John Barth - Letters

Only stout Joel and Ruthy, it seem’d to me, were not much changed, simply mellow’d into middle age. Resign’d now to childlessness, they had replaced me & Fulton with a nephew of Joel’s from Yale. Resign’d also to less-than-Homerhood after the mocking critical reception of his huge Columbiad & his ode to Captains Lewis & Clark (ably parodied by John Quincy Adams), he regretted not having stuck to satire as my father had advised, and doubted he would go to the Muse again. He agreed now with his former tutor that History is your grandest fiction, tho he had not yet come to my father’s modest corollary (which I heard now for the 1st time): that its eloquentest authors, like those of the ancient ballads & Eastern tales, are anonymous, their subtlest “works” known only to the elect. Our deals & double-deals with Joseph Bacri & Hassan Bashaw, for example, were surely works of art, which gave him more pleasure than the whole Columbiad. He hoped his work in progress would equal it.

But he cordially declined to make me privy to his strategy with the Duc de Bassano, beyond acknowledging that he was not imprest with that gentleman’s verbal assurances that the Berlin & Milan decrees had been effectively revoked. The Duke was a regular Burlingame, he said, even whose written word could not be assumed to be authentic; and I was grown too much my father, & my interests too far from his own, for him to confide in me as he had used to, now he’d re-met me. My Tecumseh sounded like a splendid fellow, my “wife” a splendid woman; he hoped that the red men would not be hounded from the continent to become, like the black slaves, an indelible stain on the conscience of white America. But even as we spoke, the 12th Congress would be debating a war with England which Madison did not want yet must surely yield to if Prime Minister Perceval fail’d to rescind the Orders in Council, & Tecumseh’s confederacy did not disband. He Barlow would be pleased to be remember’d as a diplomatist instrumental in avoiding that war; if he should fail, he bade me seriously consider what I seem’d to him to have given no thot to: that with the cream of the British military engaged against Napoleon in Spain, the U. States might very well win the war, in the process destroying Tecumseh, annexing Canada, the Floridas, & Mexico, & sweeping uncheckt across the entire continent of North America as Napoleon was sweeping across Europe. Patriotic as he was, Barlow did not believe American destiny to be quite that manifest: he urged me to turn my energies to the course of peace.

I was moved by what he said, not to believe that the Indians’ cause would be better aided by peace than by war, but to see more clearly than ever, from the perspective of Paris, what Tecumseh knew: that their cause was lost in any case; that their future lay not in history but, as it were, in myth, & that therefore their only victory would be in valiant tho futile resistance. I wisht Andrée there to advise me. My plan had been to reestablish my acquaintance with Jérôme Bonaparte, now divorced from his American wife & restored to his brother’s good graces, & thro that avenue assure Napoleon that even half a year’s dallying with Barlow should suffice to see war declared betwixt the U. States & G. Britain, especially given the slowness of transatlantic communications. Only keep Britain from revoking her Orders in Council before Congress adjourn’d for the summer; Tecumseh’s confederacy would do the rest.

But before I could begin to put this strategy into action, your mother’s urgent letter reacht me: our stratagem with Harrison had misfired, not because he had attackt the Prophet’s town, but because, incredibly, Tenskwatawa had tried to win a military victory in his brother’s absence by attacking Harrison! Losses had been high on both sides, but the victory was unquestionably Harrison’s: the Indians were disperst from the Tippecanoe, the Prophet had fled, the town was burnt to the ground; the army had return’d triumphant to Vincennes with British rifles taken from the Indians; Harrison was everywhere acclaim’d a great hero. “Cato” would be furious: with his brother for having launcht so premature an attack; with us if he learnt we’d advised Harrison to make his threatening move. Andrée was the more distrest because, to console herself in my absence, she had pursued her research into our family’s history, particularly the activities of our namesakes in Pontiac’s rebellion, and was horrified at what she saw as a pattern of deadly reenactment, too mattersome for her to put in a hasty letter. Finally, our labors of the summer had, if not borne other fruit, at least sown other & sweeter seed: she was expecting! I was to forget Napoleon, Joel Barlow, & the Game of Governments, & come posthaste to make an honest woman of her; then together we must examine History, our family’s & our own, to the end of making honest people of ourselves.

But (she could not help adding, out of self-confest habit) it would not much delay me to return to her by way of London, where “our coney J[ohn] H[enry] was ripe for catching.” That was a trap too shrewdly set to go unsprung, & should provide our baby with a handsome & much-needed nest egg.

I was alarm’d as she. To settle that certain old family score with the late Duc de Crillon which I explain’d in my 2nd letter, I had assumed the name “Jean Blanque” & had imposed upon his son for a loan of £1,200 against a pledge to help restore him to Napoleon’s good graces, which he did not currently enjoy, via my friend the American minister, who did. Given time (and Barlow’s increasing popularity in the court of St. Cloud) the man would have been good for another thousand: but I cut short my mining of that vein as well as my futile intriguing against dear Joel. I’d not had time to make real headway on that front, but then, none seem’d especially call’d for, inasmuch as I’d learnt from aides of the Duc de Bassano what Joel himself was beginning to understand: that Napoleon’s policy, like mine, was to forestall England’s lifting her Orders in Council until war with the U. States was inevitable. I bade my friend farewell.

So relieved was Barlow to see me go, all his natural affection came to the fore. He was old enough now, he declared (nearing 60), & the times parlous enough, that he could not bid a friend good-bye without wondering whether they would meet again. He misst Toot Fulton & Benjamin West, Tom Paine & Jefferson, Jim Monroe & Dolley Madison; he even misst that old Yale fossil Noah Webster, who’d been so unkind to the Columbiad; aye, & Joseph Bacri, & my father, of whom I was now the very spit & image. And he would miss me, tho not my work against his peaceable aims, which he could excuse only because so many of his countrymen shared my belligerence. It was a snowy forenoon, one of 1811’s last. Barlow was reminded of his earliest satirical verses, written for my father even as I was being conceived: “And Jove descends in magazines of snow.”

Using my Canadian credentials in London, I learnt that British elements opposed to a 2nd American war had gone so far as to plot the assassination of Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch defender of the Orders in Council, knowing that Lord Castlereagh, his likely successor, was inclined to revoke them. Also that the King was in strait-waistcoat, pissing the bed & fancying that England was sunk & drown’d, himself shut up in Noah’s Ark with his Lady Pembroke (a Regency bill was expected momently). Also that the Foreign Office had rejected John Henry’s claim for £32,000 and a good American consulship in reward for his espionage, on the grounds that his reports were valueless: they referr’d him for emolument to his employer, the Canadian Governor-General’s office. But Sir James Craig was by then gone to his own reward, & Sir George Prevost was not inclined to honor his predecessor’s secret debts. Embitter’d & out of funds, Henry had left London to return to farming in Vermont.