pointed out the singularity of the Shawnees’ myth of their own origin: that unlike other tribes (who all reckon’d their emergence from the center of the earth), they traced their descent from twelve original clans who migrated from the east across the bottom of the sea, which parted to let them pass. This myth I related to the notion of my ancestor Ebenezer Cooke, who supposed in his Sot-Weed Factor poem that all Indians are descended from the lost tribes of Israel; and I remarkt to my young drinking companion the peculiar ubiquitousness of the Shawnee, bands of whom, like Jews after the Diaspora, were to be found everywhere: from Florida, Georgia, & the Carolinas to Pennsylvania, the Indiana territory, & Lake Erie. True, they were hunters rather than merchants (the ancient Hebrews had not been merchants either). But they were famously abstemious, and regarded themselves as the elect of the earth. Tecumseh in particular had a fine Semitic nose, a Jewish distaste for drunkenness, rape, firearms, & torture (but not for tomahawks & hand-to-hand combat), a good legal-political mind, a talent for sharp bargaining in his treaty dealings, & a loyalty to his family — especially to his visionary brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet — which might prove his most vulnerable aspect. My persuasion was that one of his ancestors had been, not a colonial governor of South Carolina as the Prophet maintain’d, but an early Jewish settler’s child captured & adopted by the Shawnee.

Cooper order’d another round of cocktails, observed that Jews were not admitted to the new U. States Military Academy at West Point or to the naval officer corps, & ask’d whence my familiarity with things Hebrew. Thus we got to the remarkable Joseph Bacri, to Joel Barlow’s finally successful Algerine mission, & to my adventure with Consuelo “del Consulado.” He was full of questions, but not of the skeptical sort, and made note of my replies for his unnamed friend. Of the matter of our protracted coupling in the carriage — first feign’d & then not — whilst Consuelo disclosed her written “exposition” (as he call’d it), Cooper observed: “That will have to be toned down.” He applauded my test both of her “innocence” (by obliging her to scratch herself) and of her sincerity (by taking her directly aboard the Fortune, sans papers, baggage, or interview with Barlow; I prevail’d upon the Captain — with a bribe from my travelling-funds & a quickly forged sailing order from “Barlow”—to accept her as a passenger & get under way at once instead of waiting till morning, as we believed the Dey plann’d to intercept the ship outside the harbor). Cooper question’d, not the verity, but the verisimilitude — that is, the plausibility as fiction —of my account of all this: the sailing order forged in my cabin in the ten minutes I’d requested to indite a “farewell” (& warning) letter to Barlow, whom I would not see again till mid-September; my inditing, in the same ten minutes, that farewell & warning, in which I enclosed Consuelo’s account of the Spanish plot; our bribing the Algerine harbor-master to agree that it was the current high tide, not the next, we were clear’d to sail on; our weighing anchor, making sail, & standing out of the harbor for Leghorn, Marseilles, & Philadelphia even as the carriage — which I’d first approacht not three hours since! — climb’d up from the quay in the direction of Barlow’s villa, my horse still tether’d behind.