John Barth - Letters

The last letter from “Andrew Cook IV” reaches Castines Hundred in the winter of 1821. Andrée is not to believe that the emperor has actually died on St. Helena, any more than that the writer of the letter actually died in Baltimore in 1814: Yours Truly and his associate Jean Lafitte have successfully rescued Napoleon from that rock, like a latter-day Perseus his Andromeda; they are hiding out in the Maryland marshes, planning together the Second Revolution; he will shortly appear at Castines Hundred to fetch her and the twins.

Brazil declares its independence from Portugal, Mexico from Spain; Simón Bolivar (of whom more later) leads the revolutions in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. The “Chesapeake Negroes” are left chillily in Nova Scotia; those from the Gulf Coast are urged to rejoin their American masters; Tecumseh’s Indians are abandoned to their own devices. The aging Marquis de Lafayette returns to visit each of the 24 United States. In May of 1825, on their 13th birthday, Andrée discloses to the twins the four letters their father wrote to them in 1812 (those here appended). She is herself 36 now, her husband’s age then. Carefully she reviews for the children her life with their father, her genealogical researches, his fervent hopes for them.

Then, having discharged her duty to his memory and been to that point a model mother to their children, she adds her personal wish: that they will take as their example neither the Cooks nor the Burlingames nor herself, but the idle, pacific Barons and Baronesses Castine, indifferent to History and everything else except each other and their country pleasures. She goes further: lays a deep curse upon marriage, parenthood, the Anglo-Saxon race, and the United States of America. She goes further yet: renames herself Madocawanda the Tarratine, exchanges her silks and cottons for beads and buckskins, kisses the twins a fierce farewell, and disappears into western Canada! There will be rumors of her riding with Black Hawk in Wisconsin in 1832, a sort of middle-aged Penthesilea, when the Sac and Fox Indians are driven west across the Mississippi. It will even be reported that among the Oglala Sioux, during Crazy Horse’s vain war to break up the reservation system in 1876, is a ferocious old squaw named Madocawanda who delights in removing the penises of wounded U.S. Cavalrymen. Andrée Castine at that time would have been 87! But we need not identify “Star-of-the-Lake” with these shadowy avatars.

And the twins? They kept company with each other, raised by the Baron and Baroness Castine much in the manner that their ancestors Ebenezer and Anna Cooke had been raised in St. Giles in the Fields (per your account in our Sot-Weed Factor) —only without the radical stimulation of a tutor like Henry Burlingame III. Opposite-sex twins, the psychologists tell us, tend to regression. And why not? They were not lonely in the womb. Expelled from that Paradise, they know what Aristophanes only fancied: that we are but the fallen halves of a once seamless whole, searching in vain for our lost moiety. They have little need of speech, but invent their own languages; they have less need of others. Their eventual lovers will seem siblings, as their siblings had seemed lovers. Henry V is the only Burlingame of whose genital problems (and their traditional oversolution) we have no report; of Henrietta’s sexual life, too, we know next to nothing. Neither married; they lived together until their 49th year in a kind of travesty of Andrée’s advice, apparently uninterested in anyone except each other and in anything except, mildly, literature, the great American flowering of which was at hand.

In 1827, their 16th year, they received a letter from one “Ebenezer Burling” of Richmond, Virginia, delivered to Castines Hundred via the newly opened Erie Canal. With your dear mother, it began, has gone my soul, my name… (A true Burlingamish pun there, involving mon âme and the truncation of Burlingame: we remember A.C. IV’s long tenure in France, and the twins’ bilinguality.) He is their father, the letter goes on to declare, now past 50 and constrained by circumstances to this evocative nom de guerre. He understands and sympathizes with their mother’s defection; he hopes they will permit him, belatedly, to take her place and assume his own, as he has sought to do since 1815. He is about to leave Richmond for Norfolk with a gifted young poet-friend, whom he is helping to escape certain disagreeable circumstances and on whom therefore he has bestowed another of his own amusing aliases, “Henri le Rennet”: a mixed pun on “Henry the Reborn” and “Henry the Reemptied” or “cleaned-out” (The young fellow is destitute; he has written some admirable verses about Tamerlane; he believes that the story of “Consuelo del Consulado” needs reworking, and proposes for example that her poisoned snuffbox be changed to a poisoned pen; he is headed for Boston to try his luck as an editor and writer; his actual name is Edgar Poe). He Burling himself is en route to Baltimore, to try whether what he learned about steam propulsion from Toot Fulton many years ago can be applied to railways. He hopes his children will join him there and encloses money for their journey, along with a separate sum for the Baron Castine in partial remuneration of the expense of their upbringing. He also encloses, by way of proof of his identity, a pocketwatch which he claims was similarly and belatedly given him by his own father: a silver Breguet with “barleycorn” engine-turning on the case, steel moon hands, and a white enameled face with the seconds dial offset at the VII, the maker’s name engraved in secret cursive under the XII, and the monogram HB similarly scribed before the appropriate numeral IV. I have this watch before me as I speak.

The baron advises them to demand an interview at Castines Hundred, but the twins seem as attracted by the prospect of travel as by the possibility that the letter is authentic. They insist; their guardian shrugs his shoulders and returns to his bucolic pursuits. They set out for Baltimore — and there they live, in obscure circumstances and with much travel intermixed, until the Civil War.

Of the fate of “Ebenezer Burling” and their connection with him, there is no record (the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad opened on Andrew IV’s birthday in 1828, horse-drawn); the source of their income is unknown. From references in later letters — exchanged during the twins’ separation by the Civil War — one infers that there was much coming and going between Baltimore and Washington, Baltimore and Boston, Baltimore and Buffalo. They remember having encouraged “E.B.‘s” young poet-friend, during his own residency in their city (1831-35), to give up alcohol and poetry for short prose tales readable at a single sitting, and not to hesitate to marry his 13-year-old cousin. On the other hand, having read the young novelist Walt Whitman’s maiden effort (Franklin Evans, or, the Inebriate), they urged its author to switch to verse. Perhaps presumptuously, they take credit for passing on to Whitman Henry Burlingame III’s “cosmophilism”; Henry V opines, however, that the scandalous pansexualism of Leaves of Grass is entirely rhetorical, the author being in fact virtually celibate. With Longfellow they could do nothing, beyond suggesting that Edgar charge him with plagiarism; no more could they with Mrs. Stowe. With Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson they were content, except as the latter two strayed into verse. None could be persuaded to make literature out of their father’s Algerian adventure or their mother’s reenactment, in reverse, of the story of her ancestor Madocawanda the Tarratine. (They did not live to groan at Longfellow’s versification of it in 1871 as “The Student’s Second Tale” in Part Second of his tiresome Tales of a Wayside Inn: