John Barth - Letters

Dear Reader: I am a mite frightened. My calendar (the one on my desk which names the full moons, not the one in my knickers that marks them) notes that in France on this date in 1793 the Reign of Terror began — though the Revolutionary Tribunal had been established in the August of ’92, and my eponym had nearly lost her head in the September. If Ambrose should become my Robespierre, who will be my Napoleon?

Add odd ironies: my master’s master’s essay was entitled Problems of Dialogue, Exposition, and Narrative Viewpoint in the Epistolary Novel. You knew?

On the Monday and the Thursday since my last, he and I made love: both times in bed, in the dark. Tomorrow’s, I’ll wager, will be forgone as pointless. In April it would not have been. Tomorrow’s! We are come to that!

Well: with so much unwonted free time on my hands, I have at least finished your Sot-Weed Factor novel. Mes compliments. Since my friend and I these evenings read even in bed, I look to dispatch with more dispatch your other “longie,” #4, the goat-boy book. Of SWF I will say no more, both because my monthly flow cramps my verbal, and because while I am done with your words I am not with your plot. Rather, with your plotter, that (literally) intriguing Henry Burlingame III. By scholarly reflex, even before Monday’s momentous special delivery was delivered to 24 L, I had “checked out” enough of your historical sources in the regional-history section of the Marshyhope library (its only passable collection) to verify that while the name Henry Burlingame appears on Captain John Smith’s roster of his crew for the exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608, there is no further mention of him in Smith’s Generall Historie, and none at all in the Archives of Maryland, through which bustle the rest of your dramatis personae. I therefore assume — with more hope than conviction — that “Henry Burlingame III,” his protean character and multifarious exploits, are your invention; that the resemblance between this fictitious 17th-Century intrigant and the Burlingame/Castine/Cook line of 20th-century Ontario, Annapolis, and Everywhere Else is either pure coincidence or the impure imitation of art by life. I entreat you, sir: break your silence to tell me that this is so!

This letter will not be long. I’ve scarcely begun to assimilate, and am still entirely distracted by, that aforementioned special delivery: a packet of four very long letters, plus a covering note. The mails, the mails! The packet is postmarked Fort Erie, Ontario, 21 May 1969 (a Wednesday); the cover note is dated Wednesday, 14 May, same year; the letters proper are dated 5 March, 2 April, 9 April, and 14 May — but all Thursdays —and all in 1812! 157 years from Castines Hundred (so all are headed, in “Upper Canada”) to Dorset Heights: a very special delivery indeed!

4½ bolts from the blue. They are, of course, the letters André promised when the time should be ripe for us to make a “midcourse correction,” as the Apollo-10 chaps say, in our son’s career, by control at least as remote as theirs (and far less reliable). The letters are — read “purport to be,” though to my not inexpert eye they seem authentic — in the hand of one Andrew Cook IV, André’s great-great-grandfather, who at the time of their alleged composition was 36 years old and taking refuge at Castines Hundred from the furore over his latest ploy in the Game of Governments. They are addressed to his unborn child, then gestating in the womb of his young wife. The texts are too long and too mattersome to summarise: their substance is the history of the Burlingame/Castine/Cook(e)s, from Henry Burlingame I of Virginia (John Smith’s bête noire, as in your version) down to the “present”: i.e., Andrew Cook IV on the eve of the 1812 War. This Andrew declares, in effect, that the whole line have been losers because they mistook their fathers for winners on the wrong side; he announces his intention to break this pattern by devoting the second half of his life to the counteraction of its first, thus becoming, if not a winner, at least not another loser in the family tradition, and preparing the road for his son or daughter to be “the first real winner in the history of the house.”

Here my pen falters, though I am no stranger to the complexities of history and of human motives. What Andrew Cook IV says is that he had grown up believing his father (Burlingame IV) to have been a successful abettor of the American Revolution, and had therefore devoted himself to the cause of Britain against the United States. But at age 36 he has come to believe that his father was in fact an unsuccessful agent of the Loyalists, only pretending to be a revolutionary — and that he himself therefore has been a loser too, dissipating his energies in opposition to his father’s supposed cause and therefore abetting, unsuccessfully, his real cause. “Knowing” his father now to have been a sincere Loyalist in disguise, he vows to rededicate himself to their common cause: the destruction of the young republic. “My father failed to abort the birth he pretended to favour,” says A.C. IV. “We must therefore resort to sterner measures. For America, like Zeus, is a child that will grow up to destroy his parents.”

In that loaded metaphor, precisely, is the rub: supposing the letters to be genuine, one may still suspect them to have been disingenuous. Had Andrew IV really changed his mind about his father’s ultimate allegiances, or was he merely pretending to have done, for ulterior reasons? Was his avowed subversiveness a cover for subverting the real subversives? And might his exhortation to his unborn child have been a provocation in disguise? So at least, it seems, some have believed, notably the author of the cover note…

John: that note is in “my André’s” hand, and in his French! It is addressed to me. It is written from Castines Hundred. It is headed “Chérie, chérie, chérie!” It alludes tenderly, familiarly, to our past, to my trials. It explains that “our plan” to insure “our son’s” dedication to “our cause” (by my publishing these letters, and others yet to come, in the Maryland and Ontario historical magazines) had to be thus delayed until “our friend the false laureate” had been “neutralised”—an event that has presumably occurred, and whereof (it is darkly implied) his declining the M.S.U. Litt.D. is the signal. We may now proceed: Given “our son’s” background and professional skepticism, it will not do to present to him directly these documents, the truth of his own parentage, and the misdirection hitherto of his talents for “Action Historiography”: I am therefore to publish the letters as my discoveries, with whatever commentary I may wish to add; the author of the cover note will then clip and send them to Henri (professing astonishment, conviction, etc.) together with “certain supplementary comment,” including the story of Henri’s own birth and early childhood, the whole to be signed “Your loving, long-lost father, André Castine.” The “false laureate” once revealed to be not Henri’s true father, we will assess the young man’s reactions and, “at the propitious moment, may it come soon,” reveal to him that the responsible, respected, impersonal historian who brought the letters to light is in fact his long-lost mother! End of cover note. Its close is two words, in two languages: Yours toujours. It is signed… Andrew!

I shall go mad. I shall go mad. Why should not Ambrose (who shall not see the cover note) turn out to be André? Why should not you? Why should not my dear daft parents, decades dead, drop by for tea and declare that I am not their daughter, Germaine Necker-Gordon? Then God descend and declare the world a baroque fiction, now finally done and rejected by the heavenly publishers!