Letters

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A: Lady Amherst to the Author. Inviting him to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from Marshyhope State University. An account of the history of that institution.

Office of the Provost

Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

8 March 1969

Mr John Barth, Esq., Author

Dear sir:

At the end of the current semester, Marshyhope State University will complete the seventh academic year since its founding in 1962 as Tidewater Technical College. In that brief time we have grown from a private vocational-training school with an initial enrollment of thirteen students, through annexation as a four-year college in the state university system, to our present status (effective a month hence, at the beginning of the next fiscal year) as a full-fledged university centre with a projected population of 50,000 by 1976.

To mark this new elevation, at our June commencement ceremonies we shall exercise for the first time one of its perquisites, the awarding of honorary degrees. Specifically, we shall confer one honorary doctorate in each of Law, Letters, and Science. It is my privilege, on behalf of the faculty, (Acting) President Schott, and the board of regents of the state university, to invite you to be with us 10 A.M. Saturday, 21 June 1969, in order that we may confer upon you the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa. Sincerely hopeful that you will honour us by accepting the highest distinction that Marshyhope can confer, and looking forward to a favourable reply, I am,

Yours sincerely,

Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)

Acting Provost

GGP(A)/ss

P.S.: A red-letter day on my personal calendar, this — the first in too long, dear Mr B., but never mind that! — and do forgive both this presumptuous postscriptum and my penmanship; some things I cannot entrust to my “good right hand” of a secretary (a hand dependent, I have reason to suspect, more from the arm of our esteemed acting president than from my arm, on which she’d like nothing better, if I have your American slang aright, than to “put the finger”) and so must pen as it were with my left, quite as I’ve been obliged by Fate and History — my own, England’s, Western Culture’s — to swallow pride and

But see how in the initial sentence (my initial sentence) I transgress my vow not to go on about myself, like those dotty women “of a certain age” who burden the patience of novelists and doctors — their circumstantial ramblings all reducible, I daresay, to one cry: “Help! Love me! I grow old!” Already you cluck your tongue, dear Mr-B.-whom-I-do-not-know (if indeed you’ve read me even so far): life is too short, you say, to suffer fools and frustrates, especially of the prolix variety. Yet it is you, sir, who, all innocent, provoke this stammering postscript: for nothing else than the report of your impatience with just this sort of letters conceived my vow to make known my business to you tout de suite, and nothing other than that vow effected so to speak its own miscarriage. So perverse, so helpless the human heart!

And yet bear on, I pray. I am…what I am (rather, what I find to my own dismay I am become; I was not always so…): old schoolmarm rendered fatuous by loneliness, indignified by stillborn dreams, I prate like a “coed” on her first “date”—and this to a man not merely my junior, but… No matter.

I will be brief! I will be frank! Mr B.: but for the opening paragraphs of your recentest, which lies before me, I know your writings only at second hand, a lacuna in my own life story which the present happy circumstance gives occasion for me to amend. Take no offence at this remissness: for one thing, I came to your country, as did your novels to mine, not very long since, and neither visitor sojourns heart-on-sleeve. A late good friend of mine (himself a Nobel laureate in literature) once declared to me, when I asked him why he would not read his contemporaries—

But Germaine, Germaine, this is not germane! as my ancestor and namesake Mme de Staël must often have cried to herself. I can do no better than to rebegin with one of her own (or was it Pascal’s?) charming openers: “Forgive me this too long letter; I had not time to write a short.” And you yourself — so I infer from the heft of your oeuvre, stacked here upon my “early American” writing desk, to which, straight upon the close of this postscript, I will address me, commencing with your earliest and never ceasing till I shall have overtaken as it were the present point of your pen — you yourself are not, of contemporary authors, the most sparing…

To business! Cher Monsieur (is it French or German-Swiss, your name? From the lieutenant who led against the Bastille in Great-great-great-great-great-grand-mère’s day, or the late theologian of our own? Either way, sir, we are half-countrymen, for all you came to light in Maryland’s Dorset and I in England’s: may this hors d’oeuvre keep your appetite for the entrée whilst I make short work of soup and salad!)…

Salad of laurels, sir! Sibyl-greens, Daphne’s death-leaves, honorific if worn lightly, fatal if swallowed! I seriously pray you will take it, this “highest honour that Marshyhope can bestow”; I pray you will not take it seriously! O this sink, this slough, this Eastern Shore of Maryland, this marshy County Dorchester — whence, to be sure, you sprang, mallow from the marsh, as inter faeces etc. we are born all. Do please forgive — whom? How should you have heard of me, who have not read you and yet nominated you for the M.U. Litt.D.? I have exposed myself already; then let me introduce me: Germaine Pitt I, née Gordon, Lady Amherst, late of that other Dorset (I mean Hardy’s) and sweeter Cambridge, now “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” (to my ear, the only resident speaker of that tongue) and Acting (!) Provost of Make-Believe University’s Factory of Letters, as another late friend of mine might have put it: a university not so much pretentious as pretending, a toadstool blown overnight from this ordurous swamp to broadcast doctorates like spores, before the stationer can amend our letterhead!

I shall not tire you with the procession of misfortunes which, since the end of the Second War, has fetched me from the ancestral seats of the Gordons and the Amhersts — where three hundred years ago is reckoned as but the day before yesterday, and the 17th-Century Earls of Dorset are gossipped of as if still living — to this misnamed shire (try to explain, to your stout “down-countian,” that — chester < castra = camp, and that thus Dorchester, etymologically as well as by historical precedent, ought to name the seat rather than the county! As well try to teach Miss Sneak my secretary why Mr and Dr need no stops after), which sets about the celebration this July of its tercentenary as if 1669 were classical antiquity. Nor shall I with my passage from the friendship — more than friendship! — of several of the greatest novelists of our century, to the supervisal of their desecration in Modern Novel 101–102: a decline the sadder for its parallelling that of the genre itself; perhaps (God forfend) of Literature as a whole; perhaps even (the prospect blears in the eyes of these…yes…colonials!) of the precious Word. These adversities I bear with what courage I can draw from the example of my favourite forebear, who, harassed by Napoleon, abused by her lovers, ill-served by friends who owed their fortunes to her good offices, nevertheless maintained to the end that animation, generosity of spirit, and brilliance of wit which make her letters my solace and inspiration. But in the matter of the honorary doctorate and my — blind — insistence upon your nomination therefor, I shall speak to you with a candour which, between a Master of Arts and their lifelong Mistress, I must trust not to miscarry; for I cannot imagine your regarding a distinction so wretched on the face of it otherwise than with amused contempt, and yet upon your decision to accept or decline ride matters of some (and, it may be, more than local) consequence.

Briefly, briefly. The tiny history of “Redneck Tech” has been a seven-year battle between the most conservative elements in the state — principally local, for, as you know, Mason and Dixon’s line may be said to run north and south in Maryland, up Chesapeake Bay, and the Eastern Shore is more Southern than Virginia — and the most “liberal” (mainly not native, as the natives do not fail to remark), who in higher latitudes would be adjudged cautious moderates at best. The original college was endowed by a local philanthropist, now deceased: an excellent gentleman whose fortune, marvellous to tell, derived from pickles… and whose politics were so Tory that, going quite crackers in his final years, the dear fellow fancied himself to be, not Napoleon, but George III, still fighting the American Revolution as his “saner” neighbours still refight your Civil War. His Majesty’s board of trustees was composed exclusively of his relatives, friends, and business associates — several of whom, however, were of more progressive tendencies, and sufficiently influential in this Border State to have some effect on the affairs of the institution even after it joined the state university complex. Indeed, it was they who pressed most vigorously, against much opposition, to bring the college under state administration in the first place, hoping thereby to rescue it from parochial reaction; and the president of the college during these first stages of its history was a man of respectable academic credentials and reasonably liberal opinions, their appointee: the historian Joseph Morgan.

To console the Tories, however, one John Schott — formerly head of a nearby teachers college and a locally famous right-winger — was appointed provost of the Faculty of Letters and vice-president of (what now was awkwardly denominated) Marshyhope State University College. A power struggle ensued at once, for Dr Schott is as politically ambitious as he is ideologically conservative, and had readily accepted what might seem a less prestigious post because he foresaw, correctly, that MSUC was destined for gigantic expansion, and he sensed, again correctly, opportunity in the local resentment against its “liberal” administration.

In the years thereafter, every forward-looking proposal of President Morgan’s, from extending visitation privileges in the residence halls to defending a professor’s right to lecture upon the history of revolution, was opposed not only by conservative faculty and directors of the Tidewater Foundation (as the original college’s board of trustees renamed itself) but by the regional press, state legislators, and county officials, all of whom cited Schott in support of their position. The wonder is that Morgan survived for even a few semesters in the face of such harassment, especially when his critics found their Sweet Singer in the person of one A. B. Cook VI, self-styled Laureate of Maryland, of whom alas more later — I daresay you know of that formidable charlatan and his mind-abrading doggerel, e.g.:

Fight, Marylanders, nail and tooth,

For John Schott and his Tow’r of Truth, etc.

Which same tower, presently under construction, was the gentle Morgan’s undoing. He had — aided by the reasonabler T.F. trustees, more enlightened state legislators, and that saving remnant of civilised folk tied by family history and personal sentiment to the shire of their birth — managed after all to weather storms of criticism and effect some modest improvements in the quality of instruction at Marshyhope. Moreover, despite grave misgivings about academic gigantism, Morgan believed that the only hope for real education in such surroundings was to make the college the largest institutional and economic entity in the area, and so had led the successful negotiation to make Marshyhope a university centre: not a replica of the state university’s vast campus on the mainland, but a smaller, well-funded research centre for outstanding undergraduate and postgraduate students from throughout the university system: academically rigorous, but loosely structured and cross-disciplinary. So evident were the economic blessings of this coup to nearly everyone in the area, Morgan’s critics were reduced to grumbling about the radical effects that an influx of some seven thousand “outsiders” was bound to have on the Dorset Way of Life — and Schott & Co. were obliged to seek fresh ground for their attack.

They found it in the Tower of Truth. If the old isolation of Dorchester was to be sacrificed any road on the altar of economic progress (so their argument ran), why stop at seven thousand students — a kind of academic elite at that, more than likely long-haired radicals from Baltimore or even farther north? Why not open the doors to all our tidewater sons and daughters, up to the number of, say, seven times seven thousand? Fill in sevenfold more marshy acreage; make seven times over the fortunes of wetland realtors and building contractors; septuple the jobs available to Dorchester’s labour force; build on Redmans Neck a veritable City of Learning, more populous (and prosperous) by far than any of the peninsula’s actual municipalities! And from its centre let there rise, as a symbol (and advertisement) of the whole, Marshyhope’s beacon to the world: a great white tower, the Tower of Truth! By day the university’s main library, perhaps, and (certainly) the seat of its administration, let it be by night floodlit and visible from clear across the Chesapeake — from (in Schott’s own pregnant phrase) “Annapolis at least, maybe even Washington!”

In vain Morgan’s protests that seven thousand dedicated students, housed in tasteful, low-profile buildings on the seven hundred acres of farmland already annexed by MSUC, represented the maximum reasonable burden on the ecology and sociology of the county, and the optimal balance of economic benefits and academic manageability; that Schott’s “Tower of Truth,” like the projected diploma mill it represented, would violate the natural terrain; that the drainage of so much marsh would be an ecological disaster, the influx of so huge a population not a stimulus to the Dorset Way of Life but a cataclysmic shock; that both skyscrapers and ivory towers were obsolete ideals; that even if they weren’t, no sane contractor would attempt such a structure on the spongy ground of a fresh-filled fen, et cetera. In veritable transports of bad faith, the Schott/Cook party rhapsodised that Homo sapiens himself — especially in his rational, civilised, university-founding aspect — was the very embodiment of “antinaturalness”: towering erect instead of creeping on all fours, opposing reason to brute instinct, aspiring ever to what was deemed beyond his grasp, raising from the swamp primordial great cities, lofty cathedrals, towers of learning. How were the fenny origins invoked of Rome! How learning was rhymed with yearning, Tow’r of Truth with Flow’r of Youth! How was excoriated, in editorial and Rotary Club speech, “the Morgan theory” (which he never held) that the university should be a little model of the actual world rather than a lofty counterexample: lighthouse to the future, ivory tower to the present, castle keep of the past!

Cook’s rhetoric, all this, sweetly resounding in our Chambers of Commerce, where too there were whispered libels against the luckless Morgan: that his late wife had died a dozen years past in circumstances never satisfactorily explained, which however had led to Morgan’s “resignation” from his first teaching post, at Wicomico Teachers College; that his absence from the academic scene between that dismissal (by Schott himself, as ill chance would have it, who damningly refused to comment on the matter, declaring only that “every man deserves a second chance”) and his surprise appointment by Harrison Mack II as first president of Tidewater Tech was not unrelated to that dark affair. By 1967, when Morgan acquiesced to the Tower of Truth in hopes of saving his plan for a manageable, high-quality research centre, the damage to his reputation had been done, by locker-room couplets of unacknowledged but unmistakable authorship:

Here is the late Mrs Morgan interred,

Whose ménage à trois is reduced by one-third.

Her husband and lover survive her, both fired:

Requiescat in pacem the child they both sired, etc.

In July of last year he resigned, ostensibly to return to teaching and research, and in fact is a visiting professor of American History this year at the college in Massachusetts named after my late husband’s famous ancestor — or was until his disappearance some weeks ago. John Schott became acting president — and what a vulgar act is his! — and yours truly, who has no taste for administrative service even under decent chiefs like Morgan, but could not bear to see MSUC’s governance altogether in Boeotian hands, was prevailed upon to act as provost of the Faculty of Letters.

How came Schott to choose me, you ask, who am through these hopeless marshes but (I hope) the briefest of sojourners? Surely because he rightly distrusts all his ordinary faculty, and wrongly supposes that, visitor and woman to boot, I can be counted upon passively to abet his accession to the actual presidency of MSU — from which base (read “tow’r,” and weep for Marshyhope, for Maryland!) he will turn his calculating eyes to Annapolis, “maybe even Washington”! Yet he does me honour by enough distrusting my gullibility after all to leave behind as mine his faithful secretary-at-least: Miss Shirley Stickles, sharp of eye and pencil if not of mind, to escape whose surveillance I am brought to penning by hand this sorry history of your nomination.

Whereto, patient Mr B., we are come! For scarce had I aired against my tenancy the provostial chamber (can you name another university president who smokes cigars?) when there was conveyed to me, via his minatory and becorseted derrière-garde, my predecessor’s expectation, not only that I would appoint at once a nominating committee for the proposed Litt.D. (that is, a third member, myself being already on the committee ex officio and Schott having appointed, by some dim prerogative, a second: one Harry Carter, former psychologist, present nonentity and academic vice-president, Schott’s creature), but that, after a show of nomination weighing, we would present to the board of regents as our candidate the “Maryland Laureate” himself, Mr Andrew Cook!

Schott’s strategy is clear: to achieve some “national visibility,” as they say, with his eyesore of a Tower; a degree of leverage (inhonoris causa!) in the state legislature with his honorary doctorates (the LL.D., of course, will go to the governor, or the local congressman); and the applause of the regional right with his laurelling of the hardy rhymer of “marsh mallow” and “beach swallow”—a man one could indeed simply laugh at, were there no sinister side to his right-winged wrongheadedness and his rape of Mother English.

Counterstrategy I had none; nor motive, at first, beyond mere literary principle. Unacquainted with your work (and that of most of your countrymen), my first candidates were writers most honoured already in my own heart: Mrs Lessing perhaps, even Miss Murdoch; or the Anthonys Powell or Burgess. To the argument (advanced at once by Dr Carter) that none of these has connexion with MSUC, I replied that “connexions” should have no connexion with honours. Yet I acceded to the gentler suasion of my friend, colleague, and committee appointee Mr Ambrose Mensch (whom I believe you know?): Marshyhope being not even a national, far less an international, institution, it were presumptuous of us to think to honour as it were beyond our means (literally so, in the matter of transatlantic air fares). He then suggested such Americans as one Mr Styron, who has roots in Virginia, and a Mr Updike, formerly of Pennsylvania. But I replied, cordially, that once the criterion of mere merit was put by, to honour a writer for springing from a neighbouring state made no more sense than to do so for his springing from a neighbouring shire, or civilisation. Indeed, the principle of “appropriateness,” on which we now agreed if on little else, was really Carter’s “connexion” in more palatable guise: as we were in fact a college of the state university and so far specifically regional, perhaps we could after all do honour without presumption only to a writer, scholar, or journalist with connexion to the Old Line State, preferably to the Eastern Shore thereof?

On these friendly deliberations between Mr Mensch and myself, Dr Carter merely smiled, prepared in any case to vote negatively on all nominations except A. B. Cook’s, which he had put before us in the opening minutes of our opening session. I should add that, there being in the bylaws of the college and of the faculty as yet no provision for the nomination of candidates for honorary degrees, our procedure was ad hoc as our committee; but I was given to understand, by Sticklish insinuation, that if our nomination were not unanimous and soon forthcoming, Schott would empower his academic vice-president to form a new committee; further, that if our choice proved displeasing to the administration, the Faculty of Letters could expect no budgetary blessings next fiscal. Schott himself, with more than customary tact, merely declared to me his satisfaction, at this point in our discussions, that we had decided to honour a native son…

“I.e., the Fair-Land Muse himself,” Mr Mensch dryly supposed on hearing this news (the epithet from Cook’s own rhyme for Maryland, in its local two-syllable pronunciation). I then conveyed to him, and do now to you, in both instances begging leave not to reveal my source, that I had good reason to believe that beneath his boorish, even ludicrous, public posturing, Andrew Burlingame Cook VI (his full denomination!) is a dark political power, in “Mair’land” and beyond: not a kingmaker, but a maker and unmaker of kingmakers: a man behind the men behind the scenes, with whose support it was, alas, not unimaginable after all that John Schott might one day cross the Bay to “Annapolis, maybe even Washington.” To thwart Cook’s nomination, then, and haply thereby to provoke his displeasure with our acting president, might be to strike a blow, at least a tap, for decent government!

I speak lightly, sir (as did Germaine de Staël even in well-founded fear of her life), but the matter is not without gravity. This Cook is a menace to more than the art of poetry, and any diminution of his public “cover,” even by denying him an honour he doubtless has his reasons for desiring, is a move in the public weal.

And I now believe, what I would not have done a fortnight past, that with your help—i.e., your “aye”—he may be denied. “Of course,” Mr Mensch remarked to me one evening, “there’s always my old friend B…” I asked (excuse me) whom that name might name, and was told: not only that you were born and raised hereabouts, made good your escape, and from a fit northern distance set your first novels in this area, but that my friend himself—our friend — was at that moment under contract to write a screenplay of your newest book, to be filmed on location in the county. How would your name strike Carter, Schott, and company? It just might work, good Ambrose thought, clearly now warming to his inspiration and wondering aloud why he hadn’t hit on it before — especially since, though he’d not corresponded with you for years, he was immersed in your fiction; is indeed on leave from teaching this semester to draft that screenplay.

In sum, it came (and comes) to this: John Schott’s appointment to the presidency of MSU is quietly opposed, in our opinion, by moderate elements on the board of regents and the Tidewater Foundation, and it can be imagined that, among the more knowledgeable of these elements, this opposition extends to the trumpeting false laureate as well. Their support comes from the radical right and, perversely, the radical left (that minority of two or three bent on destroying universities altogether as perpetuators of bourgeois values). A dark-horse nominee of the right colouration might just slip between this Scylla and this Charybdis.

Very casually we tried your name on Harry Carter, and were pleased to observe in his reaction more suspicious curiosity than actual opposition. This curiosity, moreover, turned into guarded interest when Ambrose pointed out (as if the thought had just occurred to him) that the “tie-in” at our June commencement of the filming of your book and the county’s Tercentennial (itself to involve some sort of feature on “Dorchester in Art and Literature”) would no doubt occasion publicity for Marshyhope U. and the Tower of Truth. He, Ambrose — he added with the straightest of faces — might even be able to work into the film itself some footage of the ceremonies, and the Tower…

This was last week. Our meeting ended with a sort of vote: two-nothing in favour of your nomination, Dr Carter abstaining. To my surprise, the acting president’s reaction, relayed through both Dr Carter and Miss Stickles, is cautious nondisapproval, and today I am authorised to make the invitation.

You are, then, sir, by way of being a compromise candidate, who will, I hope, so far from feeling therein compromised, come to the aid of your friend, your native county, and its “largest single economic [and only cultural] entity” by accepting this curious invitation. Moreover, by accepting it promptly, before the opposition (some degree of which is to be expected) has time to rally. That Schott even tentatively permits this letter implies that A. B. Cook VI has been sounded out and, for whatever mysterious reasons, chooses not to exercise his veto out of hand. But Ambrose informs me, grimly, that there is a “Dr Schott” in some novel of yours, too closely resembling ours for coincidence, and not flatteringly drawn: should he get wind of this fact (Can it be true? Too delicious!) before your acceptance has been made public…

Au revoir, then, friend of my friend! I hold your first novel in my hand, eager to embark upon it; in your own hand you may hold some measure of our future here (think what salubrious effect a few well-chosen public jibes at the “Tow’r of Truth” and its tidewater laureate might have, televised live from Redmans Neck on Commencement Day!). Do therefore respond at your earliest to this passing odd epistle, whose tail like the spermatozoon’s far outmeasures its body, the better to accomplish its single urgent end, and — like Molly Bloom at the close of her great soliloquy (whose author was, yes, a friend of your friend’s friend) — say to us yes, to the Litt.D. yes, to MSU yes, and yes Dorchester, yes Tidewater, Maryland yes yes yes!

Yours,

GGP(A)

B: Todd Andrews to his father. The death and funeral of Harrison Mack, Jr.

Dorset Hotel

High Street

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

March 7, 1969

Mr. Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot # 1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Dear Father:

Brrr! Old fellow in the cellarage, what gripes you? Every night since Tuesday’s full moon you’ve crawled about (in your Sunday best) under the stage of my drifting dreams… like me some 30 years ago under the stage of Captain Adams’s showboat, trying unsuccessfully to turn myself off. Last night I left a particularly good dream to investigate the noise (in the dream it was a certain August afternoon 37 years past; I and the century were 32 and off weekending with my friends the Macks in their Todds Point summer cottage; Harrison Mack, alive and happily uncrowned, had gone for ice; I was napping; so was the century; Jane Mack—26 again and naked! — was just about to slip in from the kitchen and take me by the sweetest surprise of my life…), and there you swung, Father mine, blackfaced and belted ’round the neck as in February 1930, not a smudge on you. No returning to my Floating Theatre then! And tonight, soixante-neuf once more with this kinky crone of a century, here in my old hotel room — that’s not a March draft I feel on my hackles; those clunks and clanks aren’t sclerosis of the heat pipes or Captain Adams retuning his calliope: it’s you, old mole! Come to join the party? Come to watch through the keyhole while your old son (older than his dad now!) tries to get it up for Grandma Mack?

We fetch one body to the boneyard; a hearseful of ghosts hitches home with us.

Very well, groundhog: I’m late with the letter for your 39th deathday, and better the dead father should hear from the son than vice versa. February 2, it happens, was the day we buried Harrison Mack, His Majesty having died by his own design (but not by his own hand) four days earlier, to no one’s surprise. Harrison’s “identification” with George III, as his doctors called it, had gone beyond even my description in last February’s letter. Everyone at Tidewater Farms went about in Regency getup — except Harrison himself, for the reason I’ve mentioned before (which will make the contest over his estate even livelier than the fight over his father’s): that the more accurate his madness became, so to speak, the more he fancied himself, not George III sane, but George III mad; a George III, moreover, who in his madness believed himself to be Harrison Mack sane. Thus in the end he pretended to think everyone in the house crazy for wearing 1815 costume — and managed his business affairs with more clarity and good sense than at any time since the onset of his “madness” in the latter 1950’s.

Jane spared herself (no way she could’ve known it was his final year) by going off to England in pursuit of chimeras of her own. Who can blame her? In her absence, Lady Amherst (Germaine Pitt, from the college) took charge of the household, luckily for Harrison. Drawing on her acquaintance with British history and manners — and the admirable tolerance of the English for eccentricity, especially among the gentry — she directed the masquerade with skill, even with good taste. She herself took the role of “Lady Elizabeth Pembroke,” the king’s early friend and focus of his senile dreams, the love of his life: they gave his biography a happy ending by coming back to each other’s arms “in his latter years,” as they put it, since they could not agree what year it was. In “Lady Liza’s” pretended view, Harrison being 73, 1968 was 1812 at the latest, and he had at least eight more years to live. To this, George III would reply that “Harrison Mack” was but a figment of his mad imagination, whose age had no bearing on his own; that inasmuch as he dated his irrevocable madness from the death of his daughter and his retirement from the throne (i.e., his disowning of Jeannine Mack after her first divorce, his retirement from Mack Enterprises, and his moving to Redmans Neck — all in 1960), “1968” was actually 1819: he would be 81 on June 4 and would die next January 29. Lady Amherst would point out that if events were to determine dates rather than vice versa, he had even longer than eight years to live, for the Regency had yet to be established. Did he really believe that his son was running Mack Enterprises and the Tidewater Foundation?

Thus she explained Harrison’s old quarrel with Drew Mack, not with any ill will toward the boy (she’s a decent sort, Lady A.; even Jane still admires her; no malice in her that I can see toward anyone but Schott & Co., who deserve it), but to keep Harrison from reasoning himself into your country before his time. In the same vein, with a kind of dark understanding between them that I can only half follow myself (and half is too much by half on this subject), she’d remind him that the Revolution itself was still some years to come: 1968 could well be 1768, and himself in the prime of his career! But Harrison would answer with a rueful smile that he was not so easily gulled, even by those dear to him: she knew as well as he that the “revolution to come” would be not the First but the Second, and that its direction was neither in his hands, who had lost America in 1776, nor in his “self-styled son’s,” who had nearly lost Canada in 1812, but in hands more powerful and adroit than either’s.

With uneasy glances at me — how many of these history lessons, so tender and so serious, yet so lunatic, I audited! — Lady A. could rejoin only that Harrison was forsaking fact for speculation: if he put off dying until the commencement of that “Second Revolution,” he had at least a hundred fifty years to live.

“Not years, dear Liza,” the king would say — or “Germaine” if he was calling himself “Harrison” at the moment. “You and Todd will bury me next Groundhog’s Day.”

And we did. I daresay it took some enterprise in the inner sanctums of Harrison Mack’s incorporated psyche to bring about his first stroke in mid-January and hold off the second till the month’s end. The first fetched Jane home from her adventures and left her husband blind (“Why not 1813 and seven years to go?” I asked Lady A., having checked the history books on G. III’s blindness. But she declared, in tears, he was another king now, old broken Lear, and she no longer “Elizabeth Pembroke” but a superannuate Cordelia). The second stroke killed him. On your deathday — which Harrison still remembered as the cause of my endless Inquiry, my presence in this hotel, my old Floating Opera story, these epistles to the dead-letter file in the Cambridge P.O., the whole bearing of my life — we put him under in their family plot at Tidewater Farms.

It’s a plot of which “Farmer George” (so G. III and H.M. II liked to call themselves) is the sole identified tenant: long before there was a Maryland it had been an Algonquin burial ground; from George I the First to George III the Second, that aboriginal fertilizer had nourished crop after crop for English and American planters: tobacco, cotton, corn, tomatoes. Harrison acquired it (and the rest of Redmans Neck) from old Colonel Morton in 1955, when Mack Enterprises picked up Morton’s Marvelous Tomatoes. The burial ground he reclaimed for its original crop; the other 1,999 acres he put into soybeans, stables, mansion-houses, the Mack Enterprises Research and Development Facility, the Tidewater Foundation, and Tidewater Technical College. This reclamation, or recycling, was more or less the theme of my eulogy, which I delivered at Jane’s request. Harrison—my Harrison, back when Jane was our Jane (Spanish Civil War days, Roosevelt days, sweet days of last night’s dream, that Depressioned you to death and brought me to life!) — Harrison would’ve got a kick out of it. My text was the motto of Marshyhope State University College: Praeteritas futuras fecundant, which the Undergraduate Bulletin approximates as “The future is enriched by the past.” As befits a good agribusiness school, Tidewater Tech (on which we first bestowed the motto) used to misrender it “The past is the seedbed of the future.” But we knew what we meant, Harrison and I: not fecundant even in the sense of “fertilizes,” but stercorant: The past manures the future.

I’d proposed it as the Mack family motto in 1935—Floating Theatre days! — when we learned that Harrison’s father, in his last years, had caused his poop to be preserved in pickle jars. In ’37, when we used those jars (I mean the gardener’s misuse of them as fertilizer for Mrs. Mack’s zinnias) to win Harrison the family estate, I proposed it again, in English, to Jane — but the Macks had tired by then of our ménage à trois and were beginning to lose their sense of humor. Imagine my surprise, as they say, in 1957 or thereabouts (Eisenhower days! Middle middle age!), when they and I resumed our acquaintance and I learned (a) that Mack Pickles, now known as Mack Enterprises, was diversifying into soya-oil plastics, chemical fertilizers, artificial preservatives, and frozen-food plants; (b) that Jane herself was more and more the guiding force of the company; and (c) that as Harrison willingly gave way to her and to his new eccentricities, his old sense of humor began to return, and Praeteritas futuras stercorant (soberly given by their P.R. people as “The future grows out of the past”) was the corporation motto! Above it, on letterhead, label, and billboard, an elderly gentleman in muttonchop whiskers, pince-nez spectacles, and Edwardian greatcoat, standing in a newly furrowed field amid a horse-drawn plow, a three-masted ship, and a single-stacked factory, shook hands across the generations with a horn-rimmed, crew-cut, gratefully grinning young man (not futuras after all, but the praesentis of the 1950’s) waist-deep in soybeans, diesel tractors, propellor-engined airliners, and half a dozen smoking stacks.

Even in his next-to-last year, when Jane vetoed the effluent-purifiers and electrostatic precipitators urged upon Mack Enterprises by the new environmentalists, Harrison was capable of sighing slyly, “The past craps up the future.” And so my eulogy turned Ecclesiastes into a prophet of industrial recycling and rebirth control, as who should say to scrap metal, “Out of Buicks art thou come; to Buicks thou shalt return”; or compare my friend’s body in the Indian graveyard to those fish (I worked in the resurrected Christ somewhere along here) that Squanto taught the Pilgrim fathers to plant with their corn.

Praeteritas futuras fecundant: The king is dead; long live the king!

Lady Amherst, a better Latinist than I, detected the irony, but took it as it was intended and without offense. Her new friend Ambrose Mensch was all grins; but people regard him as an oddball anyhow. The widow was moved, not indecorously, and thanked me afterward, with no detectable irony of her own, for “a lovely tribute to the Harrison we both loved so.” The rest of the company either took my words at face value or paid them no attention. Drew Mack was there, stony-faced, with his handsome wife, Yvonne, both in dark dashikis for the occasion. His sister — now Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden, by my count; “Bea Golden” on last summer’s programs of The Original Floating Theatre II—was supported in her grief and gin (so the recipe smelt to me, flavored with latakia and too much of something by Givenchy) by the remarkable “Reggie Prinz”: his Jewish Afro more formidable than Yvonne Mack’s Afro Afro, his wire-rimmed eyeglasses harking back to Old Man Praeteritas in the picture, his hands (despite himself, I trust) framing hypothetical cinema-shots of ourselves, the house, the grave, nearby Marshyhope Creek and College. Of him, no doubt, more later. Who else? The ubiquitous but elusive Laureate of Maryland, A. B. Cook, read off a poem for the occasion, the closing alexandrines of which—

This marshy Indian Plot where sleeping Mack’s interr’d

Shall grow the royal Tow’r his Dreams on us conferr’d—

brought stifled groans from Lady A. and young Mensch and pursed the lips of Cook’s even more elusive son, introduced to me later as Henry Burlingame VII. John Schott, however, was moved to single-handed applause, as it were, and triumphant red-faced glare. As for Jerome Bray, the final graveside guest — a madder chap in my estimation than poor Harrison at his dottiest, and whose presence there no one could account for — his face was impassive as a visitor’s from another country, or planet.

How comes A. B. Cook VI, you ask, to have a son named Henry Burlingame VII? So did I, of the ever-smiling laureate himself, at the reception after the funeral, and was answered by Lord Tennyson paraphrased:

If you knew that flower’s crannies,

You would know what God and man is.

Overhearing which, Lady Amherst commented with just-audible asperity, “We’d know of more than one marshy plot too, I daresay.” Schott harrumphed; Cook bowed to his critic; Ambrose Mensch, at her side, wondered as if innocently whether “royal dreams” was in good eulogistic taste, considering. “Not to mention the play on interred,” Lady A. added coolly. At the time I thought she referred merely and cleverly to the stercorant business in my tribute.

To all such jibes the Maryland Laureate was deaf. His son (who, one now discovered, spoke English with a heavy Québécois accent) politely asked Lady A. to explain the pun; Mensch volunteered for that duty and led the lad aside, out of earshot of Jane, who was listening with strained but ever cool expression to Schott’s hearty condolences while, as it seemed to me, trying to catch my attention. “Bea Golden” was in smoky conversation and transaction with the bartender, while managing simultaneously to keep an eye on her current lover and, if I’m not mistaken, on Ambrose Mensch as well, whom she’d greeted earlier with a string of Dahlings effusive even for her. Drew and Yvonne Mack consulted each other; Mr. Bray, himself. Reggie framed us all in his imaginary camera.

Of Jeannine Mack’s paternity, Father of mine, I’m still in doubt, 35 years after the fact. If she’s Harrison’s daughter, she’s a throwback to some pickle farmer earlier than her grandsire. What I see in her, alas for “Bea Golden,” is our own progenitors, yours and mine: the drawling, cracker Andrewses from down-county. Misfortunate child, her red-neck genes never at home in those blue-blood boarding schools and hunt clubs! For all her mahvelouses, put her in any pahty and it’s the help she’ll be most at home with: the barkeep, the waiters and musicians. No question she’d’ve flourished as a down-home Andrews, drinking beer and making out at fifteen and sixteen in the back seats of Chevrolets; left to herself she’d ’ve been impregnated at seventeen by some local doctor’s boy during the Choptank Yacht Regatta and settled down happily somewhere in the county to raise a family; by now their kids would be off to college; they themselves would be tired of weekend adulteries with the local country-clubbers; they’d be buckled down comfortably for a boozy but respectable middle age, he in waterfront real estate and Annapolis politics, she on the school board and tercentennial committee. As is, she’s staler at 35 than her mother at 63. The very obverse of her brother, Jeannine has, I am confident, never in her incoherent life voluntarily read a newspaper, much less a book, or been moved by a work of art or a bit of history, reflected on life beyond her own botch of it, felt compassion for the oppressed, or loved a fellow human being. I’m told she’s divorcing again, and feels the charmless Prinz to be her great chance…

Ach, Hebe Tochter, mein Herz schmerz!

Drew Mack, on the other hand, is altogether his father’s son, the more so with every fresh rebellion. How could Harrison ever have wondered? Underneath the beard and jeans and dashiki, Drew’s as sleek and ample as a prize Angus; the same steak-fed, Princeton-radical Harrison whom I first met in Baltimore in ’25, beaten up by Mack Senior’s strikebreakers for teaching the “Internationale” to his fellow pickle-pickets. Drew it was who revealed to me, without himself realizing it, the real sense of that pun Lady Amherst saw and groaned at. To his mother’s visible distress, and my surprise, when I made to leave for Cambridge at the end of the funeral festivities, he and Yvonne insisted on driving me (I’d come out with young Mensch); we’d no sooner squeezed into his discreetly battered Volvo wagon than he announced—

But I’m ahead of myself, and behind on my sleep. Still to describe is the ménage back at Tidewater Farms — Jane and Germaine (the latter scarcely yet moved out from the royal chambers, the former scarcely moved back in) outladying each other at one moment across the funeral baked meats, embracing tearfully the next; Ambrose and Reggie deep in cinematographic argument in the library; “Bea Golden” passed out somewhere upstairs; a raw snow just beginning to come down on Redmans Neck from a sky too leaden to alarm any groundhog with his own shadow…

But the quick must rest, if the dead will not. I’ll finish Calliope’s music another night, now I’ve got the keys tuned: introduce you to the other haunts who’ve dropped in on me lately, hic et ubique, and bring you up to date: 52nd anniversary, so I see on my calendar, of my enlistment against the kaiser in 1917.

Back to your hole, old pioner; wane with the Worm Moon! Leave me to deal with the ghosts of the living: that’s work enough for your Liebes

Todd

C: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His life since The End of the Road. The remarkable reappearance, at the Remobilization Farm, of Joseph Morgan, with an ultimatum.

11 P.M. 3/6/69

TO:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

FROM:

Jacob Horner, Remobilization Farm, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada

Cyrano de Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ring Lardner, Michelangelo: happy birthday. The Alamo has fallen to Santa Anna; its garrison is massacred. FDR has closed the banks. Franco’s cruiser Baleares has been sunk off Cartagena. Napoleon’s back from Elba: we approach Day One of the Hundred Days.

In a sense, you Remain Jacob Horner. It was on the advice of the Doctor that in 1953 you Left the Teaching Profession; for a time you’d Been A Teacher of Prescriptive Grammar at the Wicomico State Teachers College in Maryland, now the Wicomico campus of Marshyhope State University.

The Doctor had brought you to a certain point in your Original Schedule of Therapies (this was October 27, 1953: anniversary of Madison’s Annexation Proclamation concerning West Florida and of Wally Simpson’s divorce, birthday of Captain Cook, Paganini, Theodore Roosevelt, Dylan Thomas, Catherine of Valois), and, as you’d Exceeded his prescriptions by perhaps Impregnating your Only Friend’s Wife, Arranging an illegal abortion which Mrs. Morgan did not survive, and Impersonating several bona fide human beings in the process, he said to you: “Jacob Horner, you mustn’t Work any longer. You will have to Sit Idle for a time.”

You Shaved, Dressed, Packed your Bags, and Called a taxi to fetch you to the terminal, where you were to Join the Doctor’s other patients for the bus ride north. While you Waited for the cab, you Rocked in your Chair and Smoked a cigarette, your Last. You were Without Weather. A few minutes later the cabby blew his horn; you Picked Up your Two Suitcases and Went Out, Leaving your bust of Laocoön where it stood, on the mantelpiece. Your Car, too, since you Saw no further use for it, you Left where it was, at the curb, and Climbed into the taxi.

Interminable, that journey, up the Susquehanna and Juniata, into the cold, dilapidated Alleghenies. You Wintered near the Cornplanter Indian Reservation in northwestern Pennsylvania. In the spring, having learned from his Indian clients that the house he’d rented, together with the village and surrounding countryside, would be under water following the government’s completion of nearby Kinzua Dam, the Doctor reestablished the Farm somewhat closer to the state line, which eventually he crossed to a pleasant site above Lily Dale, New York, Spiritualist Capital of America. There you Remained for a decade before Moving to the present establishment in Canada, at the opposite end of the Peace Bridge from Buffalo.

In the evening of October 25, 1954—100th anniversary of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, 1651st of the beheading of the twin saints Crispin and Crispian, 142nd of Commodore Decatur’s defeat of H.M.S. Macedonia off the Azores, 1st of Renée Morgan’s death by aspiration of regurgitated sauerkraut under anesthesia during abortion — the Doctor’s new Seneca Indian assistant performed upon you at your Suggestion a bilateral vasectomy to render you sterile: a doctored male. In the evening of October 4, 1955, two years before Sputnik, happy birthday Frederic Remington, as an exercise in Scriptotherapy you Began an account of your Immobility, Remobilization, and Relapse, entitled What I Did Until the Doctor Came. By means that you have not yet Discovered (your Manuscript was lost, with certain of the Doctor’s files, in the move from Pennsylvania to New York), this account became the basis of a slight novel called The End of the Road (1958), which ten years later inspired a film, same title, as false to the novel as was the novel to your Account and your Account to the actual Horner-Morgan-Morgan triangle as it might have been observed from either other vertex.

Not long after first publication of that book, its narrative mainspring, coiled like the Chambered Nautilus or Lippes Loop, was rendered quaint as Clarissa Harlowe’s by the development, legalization, and general use of oral contraceptive pills, together with the liberalization of U.S. abortion laws. Rennie Morgan, however, and her unborn child, perhaps legitimate, remained dead.

Of the subsequent history of Joseph Morgan you Had No Inkling; of your Own there was none, virtually, in the fifteen years between 1954 and this evening. South Vietnamese Premier Ky walked out of the Paris peace conference to protest “the bombardment of his nation’s cities by North Vietnamese artillery”; U.S. Astronaut Schweickart took a space walk from the orbiting Apollo-9 vehicle; at the State University of New York at Buffalo a protest “teach-in” against U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia continued, but most classes went on as usual. You had Prepared your almanac card for the day and were Rocking in your Chair on the porch of the Remobilization Farm after dinner, along with Pocahontas, Monsieur Casteene, Bibi, and other of the patients, Regarding the foul rush of Lake Erie from under the ice toward Niagara, when Tombo X, the Doctor’s Chief Medical Assistant (and son) announced the arrival of a new patient: middleaged mothafuckin paleface hippie look like Tim Leary after a bad trip, two mothafuckin honky cats with him, go tell um get they paleface asses back to the U.S.M.F.A. As the Doctor’s Administrative Assistant, you Went to the Reception Room, accompanied by M. Casteene.

Tressed and beaded, buckskinned, sere, Joe Morgan regarded you with manic calm.

“You’re going to Rewrite History, Horner,” he declared: the same clear, still voice that had terminated your Last Conversation with him, in 1953. “You’re going to Change the Past. You’re going to Bring Rennie Back to Life.”

As before, you Could Not Reply. Gracious, ubiquitous Monsieur Casteene, frowning Tombo X, and the two impassive young men — Morgan’s sons, dear God! — led him off toward the Progress and Advice Room for his preadmission interview, and you Returned here to the porch to Write this letter.

Tomorrow, Luther Burbank Day, Madame de Staël will flee Paris to Coppet, her Swiss estate, before Napoleon’s advance. Franco will bomb Barcelona, killing 1,000. The Germans, in violation of the Locarno Pact, will occupy the Rhineland, and U.S. troops will cross the Rhine at Remagen Bridge. Jacob Horner, you Like to Imagine, will Step into the poisoned river and Sweep beneath the flaking bridge; past the poisonous plants of Ford and the intakes of the sources of their power; down the cold rapids by Goat Island; over the crumbling, tumbling American Falls at last.

Good riddance.

D: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The origins of the Castines, Cookes, and Burlingames.

At Castines Hundred

Niagara, Upper Canada

5 March 1812

Dearest Henry or Henrietta Burlingame V,

Dreary, frozen weather the fortnight past; half a foot of new wet snow, the wind off Lake Ontario shaking the house. Then this morning, ere dawn, a cracking thunderstorm, 1st of the year, after which the skies clear’d, the wind turn’d southerly, from off Lake Erie, & wondrous warm. By dawn ’twas spring; by noon, summer! And so all day your mother & I stroll’d and play’d along the heights by Queenstown, hearing the ice crack like artillery & watching the snow go out in miniature Niagaras. A magical day; I do not wonder you flail’d about in Andrée’s belly, a-fidget to be out & on with it in such weather, till we had to sit on a rock, under the guns of Fort Niagara across the way, and sing you back to sleep in midafternoon.

Evening & chill again now, the autumn of this one-day year. ’Tis your sweet mother I’ve sung to sleep, with a Tarratine lullaby learnt from another Andrée Castine, ancestor of us all. No more playing ’twixt the featherbeds for us till after you’re born — hasten the day! She sleeps. You too, I trust: by simple love engender’d ’mid plots & counterplots enough to spin the head. The old house is still, but the fire burns on; I feel my lifetime pulsing out like blood from an artery. Day before yesterday ’twas 1800: I was fresh from France with the Revolution under my belt, and Father (perhaps) was ushering in the century by running for vice-president of the U. States under the name of Aaron Burr, denying even to me he was the 4th Henry Burlingame. Where did the dozen years go? Now I am 36, racing pell-mell to the grave; ma petite cousine your mother is a full-blown woman of 23. Bonaparte’s bleeding Europe white; the Hawks in Washington see their chance to snatch the Canadas & the Floridas; by summer we shall be at such a war as to disunite the States of America. Cities will burn & thousands die ere you’re wean’d, my precious — and this in no small part your greatgrandfather’s doing, & your grandfather’s. Aye, and your father’s as well, God forgive us! Yet I have never been more happy, more alive & more at peace, nay nor more in love than at this parlous hour.

Little woman or man to be: what blood runs in your veins! Blood of Castines, Cookes, & Burlingames whose histories, more intricate than History, are interlaced as capillaries. ’Tis a tale I knew but partially till this fortnight, when, perforce sequester’d here for a time with Andrée’s parents whilst the world looks in vain for the impostor “Comte de Crillon,” I have had both leisure & opportunity to search thro certain documents of our family. Nay, more, your mother & I have studied them with amazement, & have espied in them a Pattern, so we believe, that bids to change the course of our lives. It is to fix this pattern for ourselves that I mean to draw it out now for you, in the hope it may spare you half a lifetime of misdirected effort. For we firmly believe, Andrée & I, that ours has been a line of brilliant failures, and that while it may be too late for ourselves to do more than cancel out, in the latter half of our lives, our misguided accomplishments in the earlier, you may be the 1st true winner in the history of the house.

’Tis the house of Burlingame & Cook I speak of: the English side of the family, by contrast to which the French, or Castine, side has been a very model of consistency. The Barons Castine still inhabit St. Castine in Gascony, as they have for centuries: the American branch of the family descends from the 1st adventurous baron of the line, a young André Castine who came to Canada toward the end of the 17th Century. He took to wife a Tarratine Indian whom tradition declares to have been the daughter of “Chief Madocawando,” and from whom we Cooks & Burlingames inherit one half of the Indian blood that has served so many of us so well.

This “Monsieur Casteene,” as he was known to the English colonials, became a much-fear’d figure in the provinces of New York & New England in the 1690’s; even as far south as Maryland it was thot that he & the “Naked Salvages of the North” might sweep down & drive the English back into the sea. Amongst the children of André Castine & Madocawanda (a gifted woman who added French & English to her Indian dialects, & so master’d European manners that she quite charm’d the skeptical Gascoignes upon her one visit to St. Castine) was a daughter, Andrée, who married Andrew Cooke III and grandmother’d both the present Andrée & myself.

All subsequent male Castines have follow’d the peaceful example of their Gascon forebears and contented themselves with hunting, farming, timbering, & the breeding of handsome 1st cousins for the Cookes & Burlingames to wed. These belles cousines share their husbands’ penchant for political intrigue: a penchant that so marks our line, its genealogy, on the Burlingame side especially, is as tangled as the plots we’ve been embroil’d in.

To deal 1st with the simpler Cooks (or Cookes, as we then spelt it): Of the 1st Andrew Cooke we know nothing, save that he & someone begot Andrew II, of the Parish of St. Giles in the Fields, London. Andrew II was a tobacco factor in the Maryland plantations, who in the middle 17th Century acquired from Lord Baltimore patent to “Malden on the Chesapeake,” now call’d Cooke’s Point. Upon his wife Anne Bowyer he got twins, Anna & Ebenezer, of whom more anon. Upon his mistress from the neighboring point — a well-born French girl, disown’d by her father, Le Comte Cécile Édouard, for an earlier amour—he got a natural daughter, Henrietta, who bore her mother’s later married name of Russecks. Now, since my mother, Nancy Russecks Burlingame, was descended from this same Henrietta, ’twas but a partial pretence when I took the name Comte de Crillon for my recentest adventure: you spring from a Huguenot count on one side & a Gascon baron on the other, not to mention Tarratine royalty from Madocawanda Castine and Ahatchwhoop royalty from the Burlingames, whom I’ve yet to get to!

Thus Andrew II. His son Ebenezer Cooke is of no great interest to us, despite his claim to have been Poet Laureate of Maryland. He seems to have lost the family estate thro bumbling innocence, & to have regain’d it in some fashion by marrying a prostitute. An unsuccessful tradesman gull’d of his goods, he could make no more of his misfortunes than a comical poem, The Sot-Weed Factor. No better in the bed than at the writing desk, he got but one child, which died a-borning and fetcht its mother off into the bargain — and that ends the tale of your only artist ancestor.

But not your only artful! For with Anna Cooke, Eben’s twin, we come to the Protean Burlingames, whose operations have been at once so multifarious & so covert, that while ’tis certain they have alter’d & realter’d the course of history, ’tis devilish difficult to say just how, or whether their intrigues & counter-intrigues do not cancel one another across the generations. For a tree which, left to itself, would grow straight, if pull’d equally this way & that will grow… straight!

The 1st Henry Burlingame (a fair copy of whose Privie Journall I found last week among the family papers) was one of that company of gentlemen who came to make their fortunes in Virginia with the 1st plantation in 1607, and, disaffected by the hardships of pioneering, made trouble for Captain John Smith — whose Secret Historie of the Voiage up the Bay of Chesapeake we also possess. The two documents together tell this story: In 1608, thinking to divert the mutinous gentlemen, Smith led them on a voyage of exploration from Jamestown to the head of Chesapeake Bay, to find whether it might prove the long-sought Northwest Passage to the Pacific. After a scurrilous adventure amongst the Accomack Indians of the Eastern Shore (detail’d in Smith’s history), Burlingame became a kind of leader of the anti-Smith faction, to whom he threaten’d to tell “the true story of Pocahontas” if Smith did not leave off harassing him & return the party to Jamestown. For it was Burlingame’s opinion (set forth persuasively in the Privie Journall) that Smith was a mere swaggering opportunist & self-aggrandizer, out for glory at anyone’s cost. But Smith’s own account (I mean the Secret Historie) is also persuasive. I conceive him to have been at once an able & daring leader & a thoro rogue; our ancestor to have been both a great complainer by temperament & a man much justified in his complaints.

In any event, so aggravated grew the dispute that shortly afterwards — the party having put ashore in the Maryland marshes & been taken captive by Ahatchwhoop Indians — Smith turn’d a tribal custom into a stratagem for ransoming himself & the rest of his company at Burlingame’s expence. It was the wont of the Ahatchwhoops, upon the death of their king, to choose his successor by a contest of gluttony, he acceding to the throne who could outgorge his competitors. Such was the principle, which must have produced some odd administrators had it not in fact been modified to permit an able but temperate candidate to enter the lists by proxy, sharing the privileges of office (including the queen’s favors) with his corpulent champion, but retaining the authority himself. Smith duped Burlingame (a man of great appetite, & half-starved) into taking the field on behalf of one Wepenter, a politico of modest stomach who must otherwise lose to his gluttonous rival for the kingdom and the hand of lusty Princess Pokatawertussan. Thinking it a mere eating contest with a night of love its prize, our forebear set to with a will & narrowly bested his fat opponent Attonceaumoughhowgh (“Arrow-Target”), who died on the spot of overeating. Grateful Wepenter takes the throne, & in the morning sets Smith’s party free. But when Burlingame makes to join them (having been too ill all night of indigestion to claim his trophy), he is fetcht back in triumph by the Ahatchwhoops, their captive & co-king!

There end both the Privie Journall & the Secret Historie. Not till nearly a century later (in 1694) does anyone learn the subsequent fate of our progenitors. Old Andrew II, it seems, in 1676 engaged as tutor for the twins Ebenezer & Anna Cooke a young Cantabridgean of many parts, named Henry Burlingame III: a master of all the arts & sciences (& an array of secular skills as well, from opium smuggling to sedition) who however had no idea who his parents were or whence came his name & numeral. His researches into this subject had directed all his life, led him deep into the politics of colonial America, involved him in a dozen disguises (for which he had the original gift pass’d down to the rest of us) & as many conspiracies — chiefly Leisler’s Rebellion in New York & John Coode’s in Maryland. It also brot him in touch with “Monsieur Casteene,” as a secret agent either for the French against the British or vice-versa — the 1st of what will be a grand series of such uncertainties! — and with conspiracies of runaway Negro slaves & beleaguer’d Indians to drive their white oppressors from the continent.

But it was his hapless pupil Ebenezer, by this time (the 1690’s), done with school & in midst of his own misadventures, who stumbl’d by chance on what his tutor had subverted governments to find. Driven by a storm upon Bloodsworth Island in the lower Chesapeake, the secret base of those disaffected Indians & escaped slaves, Cooke & his companions are taken prisoner by the old Tayac Chicamec, Chief of the Ahatchwhoops, whom he discovers to be (and he owes his life to the discovery — the tale is too involv’d to repeat) none other than the son of Henry Burlingame I & Pokatawertussan: in short, Henry Burlingame II, the missing link between John Smith’s scapegoat & the twins’ formidable tutor! In Chicamec’s possession is the portion of Smith’s Secret Historie describing Burlingame’s abandonment, and Chicamec repeats his father’s vow to exterminate the “English Devils”—a resolve pass’d down thro Chicamec to his sons.

Now, as Chicamec himself was a halfbreed & his queen as well (the daughter of an errant Jesuit priest & an Ahatchwhoop maiden), their three sons were born in a variety of shades. The 1st, Mattasinemarough, was a pure-blood Indian. The 2nd, Cohunkowprets, a halfbreed like his parents. The 3rd, white-skinn’d and therefore doom’d, was named (nay, label’d, in red ochre on his chest) Henry Burlingame III, & set adrift in a canoe on the ebb tide down the Chesapeake — whence he was rescued by a passing English vessel, adopted by its captain, and fetcht back to England to begin his quest.

There is too much more to the story for this letter — enough to make a novelsworth of letters, Richardson-fashion! Indeed, I see now I must write you at least thrice more, one letter for each generation from this Burlingame III to yourself, if I am to introduce you properly to your sires & show forth that aforementioned pattern, which at this point is as yet unmanifest. But of this H.B. III, your great-great-grandfather, four things more need saying, all connected, ere I close.

1st, his brother’s name, Cohunkowprets, means “bill-o’-the-goose” in the Algonkin dialect of the Ahatchwhoops, and Chicamec’s middle son was thus denominated because, like his brothers & his grandfather (but not his father), he was born so underendow’d in the way of private parts as to move his mother to exclaim on 1st sight of him (in effect & in Algonkin), “A goose hath peckt him peckerless!” This characteristic — like a tendency to plural births — afflicts us Burlingames in alternate generations. More accurately, since the time of H.B. III, when our line began to exchange the surnames Cooke & Burlingame in succeeding generations, it has afflicted all the Burlingames: you yourself, we expect, should you emerge a Henry, will be but a few centimeters’ membership from Henriettahood in this particular. Yet do not despair, for as my existence attests (& that of Andrew Cooke III, my grandfather, & of Chicamec as well, my grandfather’s grandfather), the Burlingames have found ways to overcome their deficiency. We shall pass along to you, when you reach young manhood, the “Secret of the Magic Eggplant,” which, I now learn, we took originally from the Privie Journall.

Indeed (here is my 2nd point), as a man born short of the average stature may outdo taller men in feats of manliness, so Henry Burlingames III & IV (the latter my father) were men of uncommon sexuality. H.B. III, who concerns us here, was by his own denomination a “cosmophilist,” who not only lusted after both his charges, Anna & Ebenezer Cooke, but claim’d to have had carnal connection as well with sundry sorts of barnyard animals, plants, inanimate objects, the very earth itself — long before his discovery of John Smith’s eggplant recipe made it possible for him to beget a child.

Thirdly, from this “cosmophilism,” or erotical love of the world, must have stem’d H.B. III’s endless interests: his passion for everything from astronomy, music, politics, rope-splicing, & chess, to the practice of medicine, law, & nautical piracy, for example; in particular for what he call’d “the game of governments,” and my father “the practice of history.” He successfully impersonated, at various times, both Lord Baltimore & Baltimore’s arch-enemy John Coode; perhaps “Monsieur Casteene” as well. At 1st, one gathers, the motive for his intrigues, at least their occasion, was his research into his parentage: the Secret Historie & Privie Journall were involved in Coode’s conspiracies against Baltimore, and thus involved anyone who sought them. Later, when Ebenezer Cooke had brot to light his tutor’s lineage, Governor Nicholson of Maryland prevail’d upon Burlingame to forestall — if possible, to subvert — that “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of Indians & Negroes. Burlingame accepted the task with relish; but the Cooke twins apparently fear’d that his fascination with his newfound brothers might win out over his loyalty to white civilization. According to my grandfather, who wrote of these things some decades later, they wonder’d whether Burlingame, once on Bloodsworth, would work to divide the jealous factions of ex-slaves & Indians from several tribes, or to unite them, ally them with Casteene’s “Naked Indians of the North,” & return America to its aboriginal inhabitants.

What follow’d historically is known: there were no concerted risings of Negroes & Indians, only isolated massacres of white settlements such as Albany & Schenectady. Bloodsworth Island by 1700 was uninhabited rnarsh, as it is today. But it is not known whether this failure of the Conspiracy represents failure or success on the part of H.B. III. The man was 40 when he left Cooke’s Point for Bloodsworth Island early in 1695 (Ebenezer having regain’d his estate & been reunited with his sister & his former tutor). In April of the same year, as he had pledg’d, Burlingame reappear’d at Malden, in Ahatchwhoop dress, to wed Anna — who, however, for reasons unknown, postponed the marriage until the fall, when Burlingame’s assignment from Governor Nicholson should be completed. Her fiancé yielded to her wish & return’d to the island — never to be heard from again.

But they must have spent that final night in each other’s arms, “supping ere the priest said grace,” as Ebenezer puts it in his poem, with some assistance from the Eggplant Secret: for Anna found herself with child immediately thereafter, and in January 1696 (1695 in the old style) she was deliver’d of a son — your great-grandfather, of whom I shall write in my next letter. Enough to say now (my 4th & last matter for this night) that to cover the scandal — Ebenezer’s own harlot bride having died in childbirth two months previously — he & Anna gave out that he Ebenezer was the child’s father & she its aunt, and Andrew Cooke III was so named & raised.

Everyone at Malden & the neighboring plantations, by this same Andrew’s account, knew the story to be false, and unkindly assumed, from the twins’ general closeness, that he was not only a bastard but the child of incest as well. This suspicion was not without effect on the young man’s life.

But that is matter for another evening: sufficient here to record that it is with Andrew III that the Cooks & Burlingames begin alternating surnames thro the line of their 1st-born sons, Andrew Cooke III’s being named Henry Burlingame IV, and Burlingame IV’s Andrew Cooke IV. I.e., myself, who at my dear wife’s suggestion have dropt the e from Cooke as superfluous, and the male-primogenitural restriction as an affront to the splendid women of the Castines. Yourself therefore will be Burlingame V, whether Henry or Henrietta. With that name will be bequeatht to you a grand objective, & a formidable bloodline to aid your attaining it.

Of these—& of that Pattern, the inspiration of this letter which has fail’d to get to it — more to come, when I shall complete the chronicle of these III’s and IV’s. ’Tis far past midnight now; the wind has dropt, the fire burnt down; ’tis cold. From the neighboring farm a late dog barks; pretty Andrée stirs, stir’d in turn perhaps by you. 1812, 1812! I shall hold you both close now till you’ve quieted, without knowing who restored your peace. May we together, some sweeter year to come, do as much for History!

Till when, & forever, I am,

Your loving father,

Andrew Cook IV

E: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews. Requesting counsel in an action of plagiarism against the Author. His bibliography and biography. Enclosures to the Author, to George III, and to Todd Andrews.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

March 4, 1969

Mr. Todd Andrews

Executive Director, Tidewater Foundation

c/o Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane Cambridge, Md. 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

Every ointment has a chink. Agreeable as it was to meet last month the executive director of the Tidewater Foundation — benefactor of our LILYVAC project and thus midwife as it were to the 2nd Revolution — we regret that our meeting was occasioned by the funeral of His Royal Highness Harrison Mack II: the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most RESET If we seemed to you (or to the widowed queen or the royal mistress) distracted, even “tranced” that afternoon, we plead our bereavement (but Le roi est mort; vive le roi!) and the season. Even now our winter rest period is not ended; we can scarcely hold pen to page for drowsiness; we must count on another to RESET Yet we cannot leave this topic without presuming to warn you against Ambrose M., that person who chauffeured you to Mr. Mack’s funeral and is so bent on ingratiating himself in our circle. Never mind his attentions to Lady A. and to Miss Bea Golden, whose beautiful name he is not worthy to pronounce: our information is that A.M. is the tool and creature of the Defendant hereinafter named: we say no more.

R. Prinz, too, must be dealt with. But that is another matter.

Enclosed (with its own enclosures) is a letter we are posting today to Buffalo, N.Y. It is our intention to bring an action for plagiarism against the addressee. Since, in your capacities as director of and counsel to the Tidewater Foundation, you are the only attorney with whom we have connection, it is our wish to retain you as our counsel in this suit. Unless, indeed, you agree with us that the Foundation itself should bring the action in our behalf.

Our principal complaint, set forth in the attached, is the Defendant’s perversion (into his “novel” Giles Goat-Boy, 1966) of our Revised New Syllabus of the Grand Tutor Harold Bray. But that is merely the latest and chiefest of his crimes against us, which extend the length of our bibliography. To wit:

a. The Shoals of Love, or, Drifting and Dreaming, by “J. A. Beille” (Backwater, Md.: Wetlands Press, 1957): a novel in the format of a showboat minstrel show (But none of our books is mere fiction. See our letter to you of July 4, 1967, enclosed). Its ostensible subject is the star-crossed lovers Ebenezer and Florence, end-man and — woman of a blackface minstrel troupe aboard a drifting theater in the Chesapeake estuaries, whose love is thwarted by the heroine’s father, Mr. Interlocutor. Ebenezer is driven to the brink of humanism until Florence discovers a way to communicate with him not only despite but through her father, as a cunning wrestler turns his adversary’s strength to his RESET By means of double-entendres in the minstrel-show routine (echoing of course the great double-entendre of the “novel” itself) the lovers conduct their pathetic intercourse. The story climaxes with Flo’s ingenious re-choreography of the “breakdown” dance, which itself climaxes the nightly show, into an elaborate kinetic code, not unlike the worker-dance “language” that inspires her: its message is that Eb must sink the Floating Theatre that very night and fly with Flo to some hive of refuge. Whether or not Eb gets the message is heartbreakingly left for the reader to wonder — as the Author, no less heartbroken, wonders whether his lost parents are getting his message through the pseudofictive text. See Enclosure #3.

b. The W_sp, by “Jean Blanque” (Wetlands Press, 1959): the terse companion piece to Shoals. Its anonymous hero, a handsome young entomologist from a small agricultural college in Maryland, doing field work on Batesian mimicry in the Dorchester marshes, comes to realize that, as if “bitten by the love-bog,” he esteems the objects of his researches above his human partners; that his human roles have been as it were mere protective camouflage. As autumn passes, he withdraws into a tent of his own making in the saltmarsh, where the “novel” leaves him in a dormancy from which, perhaps, he wakes ½ — tranced come spring and takes flight with his 1,000,000 brothers. Dream? Hallucination? Transfiguration? The question is tantalizingly unresolved, while the reader her/himself takes wing on the heart-constricting beauty of the closing passage, a description of the mating flight.

c. Backwater Ballads, by “Jay Bray” (Wetlands Press, 1961), our magnum opus: a cycle of 360 tales set in the Backwater National Wildlife Refuge, our birthplace, at all periods of its history (i.e., 1600–1960: 1 tale for each year, each degree of the cycle, and each day of the ideal year, of which our actual calendars are but the corrupt approximation). The tales are told from the viewpoint of celestial Aedes Sollicitans, a freshmarsh native with total recall of all her earlier hatches, who each year bites 1 visitor in the Refuge and acquires, with her victim’s blood, an awareness of his/her history. The 1st is the Tayac Kekataughtassapooekskunoughmass, or “90 Fish,” King of the Ahatchwhoop Indians. The 9th is Captain John Smith of Virginia; the 10th Henry Burlingame I, my own foster father’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. The 360th (and the 1st to give himself to her unreservedly) is the Author, whom in return she gratefully “infects” with her narrative accumulation.

Compare these with the Defendant’s impostures. And having compared (and subdued the indignation that must follow your comparison!), let us arrange a meeting, either in your office or here in Lily Dale — where in your other capacity you can satisfy yourself with the progress of LILYVAC II on the NOVEL project — prepare our briefs, file our suit, and, companions-in-arms such as the world has never RESET He shall pay.

Were we not so sleep-ridden, we could not close without a word on the success of our fall work period; the 1st phase of the 3rd year (V) of the 5-year NOVEL plan (see Enclosure #2). But we must rest, rest for the prodigious labors of the coming spring, when in any case Ms. Bernstein will submit to the Foundation our full and confidential ½-annual report. Then let us together RESET JBB 3 encl.

(ENCL. 1)

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

March 4, 1969

“J.B.,” “Author”

Dept. English, Annex B

SUNY/Buffalo

Buffalo, N.Y. 14214

“Dear” “sir”:

Enclosed (so that you cannot pretend not to know us) are printouts of letters from us to His late Majesty George III of Maryland and to Mr. Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation — who also acts as our attorney, and from whom, in that latter capacity, you will presently be hearing.

We know very well that August 5 of this year will be the 3rd anniversary of 1st publication of “your” “novel” G.G.B. and that therefore on that date the statute of limitations will run on actions against you connected with that “work.” 5 months hence! But it is your time, not the statute, that runs out. Only the press of other business (and our absolute need for rest at this season) has kept us from bringing you sooner to account. But our eye has been upon you as yours has been upon the calendar.

Nearly 7 years have passed since the true Giles delivered to our trust the Revised New Syllabus of his ascended father Harold Bray, Grand Tutor of the universal University. 4 years ago tonight we roused from the profoundest torpor of our life to read that Tutor-given text, and to commence the great work of expunging from it the corruptions and perversions of the Antitutor and false Giles, your Goat-Boy. Like you, he believed he had triumphed over Truth, not knowing that his nemesis but awaited the proper hour to sting!

With tonight’s Worm Moon (which by summer will become a Conqueror indeed) that hour is come. We ourselves must return for a time yet into rest; indeed we can scarcely hold pen to paper for drowsiness; must count on another to post this ultimatum. But justice now is hatched and stirring: when you next hear from us (a month hence, if you have not by then made the reparations our attorney will demand) we shall be fully awake and at work on our grand project. Do not imagine that because your thefts are of gn_t-like inconsequence by comparison with our Revolutionary NOVEL, they will go unpunished. For as our noble forebear, while conquering Europe and administering the Empire, could attend with equal firmness to such details as correcting our namesake’s American marriage, so we, while supervising the Novel Revolution, will not fail to attend also to your exposure and ruin.

B.

cc. T. Andrews

2 encl.

(ENCL. 2)

Enclosure #1

On board the Gadf_y III, Lake Chautauqua, New York, 14 July 1966

To His Majesty George III of England

Tidewater Farms, Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Your Royal Highness,

On 22 June 1815, in order to establish a new and sounder base of empire, we abdicated the throne of France and withdrew to the port of Rochefort, where 2 of our frigates — new, fast, well-manned and — gunned — lay ready to run Your Majesty’s blockade of the harbor and carry us to America. Captain Ponée of the Méduse planned to engage on the night of 10 July the principal English vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow, against which he estimated the Méduse could hold out for 2 hours while her sister ship, with our party aboard, outran the lesser blockading craft. The plan was audacious but certain of success. Reluctant, however, to sacrifice the Méduse, we resolved instead like a cunning wrestler to turn our adversary’s strength to our advantage: to reach our goal by means of, rather than despite, Your Majesty’s navy; and so we addressed to your son the Prince Regent the following:

Isle of Aix, 12 July 1815

In view of the factions that divide my country and of the enmity of the greatest powers in Europe I have brought my political career to a close and am going like Themistocles to seat myself on the hearthstone of the British people. I put myself under the protection of English Law and request that protection of Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my enemies.

Having sent our aide-de-camp before us with this message and instructions to request from the Prince Regent passports to America, on Bastille Day we put ourself and our entourage in the hands of Commander Maitland aboard Bellerophon and left France. Alas, Your Majesty’s own betrayal and confinement on the mischievous charge of insanity should have taught us that our confidence in your son and his ministers was ill placed, more especially as it is with the Muse of the Past that we have ever gone to school for present direction. When therefore we learned from Admiral Sir George Cockburn that our destination was to be, not London and Baltimore, but St. Helena, like a derelict student we applied in vain to our old schoolmistress for vindication:

On board Bellerophon, at sea

…I appeal to History. History will say that an enemy who waged war for 20 years against the English people came of his own free will, in his misfortune, to seek asylum under her laws. What more striking proof could he give of his esteem and his trust? But what reply was made in England to such magnanimity’? There was a pretense of extending a hospitable hand to that enemy, and when he had yielded himself up in good faith, he was sacrificed.

Our maroonment on that desolated rock, under the boorish Cockburn and his more boorish successors, we need not describe to 1 so long and even more ignobly gaoled. We, at least, had the consolation that our exile was both temporary and as it were voluntary: we needed no Perseus to save us; we could have escaped at any time, and waited 7 years only because that period was needed for us to exploit to best advantage our martyrdom, complete the development of that stage of our political philosophy set down in the Memorial of St. Helena, and execute convincingly the fiction of our death in 1821; also for our brother Joseph in Point Breeze, New Jersey, our officers at Champ d’Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, and our agents in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Barataria, Bloodsworth Island, and Rio de Janeiro to complete the groundwork for our American operations.

By means which we will not here disclose (but which must bear some correspondence to those by which Your Majesty effected his own escape from Windsor), we departed St. Helena in 1822 for my American headquarters—1st in a house not far from your own in the Maryland marshes, ultimately in western New York — an area to which our attention had been directed during our 1st Consulship by Mme de Staël (who owned 23,000 acres of St. Lawrence County) in the days before that woman, like Anteia or the wife of Potiphar, turned against us. Here, for the last century and ½, we have directed our operatives in the slow elaboration of our grand strategy, 1st conceived aboard Bellerophon, whereof the time has now arrived to commence the execution: a project beside which Jena, Austerlitz, Vim, Marengo, the 18th Brumaire, even the original Revolution, are as our ancient 18-pounders to an H-bomb, or our old field glass to the Mt. Palomar reflector: we mean the New, the 2nd Revolution, an utterly Novel Revolution!

“There will be no innovations in my time,” Your Majesty declared to Chancellor Eldon. But the truly revolutionary nature of our project, as examination of the “Bellerophonic” prospectus (en route to you under separate cover) will show, is that, as the 1st genuinely scientific model of the genre, it will of necessity contain nothing original whatever, but be the quintessence, the absolute type, as it were the Platonic Form expressed.

The plan is audacious but certain of RESET Nothing now is wanting for immediate implementation of its 1st phase save sufficient funding for construction of a more versatile computer facility at our Lily Dale base, and while such funding is available to us from several sources, the voice of History directs us to Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of RESET Adversaries, we shook the world; as allies, who could withstand us? What might we not accomplish?

In 1789 Your Majesty “recovered” from the strait-waistcoat of your 1st “madness,” put to rout those intriguing with your son to establish his regency, and until your 2nd and “final” betrayal by those same intriguers in 1811, enjoyed an unparalleled popularity with your subjects — as did we between Elba and St. Helena. Then let us together, from our 2nd Exiles, make a 2nd Return, as more glorious than our 1st as its coming, to a world impatient to be transfigured, has been longer. To the once-King of the Seas, the once-Monarch of the Shore once again extends his hand. Only grasp it and, companions-inarms such as this planet has not seen, we shall be Emperors of the world.

N. (ENCL. 3)

Enclosure #2

July 4, 1967

TO:

Mr. Todd Andrews, Executive Director, Tidewater Foundation, Marshyhope State University College, Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

FROM:

Jerome B. Bray, General Delivery, Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

RE:

Reapplication for Renewal of Tidewater Foundation Grant for Reconstruction of Lily Dale Computer Facility for Reimplementation of NOVEL Revolutionary Project

Sir:

Inasmuch as concepts, including the concepts Fiction and Necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterf_ies exist in our imaginations, along with Existence, Imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.

Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk now to a Luxembourg, a San Marino! Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, churchgoing. What is wanted to restore its ancient dominion is nothing less than a revolution; indeed, the Revolution is waiting in the wings, the 2nd Revolution, and will not stay for the Bicentennial of the 1st, than which it bids to be as more glorious as its coming, to a world impatient to be RESET Now of “science fiction” there is a surfeit; of scientific fiction, none. Attempts to classify “scientifically” the themes of existing fiction (e.g. Professor Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature) or even its dramatical morphology (e.g. the admirable reduction, by Professors Propp and Rosenberg, of the “Swan-Geese” folktale to the formula

— these are steps in the right direction, but halting as a baby’s, primitive as Ben Franklin and his kite — and made by scholars, to the end merely of understanding for its own sake! They are like the panderings of historians upon the Napoleonic Wars; whereas our own textual analyses (beginning with the grand Concordance of the Revised New Syllabus from which the Revolutionary NOVEL Project grew) are like the Emperor’s own examinations of military history — to the end, not merely of understanding, but of mastering and perfecting it, in order, like a cunning wrestler, to RESET We were born on August 15, 1933, in the Backwater Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and raised by 1 of the staff rangers in the absence of our true parents, who for reasons of state were obliged to keep their whereabouts hidden and were never able to communicate with their only child except by coded messages which not even Ranger Burlingame was privy to. These messages trace our descent “originally” from the abortive marriage in 1803 of our namesake the Emperor’s brother Jérôme and Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore; more immediately from their grandson Charles Joseph Bonaparte and the Tuscarora Indian Princess Kyuhaha Bray, Charles’s wife in the eyes of God and the Iroquois though not in the white man’s record books during his tenure as Indian Commissioner in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt. There being at present no bona fide Bonapartes more closely related than ourself to the late Emperor, we have in fact some just pretension to the throne of France — which it is not our concern to press here, but which we do not doubt was instrumental in eliciting support for our original Tidewater Foundation grant from Mr. Harrison Mack, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most RESET Under various assumed names, for our own protection, and in circumstances as strait as our ancestor’s on St. Helena, we completed our higher education in sundry night schools and supported ourself by teaching technical and business-letter writing, 1st in the Agricultural Extension Division of the state university, later at Wicomico Teachers College, most recently in Fredonia, New York. We shall not describe here the conspiracies of anti-Bonapartists and counterrevolutionaries which drove us from academic pillar to post: they did all in their power, vainly, to mock and frustrate our literary career, knowing that our writings were never the fictions they represented themselves as being, but ciphered replies to those parental communications which have sustained us through every ordeal.

Of the fictions qua fictions you will have heard, all published by the Wetlands Press under various noms de plume: The Shoals of Love, by “J. A. Beille” (a name meant to echo Beyle, the French Bonapartist a.k.a. Stendhal); The Wa_p, by “Jean Blanque”; and Backwater Ballads, by “Jay Bray.” The use of our Indian ancestor’s surname in that last nom de plume was a coded challenge to our enemies; it elicited an altogether unexpected result, which changed our life. By the time Ballads appeared in print (to go unnoticed, like its predecessors, by the anti-Bonapartist literary establishment, but not by those for whom its private message was intended), we were at work on another “novel,” to be called The Seeker, whose hero reposes in a sort of hibernation in a certain tower, impatient to be RESET For reasons we did not ourself understand at the time, our work on this fiction had come to a standstill: then in September 1962 we were vouchsafed our 1st bodily visitation by an emissary of our parents — though we did not recognize him as such until some years later. This episode is recounted in the “Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher” of the “novel” Giles Goat-Boy (1966): an account accurate enough in its particulars, since the text was lifted outright from our Revised New Syllabus; yet wholly perverted, since its “author” is either the leader or the tool of the anti-Bonapartists who have done all in their power, vainly, to RESET O stop New ¶

Harold Bray, not the impostor Giles Goat-Boy, was Grand Tutor of the universal University! Persecuted and driven thence by agents of the Antitutor, he was revealed to us that night by his emissary as our ancestor on that campus beyond, as truly as the Bonapartes are our ancestors in this world. The coincidence of his surname and that of our Tuscarora grandmother is no coincidence!

Apprehensive of yet another plot against us, we were at 1st skeptical of this visitation and hesitant to read the manuscript entrusted to us by our visitant. In the year 1963/64, at the age of 30, we found ourself plunged into deepest torpor, not only during our normal rest period, but during our spring and fall work periods as well. Not recognizing that condition as the prelude to a grander pitch and stage of action, we sought help in nearby Lily Dale: 1st among the spiritualists who swarm there (and whose messages from our parents were transparently false); then among the activators of the famous Remobilization Farm, which had yet to be harried from the country by enemies not unconnected to our own.

The multitudinous and ingenious therapies of the Doctor’s staff restored us to the path of destiny (rather, revealed to us we had never left it) and prompted us to read The Revised New Syllabus, which did the rest. To the Farm we owe the pleasure of remeeting a former teacher (Mr. Jacob Horner, instructor in prescriptive grammar during our student nights at Wicomico Teachers College, now administrative assistant of the Farm, whom it will be our pleasure to engage as syntactical analyst in the NOVEL project when the 5-Year Plan is implemented) and the establishing of 2 invaluable associations: with M. Casteene, like ourself descended from French and Indian nobility, and eager to coordinate his historical enterprises and our own; and with H.R.H. Harrison Mack’s Tidewater Foundation, which we discovered (from M. Casteene) to be among the enlightened philanthropies on which the Remobilization Farm depends for support — and to which we turned in turn when we were ourself remobilized in 1965.

We straightway resigned our post at Fredonia (students the country over were by this time becoming impossible to teach in any case) and established ourself at Lily Dale to begin our Concordance to the R.N.S., supporting ourself as best we could by raising goats for fudge and slaughter and piloting the excursion boat Gadfl_ III (named for my lost father; never mind) on nearby Chautauqua Lake. In 1966, as your files will show, on the advice of M. Casteene we applied to Mr. Mack and were awarded a modest grant by the Tidewater Foundation for construction of a preliminary computer facility to aid in the Concordance — whose implications we ourself scarcely realized to be as revolutionary as intuited by M. Casteene and Mr. Mack’s son, Drew.

That same year (we mean 1966/67) we suffered 1 grave setback and reaped 2 unexpected windfalls. The setback was publication on August 5 of the spurious G.G.B., our manuscript edition of R.N.S. having been pirated from Wetlands Press by a carefully placed anti-Bonapartist eager to ingratiate himself with the New York trade publishers. We had counted on royalties from that work to set us free of the goats and Gadf_y… But no matter: He or she shall pay for her/his piracy, as shall in time the 1 who took our initials with our text and published the Syllabus not even as a ciphered message in the guise of fiction, much less as plain and passed truth, but as mere entertainment!

Had the blow fallen a year or 2 earlier, during our vulnerable period, we might have succumbed. But we were supported in our adversity by the foundation grant, by the ready progress of the Concordance program, and by the 2 windfalls aforementioned. The 1st (too personal to detail in this letter) was our meeting of and subsequent association with Ms. Merope Bernstein, a brilliant student of political economy, entomology, and computer science at Brandeis U., who, dissatisfied as we with the academic establishment, had dropped out in her final semester to do fieldwork in militant ecology. We met at an anti-DDT pray-in-and-spray-out on the grounds of the old Chautauqua Institution on the evening of August 15, 1966, our 31st birthday and the most beautiful evening of our life. We can say no more.

The 2nd windfall was the unexpected turn taken by our researches this past spring, when we completed the Concordance program and reviewed the initial computer printouts. You will recall that even in our 1st application we intimated (and could have no more than intimated, so tentative were our own speculations at that time) that the Concordance was to be “novel,” even “revolutionary”: the “Bellerophonic Prospectus” which we submitted to the foundation through Mr. Mack merely suggested that the circuitry of our proposed LILYVAC should be capable of mimicking prose styles on the basis of analyzed samples, and even of composing hypothetical works by any author on any subject. In our fall 1966 programming, stung by the spurious Giles, we made provisions for experiments in this line, thinking that publication of such canards as an End of the Road Continued or a Sot-Weed Redivivus or a Son of Giles might expose, confound, and neutralize our enemies; might even force reparations to aid our great work and set us free of the goats and RESET So successful was our circuitry and program design (despite the modest, even primitive, facility that is LILYVAC I), the 1st printouts, we are happy to report, transcended these petty possibilities.

We say transcended, rather than exceeded, because like a gift from the Grand Tutor, what LILYVAC gave us was not exactly what we had petitioned for, its superior “eyes” having espied in our data what ours had not. It did indeed produce a few pages of mimicry, in the format of letters written by our enemies and others; it even synopsized, as if in farewell to our Concordance project, a scripture to be called Revised New Revised New Syllabus. But the burden of its message to us was, not to abandon these enterprises, but to incorporate them into the grander project herewith set forth, to be code-named NOVEL.

The details are too sensitive to entrust to the ordinary post; we shall confide them to the foundation through Mr. Drew Mack on a “need-to-know” basis. But bear in mind that we are not an homme de lettres; that The Shoals of Love, The Was_, and Backwater Ballads were not mere novels, but documents disguised in novel format for the purpose of publicly broadcasting private messages to our parents — who, we now have reason to believe, have not been deaf to those cunning, painful ciphers, and may be replying to us in kind through LILYVAC.

Bear in mind also and therefore that any description of our revolutionized project is perforce cryptic and multireferential; when we say NOVEL, for example, we refer at once to at least 5 things: (a) (what we take to be) a document in the guise of an extended fiction of a revolutionary character; (b) a 5-year plan for the composition of that document; (c) a 5-year plan for effecting, in part by means of that document, certain novel and revolutionary changes in the world; (d) the title of a (also known as RN) and the code name of b and c; and (e) the code name for this Novel Revolution itself and the 5 several years of its implementation, which Ms. Bernstein and we have abstracted from LILYVAC’s printout instructions as follows.:

1. 1966/67 (Year N [already completed in essence, without our knowing the true significance of our labors]): Programming of LILYVAC I to mimic prose styles on the basis of analyzed specimens. Composition of hypothetical fictions. Neutralization of leading anti-Bonapartists and exaction of reparations for plagiarism [these last have yet to be achieved]. Poisoned entrails.

2. 1967/68 (Year O): Programming of LILYVAC II [i.e., the modifications and extensions of LILYVAC I to be made this fall with Tidewater Foundation funds, contingent on renewal of our grant] with data for The Complete and Final Fiction: e.g. analyses of all extant fiction, its motifs, structures, strategies, etc. Production of an abstract model of the perfect narrative, refined from such crudities as are now available, e.g. the “Swan-Geese” formula cited earlier. Toad that under cold stone days and nights has 31 sweltered venom sleeping got.

3. 1968/69 (Year V): 1st trial printouts of RN and analysis of same. Fillet of a fenny snake.

4. 1969/70 (Year E): Completion of analysis. Eye of newt. Reprogramming of LILYVAC II (or construction of LILYVAC III) for composition of Final Fiction RN.

5. 1970/71 (Year L): Final print-out of NOVEL (i.e., RN). Revelation of true identity. Rout of impostors and pretenders. Assumption of throne of France. Restoration of “Harrison Mack II” to throne of England. Destruction of all existing stocks of insecticides and prohibition of their manufacture forever. Toe of frog. Reunion with parents. Commencement of New Golden Age.

We have explained already that LILYVAC found it unnecessary actually to compose the hypothetical fictions, having adumbrated their possibility and demonstrated the capacity. Nor can it be said that the creature who appended his name to the false Giles has been neutralized: we have not got all the birds out of LILYVAC I, and its capacity, while exceeding what could have been expected of so modest a facility, falls short of our requirements for years O through L — a discrepancy which we look to the Tidewater Foundation to rectify. But he shall pay.

Moreover and finally, our spring work period was abbreviated by an almost successful attempt on the part of our enemies to assassinate us in late May of this year. In the guise of Chautauqua County officials and with the pretext of “fogging the woods around Lily Dale against lake-fli_s,” they laid a cloud of poison gas about the car in which Ms. Bernstein and we had parked, en route from our afternoon’s work, in order to review our draft of this very letter. Thanks to her quick action in rolling up the windows and taking the wheel, and the admirable traction of our loyal VW on marshy woodland lanes, we made good our escape. Ms. Bernstein, we are relieved to report, suffered no more than a few tears and sneezes; we on the other hand were gassed to unconsciousness for 24 hours, suffered delirium, nausea, poisoned entrails, and muscular spasms for the following week, and still experience occasional twitches and a sustained low-grade nervous disorder. They shall pay.

But we survived! (The innocent lake-blanks, alas, did not.) And, come August 15 and the commencement of our fall work period, we shall proceed with the implementation of Year O, for which nothing is wanted save sufficient funding for the redesign of LILYVAC I. And while such funding is available to us from several sources, the voice of History directs us to RESET Complimentary Close

JBB

F: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly (and Lady Amherst). A de-cla-ra-ti-on and an ex-hor-ta-ti-on. With several postscripts.

The Lighthouse, Mensch’s Castle

Erdmann’s Cornlot

Dorset, Maryland

March 3, 1969

FROM:

Ambrose Mensch, Whom It Concerned

TO:

Yours Truly (cc. Germaine Pitt)

RE:

Your blank and anonymous letter to me of May 12, 1940

Dear Sir or Madam:

Fill in the blank: AMBROSE LOVES ______________.

A.

P.S. (to G.P.): Dear Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English and Acting Provost of the Faculty of Letters of Marshyhope State University College Germaine Gordon Pitt Lady Amherst: I love you! And I shall in your pursuit surely make an ass of

P.P.S.: Sixth love of my life, admirable GGPLA: here are the first five “Words of Five Syllables” in the old New England Primer:

Ad-mi-ra-ti-on

Be-ne-fi-ci-al

Con-so-la-ti-on

De-cla-ra-ti-on

Ex-hor-ta-ti-on

They correspond, sort of, to this affair’s predecessors; also to the Story Thus Far (thus far unknown to you) of our relation, whereof we are come to Stage D already and shall by this letter be fetched E-ward.

In my student days, Lady, when science had still not purged itself of 19th-century pathos, the first principle of embryology was that Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: that the evolutionary history of the individual rehearses the ditto of his race. Law too lovely to be true! Which therefore I here take as first rule of my next fiction: its plot shall be the hero’s recapitulation, at the midpoint of his life, of his Story Thus Far, the exposition and complications of its first half, to the end of directing his course through the climax and dénouement of its second. My hero Perseus (or whoever), like a good navigator, will decide where to go by determining where he is by reviewing where he’s been. And inasmuch as my life here in the Lighthouse is itself a species of fiction, it follows that law of reenactment. On May 12, 1940, when I was ten, I found a note in a bottle along the Choptank River shore just downstream from where I write this: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, torn from a tablet and folded thrice; on a top line was penned in deep red ink TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN; on the next-to-bottom, YOURS TRULY. The lines between were blank — a blank I’ve been trying now for 29 years to fill! All my fictions, all my facts, Germaine, are replies to that carte blanche; this, like them, I’ll bottle and post into the broad Choptank, to run with the tide past cape and cove, black can, red nun, out of the river and the Bay, down to the oceans of the world. My Perseus story (if I write it) will echo its predecessors as middle-aged Perseus rehearses his prior achievements, before adding to their number; the house I live in is built from the stones of my family’s history, our past fiascos reconfigured. (And Marshyhope’s up-going Tower of Truth, worse luck for it, is rising on footers of those same false stones.) No wonder, then, dear G, if to my eyes these ABC’s from the N.E.P. spell Q.E.D. E.g.:

1. Ad-mi-ra-ti-on. When first I beheld you in the halls of Marshyhope last fall, an English tea rose among our native cattails and marsh lilies, et cetera. In fact, admirable lady, as a sometime scholar I had admired already your editions of Mme de Staël’s letters and your articles on her connection with Gibbon, Byron, Constant, Napoleon, Jefferson, Rousseau, Schlegel, & Co.; also your delicate commentary on Héloise’s letters to Peter Abelard; also your discreet recollections of H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Thomas Mann. Oeuvrewise, milady, we were well met ere we met!

Even if, as I quite imagine, my own obscure, tentative, maverick “writings” (I mean the works of “Arthur Morton King”) have yet to swim into your ken. What must you make, Fair Embodiment of the Great Tradition, of my keyless codes, my chain-letter narratives with missing links, my edible anecdotes, my action-fictions, my récits concrets, my tapes and slides and assemblages and histoires trouvées? No matter: yours not to admire, but to be admired! I know a little of your history; I admire it. I know a bit more of your struggle with our horse’s ass of an acting president, John

who does not even caricature very well…; I admire it. I know what I hear of your kindness to poor old Harrison Mack in his last year or so…; ditto, perhaps most of all.

2. Be-ne-fi-ci-al it has been to my somewhat battered spirit to work with you on the ad hoc nominating committee for the MSUC Litt.D. My curriculum vitae, as you must know from your provostial files, has been on the margins of the academic as well as of the literary establishment; I’ve used the campuses, and been by them used, only in times of material or spiritual want: a chronic but intermittent and seldom intense condition. Enough for this postpostscript to say that Affair E had ended, painfully, last summer: as sore a business as Aeneas’s jilting Dido, but not, I trust, so fatal. Imagine an Aeneas who has ceased to love the queen, yet who for various reasons does not cut his anchor cables and run for Rome, but stays on in Carthage, in the very palace! Too distracted to compose (I was anyhow done with avant-garde contraptions, was looking for a way back to aboriginal narrative, a route to the roots), I lost myself with relief in the easier gratifications of teaching, reading, committee work, and the search for a project to reorient me with my muse: to bridge the aforementioned gap between Whence and Whither.

Thus lost, what I found instead was a muse to reorient me with my projects — a role you were serenely unaware of playing. That you had personally known, even been on more or less intimate terms with, several old masters of modernist fiction as well as their traditionalist counterparts, made you for me Literature Incarnate, or The Story Thus Far, whose next turning I’d aspired to have a hand in. That you were… a few years my senior (who have been 40 since I was 20, and shall continue to be till 60) aroused me the more: for so is Literature! Your casualest remarks I read as portents and fetched to the Lighthouse to examine for their augury. “Did you know,” you asked me once over post-committee coffee in the Faculty Club, “that James Joyce was terribly interested in the cinema, and had a hand in opening the first movie-house in Dublin? But of course, as his eyesight failed…” And you added, “Curious that Jorge Borges, our other great sightless modernist, has always been attracted to the cinema too; I believe he’s even done filmscripts, hasn’t he?” Yet you had no idea that I was at that moment wrestling with the old rivalry between page and screen, making notes for an unfilmable filmscript, and being tempted by Reg Prinz’s invitation to do a screenplay of a certain old friend’s new book! What’s more, one of the principals of that book itself (at least in my screenplay notes) is a woman much resembling yourself, who has a tempestuous affair with a brash American some calendar years her junior and some light-years her social inferior! If our connection was not plotted in heaven, dear Germaine, it’s because our Author lives elsewhere. May you too find it be-ne-fi-ci-al!

3. As I hope you found my attempt at con-so-la-ti-on last month at Harrison Mack’s funeral, when, it seemed to me, our relationship escalated to a third stage. For one thing, I touched you — even embraced you for the first time, under pretext of consoling a bereft colleague. You were startled! But for all you knew, such unwonted familiarity might be customary among Americans: another manifestation of our aggressive informality, like my suddenly addressing you as “Germaine” instead of “Lady Amherst” or (à la Schott) “Mrs. Pitt.” Yet it’s an English proverb, not an American, that the time to pay court to a widow is en route home from the funeral. If you were not quite rewidowed by Mack’s death (not having been quite his wife), I wasn’t quite paying court yet, either, when I seized the opportunity of your uncertain new standing at Tidewater Farms to console you diplomatically out to dinner and back to your pre-Mack lodgings.

There — by confiding to your new friend-in-need that you had no convenient way to remove from the Mack residence a number of gifts from His Late Majesty which ought not to be inventoried with his estate, and by permitting me to oblige you by fetching them at once in my car, and by confiding further thereupon (at my request and discreetly) some details of the George III/Lady Pembroke masquerade you’d carried off so admirably to old Mack’s benefit — you gave me grounds to confide to you my own more-or-less bereft and therefore eligible status as a divorcé with custody of a handicapped daughter.

For which afflictions of fortune you duly consoled me in your turn. Whence we moved to consoling each other, with your good Dry Sack, for the limitations of life in the academic and geographical backwaters of my Maryland; and you complimented my speech with having but a very inconspicuous American accent, and no Eastern Shore brogue at all; and I complimented you on your graceful acceptance of your fallen lot — but was by this time lost in admiration of your yet-youthful great gray eyes, your less gray hair, your excellent skin (especially for a Briton, Ma’am) and dentition, your sturdy breasts and waist and hips — which, together with your okay legs, put me strickenly in mind of Never Mind Whom, fifth love of my life, that Dido aforementioned (but her thighs tended to Italian amplitude, yours to a Kentish, downs-trekking, partridge-potting muscularity).

Consoled and consoling to my cups by midnight, having exploited your reluctance to be rude, but acceding at last to your reminder that Monday was a workday for the living, I went home to my Lighthouse imagining how it would be to divest an acting provost and genuine English gentlewoman of her tweeds. Would her underthings give off heather, saddle leather? Her voice — of all her admirables the admirablest, the very pitch and timbre of La Belle Lettre sans Merci—what does it say, how sound, in carnal transport? Et cetera — my interest mounting, so to speak, in the month between then and now. I contemplate as always my camera obscura (of which, as of the Lighthouse and Mensch’s Castle, more anon); but instead of the river, the town, the vanished seawall which begins our family saga, I see you.

4. De-cla-ra-ti-on: AMBROSE LOVES LADY AMHERST.

5. Ex-hor-ta-ti-on: Dear dignified Germaine: let us be lovers! Come play Danaë in this cracked tower! Muse of Austen, Dickens, Fielding, Richardson, and the rest: reclaim your prodigal! Speak love to me, Mother Tongue! O Britannia, your lost colony is reconquered!

P.P.P.S.: The sixth word, Ma’am, is for-ni-ca-ti-on.

P.P.P.P.S.: The seventh, ge-ne-ra-ti-on!

P.P.P.P.P.S.: The eighth and ninth — but seven will suffice. We have come to that sixth, Sixth Sweetheart: I declare a state of loving war upon your heart as upon a tower, which I will take by storm or siege unless, as I exhort, you yield in the great tradition of British triumphs and defeats: without a fuss. In letters to come (i.e., to go, bottled and corked, to Yours Truly on future tides) I shall fill in some earlier blanks. Till when I declare myself, exhortingly, my A.,

Your

A

G: The Author to the Reader. LETTERS is “now” begun.

“March 2, 1969”

Dear Reader, and

Gentles all: LETTERS is now begun, its correspondents introduced and their stories commencing to entwine. Like those films whose credits appear after the action has started, it will now pause.

If “now” were the date above, I should be writing this from Buffalo, New York, on a partly sunny Sunday mild for that area in that season, when Lake Erie is still frozen and the winter’s heaviest snowfall yet ahead. On the 61st day of the 70th year of the 20th century of the Christian calendar, the human world and its American neighborhood, having survived, in the main, the shocks of “1968” and its predecessors, stood such-a-way: Clay Shaw was acquitted on a charge of involvement in the assassination of President John Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan was pleading in vain to be executed for assassinating Senator Robert Kennedy, and James Earl Ray was about to be convicted of assassinating the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Ex-President Dwight Eisenhower was weakening toward death after abdominal surgery in February; ex-President Lyndon Johnson, brought down by the Viet Nam War, had retired to Texas; his newly inaugurated successor, Richard M. Nixon, was in Paris conferring with French President de Gaulle and considering the Pentagon’s new antiballistic missile program. The North Vietnamese were pressing a successful offensive toward Saigon while the Paris peace conference — finally begun in January after the long dispute over seating arrangements — entered Week Six of its four-year history. Everywhere university students were rioting: the Red Guard was winding up Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China; the University of Rome was closed; martial law had been imposed here and there in Spain, tear gas and bayonets in Berkeley and Madison; in Prague students were burning themselves alive to protest Soviet occupation of their country. Hostility between the Russians and the Chinese was on the verge of open warfare at the border of Sinkiang Province; along Israel’s borders with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, things once again had crossed that verge. The U.S.S. Pueblo inquiry, souvenir of one war ago, was still in progress. The Apollo-9 spacecraft was counting down for launch toward its moon-orbiting mission, the French-British Concorde for the first supersonic transport flight, both to be accomplished on the following day. Ribonuclease, the “key to life,” had just been synthesized for the first time in a chemical laboratory; in another, also for the first time, a human egg was successfully fertilized outside the human body. The economy of the United States was inflating at a slightly higher annual rate than the 4.7 % of 1968, which had been the highest in seventeen years; the divorce rate was the highest since 1945. Having affirmed the legality of student protest “within limits,” our Supreme Court was deciding on the other hand to permit much broader use of electronic surveillance devices by law-enforcement agencies. Every fourth day of the year, on the average, an airliner had been hijacked: fifteen so far. Before the month expired, so would Mr. Eisenhower; and before the year, Senator Everett Dirksen, Levi Eshkol, Ho Chi Minh, and Mary Jo Kopechne, with difficult consequences for Senator Edward Kennedy. Tom Mboya would be assassinated in Nairobi, Sharon Tate and her friends massacred in California, large numbers of Southeast Asians in Southeast Asia. Sirhan Sirhan would be sentenced to death, James Earl Ray to 99 years’ imprisonment; Charles Manson and Family would be arrested and charged with the Tate killings, but the Green Beret murder trials would be dropped when the C.I.A. forbade its implicated agents to testify. Abe Fortas would resign from the U.S. Supreme Court and be replaced by Warren Burger, whose court (in opposition to President Nixon) would order immediate desegregation of Southern schools and soften the penalties for possession of marijuana; the U.S. Court of Appeals would reverse the 1968 conviction of Dr. Benjamin Spock and his alleged coconspirators; and Judge Julius Hoffman would begin the trial of the Chicago Seven for inciting riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Russian-Chinese border fighting would be “resolved” by talks between Aleksei Kosygin and Chou En-lai, and Chairman Mao would declare the Cultural Revolution accomplished. While the Paris peace talks reached an impasse, the cost to the United States of the Viet Nam War would reach 100 billion dollars, fresh U.S. atrocities would be reported, the draft lottery would begin, the first contingent of American troops would be withdrawn from South Viet Nam, the Defense Department would deny, untruthfully, the presence and activity of U.S. forces in Laos, the student riots, strikes, and building seizures would spread to every major campus in the nation, and a quarter-million demonstrators, the largest such crowd in the 193 years of the Republic, would march in Washington on the occasion of the “Moratorium.” U.S. forces in Spain would practice putting down a hypothetical anti-Franco uprising; U Thant would declare the Mideast to be in a state of war; the British Army would take over the policing of Northern Ireland after a resurgence of warfare between Catholics and Protestants; China would explode thermonuclear test weapons in the atmosphere; the U.S. and Russia would reply with underground thermonuclear explosions of their own, in the Aleutians and Siberia, and begin arms-limitation conferences in Helsinki. President Ayub would resign in Pakistan, Georges Pompidou would succeed Charles de Gaulle in France, Golda Meir the late Levi Eshkol in Israel, and a military junta the deposed president of Bolivia. Nixon would lift the ban on arms sales to Peru (and meet with President Thieu on Midway, and exercise his broader “bugging” rights against political dissenters, and postpone the fall desegregation deadline for Southern schools, and close the Job Corps camps, and visit South Viet Nam, and greet the returning Apollo-11 astronauts aboard the U.S.S. Hornet). Those latter, and their successors in Apollo-12, would have left the first human footprints on the moon and fetched home a number of its rocks to prove it, despite which evidence a great many Americans would half-believe the whole exploit to have been faked by their government and the television networks; the Mariner spacecrafts 6 and 7 would photograph canalless, lifeless Mars; Russia’s Venus 5 and 6 would reach their namesake planet and reveal it also to be devoid of life. The New York State legislature would defeat a liberalized abortion bill. Complete eyes would join hearts and kidneys on the growing list of successfully transplanted human parts. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare would recommend an absolute ban on the use of DDT. Unemployment, inflation, prime-interest, and first-class-postage rates would rise in the United States, the stock market plunge; 900 heroin deaths, mostly of young people, would be reported in New York City; the Netherlands would temporarily shut off public water when U.S. nerve gas accidentally poisoned the Rhine. Dorchester County, Maryland, would celebrate its Tercentenary; fire would melt a wax museum at Niagara Falls, and the American Falls itself would be turned off for engineering surveys. At least six more airliners would be hijacked; Thor Heyerdahl in Ra I would embark upon the Atlantic, along with tropical storms Anna, Blanche, Carol, Debbie, Eve, Francelia, Gerda, et al.; in East Pakistan a child would be swallowed by a python; the National Committee on Violence would describe the 1960’s as one of the most violent decades in United States history, but the French wine-growers association would declare ’69 a vintage year.

But every letter has two times, that of its writing and that of its reading, which may be so separated, even when the post office does its job, that very little of what obtained when the writer wrote will still when the reader reads. And to the units of epistolary fictions yet a third time is added: the actual date of composition, which will not likely correspond to the letterhead date, a function more of plot or form than of history. It is not March 2, 1969: when I began this letter it was October 30, 1973: an inclement Tuesday morning in Baltimore, Maryland. The Viet Nam War was “over”; its peacemakers were honored with the Nobel Prize; the latest Arab-Israeli war, likewise “over,” had preempted our attention, even more so the “energy crisis” it occasioned, and the Watergate scandals and presidential-impeachment moves — from which neither of those other crises perfectly diverted us. The campuses were quiet; the peacetime draft had ended; détente had been declared with Russia and proposed with China — unthinkable in 1969!—but the American defense budget was more enormous than ever. In Northern Ireland the terrorism continued; the generals had taken over in Greece and Chile, and Juan Peron was back in Argentina; Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray were still in jail, joined by Charles Manson and Lieutenant Galley of the My Lai massacre. The Apollo space program was finished; there would not likely be another human being on the moon in this century. We were anticipating the arrival of the newly discovered comet Kohoutek, which promised to be the most spectacular sight in the sky for many decades. Meanwhile the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down all antiabortion laws but retreated from its liberal position on pornography, and the retrials of the Chicago Seven had begun. The prime interest rate was up to 10 %, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, after a bad year, up to 980, first-class postage up to eight cents an ounce. Airport security measures had virtually eliminated skyjacking except by Palestinian terrorists; the “fuel shortage,” in turn, was occasioning the elimination of many airline flights. Plans for the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial were floundering.

Now it’s not 10/30/73 any longer, either. In the time between my first setting down “March 2, 1969” and now, “now” has become January 1974. Nixon won’t go away; neither will the “energy crisis” or inflation-plus-recession or the dreadfulnesses of nations and their ongoing history. The other astronomical flop, Kohoutek, will, to return in 75,000 years, as may we all. By the time I reach Yours Truly…

The plan of LETTERS calls for a second Letter to the Reader at the end of the manuscript, by when what I’ve “now” recorded will seem already as remote as “March 2, 1969.” By the time LETTERS is in print, ditto for what shall be recorded in that final letter. And — to come at last to the last of a letter’s times — by the time your eyes, Reader, review these epistolary fictive a’s-to-z’s, the “United States of America” may be setting about its Tri- or Quadricentennial, or be still floundering through its Bi-, or be a mere memory (may it have become again, in that case, like the first half of one’s life, at least a pleasant memory). Its citizens and the planet’s, not excepting yourself and me, may all be mainly just a few years older. Or perhaps you’re yet to have been conceived, and by the “now” your eyes read now, every person now alive upon the earth will be no longer, most certainly not excepting

Yours truly,

I: The Author to Whom It May Concern. Three concentric dreams of waking.

3/9/69: I woke half tranced, understanding where I was but not at once who, or why I was there, or for how long I’d slept. By the sun — and my watch, when I thought to check it — it was yet midsummer midafternoon, a few hours into Cancer, hotter and hazier than when I’d dozed off. The slack tide had turned, was just commencing its second flow; but the marsh was still in full siesta, breathless. Two turkey buzzards circled high over a stand of loblolly pines across the creek from those in whose steaming shade I lay. The only other sign of life, besides the silent files of spartina grass, was the hum of millions upon millions of insects — assassin flies, arthropods, bees above all, and beetles, dragonflies, mosquitoes — going about their business, which, in the case of one Aedes sollicitans, involved drawing blood from the back of my right hand until I killed her.

The movement woke me further: I recognized that before consulting my wristwatch I’d felt for a pocketwatch — 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 my father’s monogram, HB, similarly scribed before the appropriate Roman numeral IV — a watch which I did not possess, had never possessed, which could not with that monogram be my father’s, which did not so far as I know exist! Reached for it (in the watch pocket of the vest I didn’t wear, didn’t own) with more reflexive a motion than then turned my left wrist. I’d perspired in my sleep, whereinto I’d fallen (whence such locutions in — what year was it?) in midst… in midst of revisiting the Maryland marshes at the midpoint of my life; perspired the more now, more awake, at feeling one foot still in distant time or dreams.

I knew “myself,” come briefly down under Mason and Dixon’s to visit certain cattailed, blue-crabbed, oystered haunts of — aye, there was the rub: I had been going to say “my youth,” but what that term referred to, like dim stars and ghost crabs, I could not resolve when I looked straight at it. And when I looked away — at a periwinkle, say, self-encapsulated on a nearby reed — from my mind’s eye-corner I could just perceive, not one, but several “youths,” all leading — but by different paths, in different ages! — to this point of high ground between two creeklets where I lay, stiff as if I’d slept for twenty decades or centuries instead of minutes. There was the neutral, sleep-wrapped, most familiar youth, neither happy nor unhappy, begun in Gemini 1930, raised up in sunny ignorance through Great Depression, Second War, and small-town Southern public schools. I knew that chap, all right: dreamer of sub-sea-level dreams from the shores of high transmontane lakes; his was the history most contiguous with the hour I’d waked to.

But beside it, like a still-sleeping leg that its wakened twin can recognize, was another history, a prior youth, to whom that pocket-watch and vest and a brave biography belonged. They shared one name’s initial: bee-beta-beth, the Kabbalist’s letter of Creation, whence derived, like life itself from the marsh primordial, both the alphabet and the universe it described by its recombinations. Beyond that, and their confluence in the onstreaming Now, they had little in common, for this youth’s youth was all bravura, intrigue and derring-do, sophistication and disguise. Coeval of the nation in whose founding his father had played a certain role, he had grown up between its two wars of independence, come to disbelieve in both father and fatherland, striven to disunite the but slightly united states — and then (a lurid memory here of bomb burst, rocket glare: not the clearest of illuminations) at the midpoint of his wayward life had seen a different pattern in the past, changed heart again, retreated from fatherland to Mother Marsh in vast perplexity to sort things out, dozed off for a moment in the resinous shade…

Then what was this third, faint-bumbling B, most shadowy of all, but obscured more by mythic leagues of time than by self-effacement or disguise? And not retreated to the midday marsh, but fallen into it as though from heaven, become a blind, lame, vatic figure afloat on the tepid tide, reciting a suspect version of his history, dozing off in midexposition…?

I woke half tranced, understanding where I was but not at once why I was there. Then the dream came clear. It’s Sunday afternoon, March 9, ’69, 157th anniversary of President Madison’s disclosure of the notorious “Henry Letters” to Congress in 1811, cool and cloudy in Buffalo, New York. I have breakfasted early, read through the Sunday Times, taken a restless midafternoon nap — and dreamed once again of waking in the Maryland marshes.

No doubt the dream, above recorded, had been prompted by a recent invitation to visit that state in June for my maiden honorary degree. Its content was clear: my ancient wish to write the comic epic that Ebenezer Cooke, 17th-Century Laureate of Maryland, put aside to write his Sot-Weed Factor, and which I myself put aside for the novel LETTERS: a Marylandiad. Its hero would live the first half of his life in the first three dozen years of the republic (say, 1776–1812) and the second half in its “last” (say, 1940–1976), with a 128-year nap between, during which — unlike Rip Winkle’s case — the country ages but the sleeper doesn’t. Enjoying the celebrated midlife crisis, he wanders alone at midday (make it 21 June 1812 or thereabouts) into the marshes, “devouring his own soul,” etc., dozes off, and wakes as it seems to him a very short while later. Begin perhaps with his waking, half tranced, with that odd sense of an additional past, a double history, one contiguous to “now” and one Revolutionary.

But in this latest dream there was a third…

Relate: Greece is to Rome as Rome is to the U.S.: translatio studii, “westward the course of empire,” “manifest destiny.” Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau. Iliad: Aeneid::Aeneid: Marylandiad, the second an imitation of the first, the third a parody of the second.

Back to LETTERS: notes on Ambrose Mensch’s story about Perseus, Andromeda, Medusa.

Work in: “2nd Revolution” (1812 War called Second War of Independence). Eben Cooke’s Sot-Weed Redivivus (1730). Roman economy slave-based, like early U.S.; Romans “invented” satire (also, especially under Augustus, bureaucracy, civil service, the mercantile middle class, and red tape). Ebenezer Cooke an “Augustan” poet. Rome built on marshes between those seven hills. Crank explanation of Empire’s fall: anopheles mosquito from those marshes. Sleeping sickness. Cooke in Sot-Weed Redivivus advises Marylanders to drain marshes. Philip Freneau traces Indians from Carthaginians; ditto Cooke in The Sot-Weed Factor (1698).

Marshes: associated with both decay and fertility, female genitalia (cf. Freudians on Medusa), death and rebirth, miasma (pestilence, ague, rheumatism, sinusitis), evil, damnation, stagnation (e.g. Styx, Avernus; also Ezekiel 47:11). Behemoth sleeps in cover of reeds (Job 40:11). Marsh ibis sacred to Thoth, inventor of writing. Reed pens and styli; papyri. East Anglia fenlands associated with eccentricity, independent-spiritedness, fertility, dialects, odd customs. “The Marsh King” (Alfred the Great, 848?-900). 12th-Century Chinese story-cycle Shui-liu Chuan: “Men of the Marshes.” Maryland is “Border State”: tidewater marsh also, between land and sea. Irish bog-peat: not only sphagnum but shrub Andromeda.

Back to Perseus.

Great sleepers, arranged alphabetically: Arthur, Barbarossa, Brunhilde, Charlemagne, Francis Drake, Endymion, Epimenides, Finnegan, Herla, Honi the Circle Drawer, John the Divine, Peter Klaus, Lazarus, Mahdi, Merlin, Odin, Ogier the Dane, Oisin, old Rip (fell asleep just before Revolution, woke after), Roderick the Goth, Sebastian of Portugal, the Seven Ephesians, Siegfried, Sleeping Beauty, Tannhauser, William Tell, Thomas of Erceldoune, Wang Chih.

Postscript 3/9/74: I wake half tranced, understanding where I am and then, aha, why I’m here: in Baltimore, whereto I’d not contemplated moving at all in 1969. Once again the fiction has been not autobiographic but mildly prophetic. In 1960, in the draft of a story about Ambrose Mensch, I placed a nonexistent point of land on the south bank of Choptank River just downstream from the bridge at Cambridge, Maryland; in 1962 the Corps of Engineers redredged the ship channel, dumped the spoil where the old East Cambridge seawall was, and voila! Having decided in 1968 that the “Author” character in LETTERS would be offered an honorary doctorate of letters from a Maryland university, I receive in 1969 just such an invitation in the mail. And presuming in 1969 to imagine, in notes for Jerome Bonaparte Bray’s story Bellerophoniad, a “hero” (Bellerophon, slayer of the Chimera) who falls from mythic irreality into the present-day Maryland marshes — I find myself back in the Old Line State.

Just as Eben Cooke put aside his Marylandiad to write The Sot-Weed Factor—and the “editor” of Giles Goat-Boy put aside his novel The Seeker to edit The Revised New Syllabus, and J. Bray’s LILYVAC computer put aside its Concordance to propose the revolutionary novel NOTES—so I put aside, in 1968, in Buffalo, a Marylandiad of my own in favor of the novel LETTERS, whereof Mensch’s Perseid and Bray’s Bellerophoniad were to be tales-within-the-tale. Then, in ’69, ’70, and ’71, I put by LETTERS in pursuit of a new chimera called Chimera: serial novellas about Perseus, Bellerophon, and Scheherazade’s younger sister. Now (having put by Buffalo for Baltimore) it’s back to LETTERS, to history, to “realism”… and to the revisitation of a certain marsh where once I wandered, dozed, dreamed.

But though I have returned to Maryland, I shall not to Cooke’s Marylandiad. One must take care what one dreams. And there are projects whose fit fate is preemption: works meant ever to be put aside for works more pressing; dreams whose true and only dénouement is the dreamer’s waking in the middle, half tranced, understanding where he is but not at once why he’s there.

LETTERS: an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers, each of which imagines himself actual. They will write always in this order: Lady Amherst, Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, A. B. Cook, Jerome Bray, Ambrose Mensch, the Author. Their letters will total 88 (this is the eighth), divided unequally into seven sections according to a certain scheme: see Ambrose Mensch’s model, postscript to Letter 86 (Part S, p. 770). Their several narratives will become one; like waves of a rising tide, the plot will surge forward, recede, surge farther forward, recede less far, et cetera to its climax and dénouement.

On with the story.

N: The Author to Lady Amherst. Politely declining her invitation.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

March 16, 1969

Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)

Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst?):

Not many invitations could please me more, ordinarily, than yours of March 8. Much obliged, indeed.

By coincidence, however, I accepted in February a similar invitation from the main campus of the State University at College Park (it seems to be my year down there), and I feel that two degrees in the same June from the same Border State would border upon redundancy. So I decline, with thanks, and trust that the ominous matters you allude to in your remarkable postscript can be forestalled in some other wise.

Why not award the thing to our mutual acquaintance Ambrose Mensch? He’s an honorable, deserving oddball and a bona fide avant-gardist, whose “career” I’ve followed with interest and sympathy. A true “doctor of letters” (in the Johns Hopkins Medical School sense), he is a tinkerer, an experimenter, a slightly astigmatic visionary, perhaps even a revolutionizer of cures — and patient Literature, as your letter acknowledges, if not terminal, is not as young as she used to be either.

Cordially,

P.S.: “I have made this longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter”: Pascal, Letters provinciates, XVI. Perhaps Mme de Staël was paraphrasing Pascal?

P.P.S.: Do the French not customarily serve the salad after the entrée?

E: The Author to Lady Amherst. A counterinvitation.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

March 23, 1969

Prof. Germaine G. Pitt (Amherst)

Acting Provost, Faculty of Letters

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Dear Professor Pitt (Amherst):

Ever since your letter of March 8, I have been bemused by two coincidences (if that is the word) embodied in it, of a more vertiginous order than the simple coincidence of the College Park invitation, which I had already accepted, and yours from Marshyhope, which I felt obliged therefore to decline in my letter to you of last Sunday.

The first coincidence is that, some months before the earlier invitation — last year, in fact, when I began making notes toward a new novel — I had envisioned just such an invitation to one of its principal characters. Indeed, an early note for the project (undated, but from mid-1968) reads as follows:

A man (A——?) is writing letters to a woman (Z——?). A is “a little past the middle of the road,” but feels that “the story of his life is just beginning,” in medias res. Z is (a) Nymph, (b) Bride, and (c) Crone; also Muse: i.e., Belles Lettres. A is a “Doctor of Letters” (honorary Litt.D.): degree awarded for “contribution to life of literature.” Others allege he’s hastening its demise; would even charge him with malpractice. Etc.

Then arrived in the post the College Park invitation in February and yours in March. I was spooked more by the second than the first, since it came not only from another Maryland university, but from — well, consider this other notebook entry, under the heading “Plot A: Lady____ & the Litt.D.”:

A (British?) belletrist “of a certain age,” she has been the Great Good Friend of sundry distinguished authors, perhaps even the original of certain of their heroines and the inspiration of their novels. Sometimes intimates that she invented their best conceptions, her famous lovers merely transcribing as it were her conceits, fleshing out her ideas — and not always faithfully (i.e., “doctoring” her letters to them). Etc.

This circa September 1968. Then, two weeks ago, your letter, with its extraordinary postscript…

Hence my bemusement. For autobiographical “fiction” I have only disdain; but what’s involved here strikes me less as autobiography than as a muddling of the distinction between Art and Life, a boundary as historically notorious as Mason and Dixon’s line. That life sometimes imitates art is a mere Oscar Wilde-ish curiosity; that it should set about to do so in such unseemly haste that between notes and novel (not to mention between the drafted and the printed page) what had been fiction becomes idle fact, invention history — disconcerting! Especially to a fictionist who, like yours truly, had long since turned his professional back on literary realism in favor of the fabulous irreal, and only in this latest enterprise had projected, not without misgiving, a détente with the realistic tradition. It is as if Reality, a mistress too long ignored, must now settle scores with her errant lover.

So, my dear Lady Amherst: this letter — my second to you, ninth in the old New England Primer—is an In-vi-ta-ti-on which, whether or not you see fit to accept it, I pray you will entertain as considerately as I hope I entertained yours of the 8th instant: Will you consent to be A Character in My Novel? That is, may I — in the manner of novelists back in the heroic period of the genre — make use of my imagination of you (and whatever information about yourself it may suit your discretion to provide in response to certain questions I have in mind to ask you) to “flesh out” that character aforenoted? Just as you, from my side of this funhouse mirror, seem to have plagiarized my imagination in your actual life story…

The request is irregular. For me it is unprecedented — though for all I know it may be routine to an erstwhile friend of Wells, Joyce, Huxley. What I’d like to know is more about your history; your connection with those eminent folk; that “fall” you allude to in your postscript, from such connection to your present circumstances at MSUC; even (as a “lifelong mistress of the arts” you will surely understand) more delicate matters. If I’m going to break another lance with Realism, I mean to go the whole way.

I am tempted to make your acquaintance directly, prevailing upon our mutual friend to do the honors; I’d meant to pay a visit to Dorchester anyhow in June, from College Park. But I recall and understand Henry James’s disinclination to hear too much of an anecdote the heart of which he recognized as a potential story. Moreover, in keeping with my (still vague) notion of the project, I should prefer that our connection be not only strictly verbal, but epistolary. Cf. James’s notebook exclamation: “The correspondences! The correspondences!”

Here’s what I can tell you of that project. For as long as I can remember I’ve been enamored of the old tale-cycles, especially of the frame-tale sort: The Ocean of Story, The Thousand and One Nights, the Pent-, Hept-, and Decamerons. With the help of a research assistant I recently reviewed the corpus of frame-tale literature to see what I could learn from it, and started making notes toward a frame-tale novel. By 1968 I’d decided to use documents instead of told stories: texts-within-texts instead of tales-within-tales. Rereading the early English novelists, I was impressed with their characteristic awareness that they’re writing—that their fictions exist in the form, not of sounds in the ear, but of signs on the page, imitative not of life “directly,” but of its documents — and I considered marrying one venerable narrative tradition to another: the frame-tale and the “documentary” novel. By this time last year I had in mind “an open (love) letter to Whom It May Concern, from Yours Truly.” By April, as grist for what final mill I was still by no means certain; I had half a workbookful of specific formal notes and “incidental felicities”: e.g., “Bit #46,” from Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso: the choirs of the blessed, like sailors in formation on an aircraft-carrier deck or bandsmen at halftime in an American football match, spell out with themselves on the billboard of Heaven DILIGITE IUSTITIAM QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM (“Love justice, [ye] who judge [on] earth”); or #47, an old English hornbook riddle in the Kabbalistic tradition of the Holy Unspeakable Name of God: “AEIOU His Great Name doth Spell;/Here it is known, but is not known in Hell.”

I could go on, and won’t. “The correspondences!” I was ready to begin. All I lacked were — well, characters, theme, plot, action, diction, scene, and format; in short, a story, a way to tell it, and a voice to tell it in!

Now I have a story, at least in rough prospectus, precipitated by this pair of queer coincidences. Or if not a story in Henry James’s sense, at least a narrative method in Scheherazade’s.

But it is unwise to speak much of plans still tentative. Will you be my “Lady A,” my heroine, my creation?

And permit me the honor of being, as in better-lettered times gone by, your faithful

Author