John Barth - Letters

Now it’s Saturday again, a few hours from the commencement ceremonies which I suddenly have dark misdoubts of. Ambrose is at the hospital with his mother, whose dying suddenly accelerated in midweek… and I need once more to write to you, not only whether you reply or not, but whether or not you even read my words.

Here is what “Monsieur Casteene” told me six days ago, in the voice described in my last: almost too ready with his inside information to be believed, and so confiding that though I cannot refute a single of his details and must admit the total accuracy of everything he recollected (much more than I!) concerning our old connexion, I distrusted him absolutely. I take a deep breath; I plunge in:

The man declares himself to be indeed, though Much Changed, the André Castine who first got me with child thirty years ago in Paris and again two years since at Castines Hundred. He declares that the high-spirited, loving disagreement with his apparently ineffectual father (Henri Burlingame VI), which I so well remembered from 1940, was in fact their ongoing cover throughout the war period for close cooperation, not on behalf of the Japanese and the Nazis — I didn’t ask him about those pre-Pearl Harbor messages to me from the Pacific — but on behalf of the U.S.S.R., whose alliance and subsequent rivalry with the U.S. they foresaw. More exactly, on the ultimate behalf of the Communist party in North America, and to the ultimate end of a Second Revolution in the U.S., which they saw more hope for if the war were less than an unconditional Allied victory.

I simply report the news.

Thus they were involved in attempts to sabotage the Manhattan Project, which they also opposed on general humanitarian grounds. Indeed, Deponent testifieth that his father was vaporised at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on the morning of 16 July 1945, in a last-ditch effort to thwart the detonation of the first atomic bomb: a martyrdom unknown to this day to any but “wife” and son, and now me, and now you. Thereafter, Casteene claims to have been involved in the supply of “atomic secrets” to the Soviet Union in the latter 1940’s and, in the early 1950’s, with the supply of compromising data to Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunters (to the end of “purging the C.P. of leftover liberals from the thirties” in preparation for its “new and different rôle in the sixties,” so declareth etc.). In 1953, a pivotal year, he comes to believe that his father’s beloved project has been misconceived; that political revolutions as such are not to be expected or even especially wished for in the overdeveloped countries at this hour of the world; that Stalinism is as deplorable as Hitlerism; etc. The 2nd Revolution, he decides, in American anyroad, will be a social and cultural revolution in the decade to come (i.e., the 1960’s); the radical transformation of political and economic institutions will either follow it in the 1970’s or become irrelevant. M. Casteene’s personal target date for the whole business, I simply report, is 1976.

Still listening, John? Well: about that same time — I mean the middle 1950’s, while dear old Mann is telling yours truly in dear old Switzerland about the liberating aspect of utter disgrace — Deponent moveth to Maryland and setteth up as an arch right-winger named Andrew Burlingame Cook VI, which name is in fact as officially his from his father as is the name André Castine from his mother. He modifies his appearance (He can do it almost before one’s eyes, but never quite perfectly; then when he “returns” like Proteus to his “true” appearance, that’s never quite what it was before, either!); he pretends to be a blustering patriotic poetaster of independent means; he befriends Harrison Mack, claims distant cousinship to Jane Mack. He ingratiates himself with right-wing political figures in Annapolis, in Washington; he goes so far as to call himself the Laureate of the Old Line State — and is threatened with lawsuit, to no avail, by the actual holder of that post. He affiliates himself in various ways with Mr Hoover’s F.B.I, and Mr Allen Dulles’s C.I.A. That portion of the general public aware of his existence (and both his visibility and his audibility are as high as he can manage) take him for a more or less pompous, more or less buffoonish reactionary. A few — Todd Andrews, for example — believe that underneath the flag-waving high jinks is a serious if not sinister cryptofascist. And a very few— e.g., Joe Morgan, as I believe I reported some six or seven Saturdays past — suspect that in fact his reactionary pose is a cover for more or less radical left- wing activities. But only his son, Henri C. Burlingame VII — and now myself, whom alas he has had to keep too long and painfully in the dark — know that “A. B. Cook” and “André Castine” are, under contrary aspects, the same Second-Revolutionist.

We are not done.

In his latter thirties, Monsieur Castine/Cook researches the history of his forebears — those Cooks and Burlingames alternating back through time to the original poet laureate of Maryland and beyond — and prepares to draft a mock epic called Marylandiad, after the manner of Ebenezer Cooke’s Sot-Weed Factor poem. His motives are three: to reinforce his public cover; to gratify his genuine interest in that chain of spectacular filial rebellions; and to introduce “our” son properly to his paternal lineage. His researches are mainly on location at Castines Hundred, and inasmuch as he divides his time, with his identity, between there and the province of the Barons Baltimore, he avails himself also of the Maryland Historical Society — where, we remember, yours truly was first by A. B. Cook dismayed in 1961—and thus becomes acquainted with its then officials, one of whom he will subsequently recommend to Harrison Mack for the presidency of Tidewater Tech and later yet connive with John Schott to unseat from Marshyhope.

You are yawning? You shall yawn no longer. “Cook” comes to know Mr Morgan’s background, the unfortunate events leading to Mrs Morgan’s death and Joe’s “resignation” from Wicomico Teachers College: information he will later make use of. Indeed, he discovers in 1959 that it has perhaps already been made use of, in a just-published and little-noticed novel by a young erstwhile Marylander now teaching in Pennsylvania. The plot thickens: Cook draws Morgan out on the parallels between His curriculum vitae and certain events and characters in The End of the Road. He learns that Morgan, a rationalist but nowise a quietest, is indignant to the point of seriously contemplating vaticide (if that term may be extended to cover fictionists as well as poets); what stays his hand is no scruple for his own well-being, for which he cares nothing since his wife’s death, but the possibility that after all the author may be innocent.

Do I have your attention now?

Cook scoffs, but Morgan stands firm; he and you have never been introduced. Despite the undeniable and disquieting parallels, in most ways your fiction doesn’t correspond to the actual events, not to mention the characters involved. Its author is not known to be either a dissembler or a brazen fellow: yet the one crossing of your paths had occurred right there in the Historical Society library, just a few months ago! Morgan, appalled, had recognised you at once; the recognition was apparently not mutual. You worked busily there half an afternoon. With the worst will in the world, Morgan could detect not the slightest indication that you knew who the grim-faced official was who passed by you, ostensibly on errands of business, several times. If he had (so detected), he declared calmly, he’d have done you to death on the spot with his bare hands.