John Barth - Letters

The prospect of “reunion” with the shadowy figure I had scarcely met & never known, & who had caused my mother such distress, gave me no pleasure. My uncle the Baron was all the father I needed, Castines Hundred the one real home I’d had. Only the sea-voyage, and the anticipation of a foreign land, reconciled me to the journey.

Sing now, Calliope, in minor key, & Clio in mournful numbers, our shock & confusion when, having settled in a boarding house in King Street, London, on my “father’s” written instructions, we discover’d that the “Joseph Brant” being given a Captain’s commission (and pension) by the Court, & received by George III, & painted by Romney, and feted everywhere, was neither the pusillanimous prayerbook-scholar of Canajoharie & Upper Canada, nor the “Devil of the Mohawks” who had butcher’d Forty Fort & Cherry Valley, nor yet the New Haven tutor who had begot me in the Maryland marshes with the Secret of the Magic Eggplant, but an icy & indifferent stranger who scarcely acknowledged our existence face to face (and never deign’d to sleep in King Street), whilst sending us the warmest letters in the post, with money for our support & my education: letters whose authorship this same “Joseph Brant” neither admitted nor denied!

Unhinged, Mother fled for comfort across town to our old acquaintance Benedict Arnold, who sympathized but could not help us. He made plain, however (just before leaving London for Canada to try the West Indies trade again), his conviction that Father had betray’d him into betraying Washington & himself. He declared further — planting in my boyish mind a seed which was to bear much subsequent fruit — that this betrayal had been not in the interest of the Crown at all! On the contrary: having arranged for him to betray West Point to the British, Father had (so Arnold swore) then betray’d him & Major André to Washington, to shock the emerging republic into unity and weaken the hand of Washington’s rivals, such as General Gates! The Newburgh Letters, he avow’d “on good authority,” had been dictated by my father to John Armstrong with Washington’s approval, for a similar purpose. Letters! It was those that kept us in London, even after “Joseph Brant” departed to claim his new estate on Lake Ontario. They still arrived, almost regularly, at King Street; but in 1788 they began to be deliver’d from Paris, and tho the initial was the same, the name it named was now Joel Barlow’s!

He was just arrived in France, these letters said, on secret business involving Louisiana, “which must not fall into American hands.” The “Joseph Brant” subterfuge, they said, had been a heartbreaking necessity to disguise from Parliament his dealing with George III’s ministers; thank heaven he could now put it by, “at least for the most part,” and come to us in propria persona…

In July we were paid a call by Mr. Barlow, who turn’d out to be — Joel Barlow! He had indeed come from Hartford to Paris less than a fortnight past, he confirm’d, on behalf of the Scioto Company, speculators in Ohio real estate. He acknowledged further that he had encounter’d his old tutor Henry Burlingame IV at dinner at the Marquis de Lafayette’s a few days since, whither he’d gone with the American minister Mr. Jefferson; and he was come to us at King Street at that gentleman’s request, to urge us to join him, Burlingame, at his Paris lodging. But he disclaim’d with alarm having written any letters to us over his name, and trusted we would not excite the jealousy of his own wife (whom he was entreating to leave Hartford & join him) with that story. Could Burlingame’s letters be going to Mrs. Barlow & his to us? My mother produced one: the handwriting was not Barlow’s. He left as dismay’d as we, promising to press Burlingame on the matter when his business in London & the Low Countries was done & he return’d to Paris. Mother took to bed.

More letters came, all in the same hand, all tender, solicitous, intimate: from “Brant” in Upper Canada, from “Barlow” in Antwerp, from “Benedict” in St. John’s, even from “Burr” in New York, now attorney-general of that state. In the spring of ’89, after a particularly touching letter from “Barlow,” we removed to Paris: not only did the author of The Vision of Columbus deny writing the letter; he inform’d us, astonisht, that Burlingame had left Paris for Baltimore some months hence, presumably to rejoin us there!

In 1789 Nancy Russecks McEvoy Burlingame was still scarcely 30, and — to her son’s eyes, at least — still beautiful, if much distraught. She had taken one or two lovers over the years & yet remain’d faithful to her faithless husband, whom she thot Joseph Whaland & those others to have been. But this last shock undid her judgement: she came to believe that virtually everyone with his initial was Burlingame, regardless of station, appearance, or attitude. The letters still came, & the money: from Baltimore, from Canada, sometimes from Barlow’s own hotel. We took lodging there. Barlow’s land business was going badly; he miss’d his wife; they had no children; he was kind to Mother & me. She call’d him “Henry”…

Her story ends in 1790, when Ruth Barlow was finally persuaded to cross the ocean. Just before the storming of the Bastille the year before, I had been put into a boarding-school at the Pension Lemoyne, across the street from Mr. Jefferson’s house, along with another ward of Mr. Barlow’s. Not long after, Mother inform’d me that I might expect a younger brother or sister by summer. Barlow was doubly desperate: an ardent supporter of both revolutions, he nonetheless hoped to save the floundering Scioto venture by selling large pieces of Ohio to refugees of the ancien régime; a devoted husband, he nevertheless install’d Mrs. Barlow in our lodgings in London & kept her waiting there a full month until my mother was brot to childbed in mid-July. Surely now, I thot, my father will appear. I had got a letter & a cheque from him on my 14th birthday, over the initial of an obscure young Corsican sublieutenant of artillery in Auxonne…

On July 10 th, 1790, just before joining others of the American community in Paris in a congratulatory address to the French National Assembly, Mr. Barlow inform’d me that he had made plans, on my father’s written instructions, for returning us to Canada as soon as Mother was able to travel. On the 1st anniversary of Bastille Day my sister was born, dead; Mother died a day or so later of childbed fever. That same day a letter was deliver’d to me by a servant of Madame de Staël, a friend of Barlow’s, whom I did not know. But I had come to recognize that penmanship. The letter purported to have been written from a place call’d the Bell Tavern in the town of Danvers, Massachusetts. It declared that no force on earth could have kept the author from my mother’s side at the birth of their poor daughter, except the same historic affair that had obliged him to leave her soon after begetting that child: a business involving the reversal of both the American & the French Revolutions! I was to come to him at once, to Baltimore; his friend Mme de Staël would see to the arrangements. And once with him at last, I would see “the pattern & necessity of [his] actions, so apparently heartless, over the years: the explanation & vindication of [his] life, the proper direction of [my] own.” It was sign’d, Your loving Father, Henry Burlingame IV.

I tore that letter to pieces, burnt the pieces, pisst upon the ashes. And there commences — or shall commence when I next find leisure to write you, who will perhaps by then have commenced your own life story — the no less eventful history of

Your loving Father,

Andrew Cooke IV