John Barth - Letters

Does Cook find such an unlikely coincidence hard to swallow? Then let him chew on this at-least-as-farfetched: a check of your table immediately upon your leaving it disclosed to Morgan that the subject of your researches was evidently the same as Cook’s own! There lay sundry volumes of The Archives of Maryland; facsimile editions of The Sot-Weed Factor and Sot-Weed Redivivus; divers other primary and secondary texts in the history of 17th-Century Maryland…

Intrigued, our master intriguer volunteers to find out discreetly for Morgan, if he’s interested to know, whether you are guilty or innocent in the matter of your sources for The End of the Road, as he means to approach you forthwith to compare his information on Ebenezer Cooke & Co., and his literary project, with yours. Morgan shrugs: nothing will restore his late wife to him, and you had nothing to do with her demise. As good as his word (sic, sir, sic), Cook drives up into Pennsylvania and invades your undergraduate classroom on pretext of soliciting poetry readings in the area and meeting “fellow Maryland writers”; he distributes self-promoting handouts to your students, who are half amused, half annoyed by the blustering disruption — and after class, evidently in a different humour, he discusses with you the backgrounds and sources of your then two published novels and your work in progress. Returning to Baltimore, he reports to Morgan your claim to have derived the story line of The End of the Road from a fragmentary manuscript found in a farmhouse turned ski lodge in northwestern Pennsylvania. Cook himself is unconvinced: the anecdote is as old as the medium of prose fiction; surely you are pulling his leg, or covering your tracks.

At this point in “Casteene’s” narrative I recall Morgan’s having remarked to Todd Andrews and myself that A. B. Cook had once offered to arrange a murder for him; that he had declined the offer but been enough convinced of its seriousness to believe Cook a genuinely formidable man with underground, perhaps underworld, connexions, the nature of which however was unclear. Had that offer been serious? I asked Casteene now.

He smiled handsomely, almost like André: Such a thing is easy to arrange, my dear, the easiest thing in the world. In fact he had been, let us say, half serious: he was seriously exploring Morgan’s character, as a possible candidate both for the presidency of Tidewater Tech and, perhaps, for a certain role in the Second Revolution. But he had found the man not yet ready for that latter, and was in any case finally disinclined to your doing in, given your then current project. This project he regarded as of sufficient usefulness to persuade him to forgo his Marylandiad in its favour (he was anyhow too immersed in “action historiography” to bother seriously with composition) and bestow upon you his researches. Your Ebenezer Cooke, he declared, like the original sot-weed factor, needed a foil to his gullibility, a counter to his innocence, to heighten the comedy and deepen the theme: he made you a gift of his “cosmophilist” ancestor Henry Burlingame III, together with Captain John Smith’s Secret Historie and the Privie Journall of the first Henry Burlingame. In return, unwittingly, you would provide him with a point de départ for some future counterdocument to assist in the delicate conversion of “our son” to “our cause.”

I conclude. Deponent sweareth that he has had no contact with you since that day in 1959. That he enjoyed your rendering of his material, but on the whole prefers actions to words. He regrets having later had to support ridiculous John Schott against Morgan in the Marshyhope power struggle (it had to do, as what has not, with the preservation of his precious cover), and is gratified at least to have been able to arrange (in his “Monsieur Casteene” aspect, under which he does whatever it is he does at the Farm) Morgan’s invitation to Amherst and subsequent enrollment in the cause of the Second Revolution. Even more, it Went Without Saying, he regretted—

But no: I will not entertain you with the song and dance of this man’s regrets concerning my ordeal since 1940. He professed to be delighted at my new connexion, in whose favour he had been happy to have “A. B. Cook” decline the M.S.U. Litt.D. Further, he made bold to venture that Ambrose’s energetic flirtation with “Bibi,” at the Falls and the Farm, was owing to his unexpected rencontre with his ex-wife. Casteene counselled patience, even indulgence on my part; he would not, for example, in my place, attempt to compete for Ambrose’s favour by dressing beneath my age and dignity…

Speaking of lovers: he trusted I would not mistake his own little arrangement with “Pocahontas” (he tisked his tongue at the outrageous smallness of the world) as anything but a physical-clerical convenience: what passed for his heart, I might be assured, was mine toujours, but he would never again presume any claim upon me after that painful reenactment, in 1967, of our original star-crossed intimacy. We were no longer young, n’est-ce pas? By the projected date of his life-work’s completion he would be nearly 60. And aside from the annotation and publication of those letters of Andrew Cook IV’s — his discovery of which, in Buffalo two years past, he regarded as both the unlikeliest and the happiest coincidence in a life fraught with improbability — he would ask nothing further from me ever.

Here he brightened. “But we haven’t said a word about notre fils! Le Burlingame des Burlingames!”

I stopped him. Indeed, at this point I put an end not only to our interview, but to our remaining connexion. Had the man been unequivocally André (but when was André ever so?) or unequivocally A. B. Cook, or unequivocally neither… But he was equivocal as those letters — which now, upon a sudden, strong, heart-heavy, but unequivocal impulse, I returned to him. Whoever he was, I told him, he was not who he’d been, nor whom I’d loved even as late as two years ago. And whoever, wherever our son was, he was as dead to me as my André, surely in part by my own hand. I did not share what seemed all about me to be an epidemic rage for reenactment. The second half of my life, or third third, I must hope would be different indeed from what had so far preceded it! I had no more to say to him; at this point I would have nothing to say to our son either, a 29-year-old stranger, should he be “restored” to me: such reconnexion must be principally an embarrassment to all parties. As he had observed, I was in love again, no more happily than before, but at least my troubles were of a different sort. Whatever the future held for me, it did not promise to be a recapitulation of the past, and I was prepared to settle for that.

He bowed, kissed my hand. Thus we parted, I trust forever — though I quite expect some version of A. B. Cook to appear at this afternoon’s festivities, disclaiming any connexion with M. Casteene or involvement in the foregoing conversation. The gentleman was not pleased. In particular he bade me reconsider the matter of the letters: if neither our past intercourse nor our son retained importance for me, would I not at least abet in this small way a cause larger than either, the cause of the Second Revolution? In which Henri, if things were managed skillfully, might well play a major rôle?

Bugger your Revolution, I’m afraid I said, and got out of there — that dreadful, spooky Farm, where the chief crop raised is ghosts of the past — and back to the Erie Motel.

And, I wish I could say, back to my understanding and sympathetic Ambrose. But though my lover affirms with each insemination his resolve to marry me once I’m preggers and The Movie Thing is done, this past week has been the hardest of our history. On the Monday and the Tuesday, making the most of the rare sunshine, Prinz shot footage of the Chautauqua Institution, the lake itself, and the vineyard country round about, though Ambrose acknowledges that nowhere do these appear in your writings. Bats figured as prominently as actors, flitting around the Miller Bell Tower, the cupola of the old Athenaeum, and (I ventured to suggest) the belfries of Reg Prinz and Ambrose Mensch. The former had been enchanted by the latter’s passing mention of the obscure, winged ascent of the villain “Harold Bray” at the end of your Goat-Boy novel; and though I can attest that as of where I am therein (halfway through) it is nowhere suggested that that charlatan is Batman, so he seems to be becoming in the film. Prinz himself rappelled down the tower by Monday’s twilight in cape and domino to carry off Bea Golden (aptly cast as your nymphomanic heroine Anastasia) and make threatening squeaks at Ambrose in the role of, near as I can guess, Himself playing the Author dressed as Giles the Goat-Boy: sheepskin vest and a horned helmet borrowed from the Chautauqua Opera Company’s prop room, Wagnerian section.