Letters

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L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Despair at Ambrose’s infidelity. Their Fifth Stage.

24 L Street, Dorset Heights

Saturday, 12 July 1969

John,

Lost, aye, I’m lost right enough, and not in any funhouse.

Three nights and days he spent with her down there in deserted “Barataria,” where except in goose-shooting season there is nothing to do but copulate and swat mosquitoes. They did both, did my A. and his Bea — more determinedly, I gather, than successfully — in A. B. Cook’s air-conditioned hunting lodge on the north end of the island, where the only dry ground is and where Reg Prinz’s movie set was and will be. (It’s to be rebuilt in August for redestroying in September: an example yours truly may be doomed to follow.)

Three nights and days! The whole long holiday weekend, whilst I steamed and stewed and reached new lows in Dorset Heights! Late on the Monday (7/7) he returned to me, covered with welts and cross as a bear. Confessed straight off, he did—announced, rather — that his philandering idyll had been no idyll: Couldn’t get it up for her (I’m glad, says I) about half the time (Ah, that hurt, and damn me for crying then and there). Would’ve called it quits even if Bea hadn’t got urgent word from “Monsieur Casteene” about the Doctor’s death.

You will have heard, no doubt: among the 200 pleasure-boaters feared lost in the big Lake Erie storm of 4 July — whilst we-all were making cinematical merry here on the Choptank aboard the O.F.T. II—was the dark proprietor of the Remobilisation Farm. No details yet.

Who cares? Who cares?

Well, Bea, it seems, for one. Anyroad she took the occasion to beat it out of Barataria and back to Fort Erie, leaving crestfallen Ambrose to scratch his own itches.

I gather further (And who cares? I do, God help me!) my prodigal has scrapped his Perseus piece, and there’s a pity. Indeed, while I still don’t know what he wrote to Bea Golden in that famous Unfilmable Sequence of Independence Day, I learn now that what he wrote it on was the verso of his manuscript, which then — like the legendary poet Gunadhya in The Ocean of Story (or Rodolfo in Act I of La Bohème)—he destroyed page by page, giving each to B.G. to read and chuck overboard. That hurts, John: it was… our story, if you know what I mean: Ambrose’s and mine. His notion that Medusa the petrifying Gorgon, Perseus’s snake-haired adversary, might actually have loved him and longed for destruction at his hands; that in the “2nd Cycle” of their connexion, recapitated and restored to her original beauty, she would teach him to love instead of to accomplish by heroical destruction; that by some magic physics of the heart they could become, not stones, but stars, rehearsing endlessly the narrative of their affair — I loved that; I had presumed to see in it the emblem of my trials thus far and a future hope.

Nope. The plan, he acknowledges, is dandy; he has preserved his graphs and charts, may attempt to publish them as is. But he will not after all, at this hour of the world, write…

So. I ought to’ve shown him the door, and did not. We languish here in air-conditioned desperation whilst the peninsula swelters: an odd, dull lull after all the recent action, but hardly a respite, certainly no vacation. Tender and tyrannical at once, vulnerable and volatile, my friend is burdened with something beyond his mother’s dying (which proceeds all too slowly, alas for her), the abandonment of his story, the impending return of Reg Prinz and the resumption (Monday next) of their rivalry — beyond even the set-down of his sexual ego on Bloodsworth Island. I don’t know what it is. My clear feeling — very possibly a desperate delusion — is that his “conquest” of and failure with Bea Golden really did have more to do with me (I mean with us, our unsuccess in the conception way) than with her. But I don’t know. He is a raw nerve now; sore as my heart is, I love and oddly pity him.

Too, we are back to’t. Impotent with her, he is a standing bone with me. And who cares? Well, the pair of us; God knows exactly wherefore. A touch more frequently in this “5th Stage” than in our fanatical 4th (but nothing like our sexy 2nd), we go to’t, to’t, to the crazy end — but not just—of July engenderment. Now I know the pattern, I cannot drop knickers for him without thinking of poor three-timed Magda: with mixed feelings as I fancy Ambrose thinking likewise. Once only I remarked as much: his eyes filled up; I shan’t again.

Anyroad, I am not to forget that we are not merely reenacting; that even were we, with luck this as yet but ill-defined 5th Stage will bring us to the 6th—i.e., to ourselves, to Ambrose and Germaine, not Ambrose and Magda/Jeannine Mack/Magda/Marsha Blank/Magda! Who will I be, I wonder, when, having gone through such protean metamorphoses, I return to my “true” self?

What else is new. Oh, that I seem in for a new couturial outrage. From old steamer trunks and attic cedar closets in the Menschhaus, Ambrose has recovered a virtual wardrobe of 1930-ish ladies’ wear — his then-still-stylish mum’s, I suppose — and…

Yup. That’s how we do’t when we go to’t these days at 24 L. It’s nothing Oedipal, I think (we’re not even sure they’re Andrea’s clothes): rather that, having failed to fertilise me in the costumes first of my present age and then of the presently young, he’ll give me a go in the garb of my own young womanhood and first fertility. And indeed, for all my apprehension that he may carry this new mummery, like the old, out of doors, I confess that intramurally it is not only Ambrose who finds arousing these early Joan Crawfords, late Greta Garbos, middle Marlene Dietrichs, not unreasonably unlike what I wore in Paris when André’s first intromission found its mark, some 350 ovulations past…

I cannot write.

And so I shall begin your Lost in the Funhouse stories. A. says he’s in them. If so, for whom is the funhouse fun? Not, I think, for lost

Germaine

A: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Dorchester County Tercentenary and Mating-Season Sequences. Ambrose’s concussion, and its cause.

24 L, 11 P.M.

19 July 1969

Well, John,

All evidence indicates that our little lull is done and some new storm hard upon us. As I write this (near midnight), our friend Ambrose lies half-conscious in my bed, his circuits just beginning to reconnect after a terrific crack athwart the cranium this noon, which decked and, it seems, mildly concussed him. My first experience of that alarming phenomenon, taken so lightly in our films, on the telly, in our fiction, where folks are regularly and tidily “knocked out,” to waken some minutes or hours later, shake their noggins a time or two, and then On with the story!

I here attest that that is not the way it is. A blow to the head severe enough to cause loss of consciousness (A.‘s, classically, was just above the temple, his left, not far from the famous birthmark), if it does not actually fracture the skull, plays hob with the memory functions for (going on to) half a day at least. One prays that this symptom — and the headache, and the heavy sleeping — will not be accompanied by nausea and vertigo, indications of subdural hematoma and more serious consequences. So far, so good: when he is awake, my dear despot cannot remember the question he put 90 seconds since, or my answer. He smiles, reputs and re-reputs it; I reanswer and re-reanswer. It was that fucker Prinz, wasn’t it? Yes, luv. With the light boom? I think the mike boom, dear. It was Prinz, wasn’t it? No question, luv; and no accident, I fear. With the fucking light boom, right? At the fucking tercentenary? The fucking mike boom, I believe, dear.

Et cetera. Well, it was Reg Prinz — not the Director himself, ever at the camera, but one of his grad-student bullies at the audio boom (at noon today, at Long Wharf, at the opening of the “Dorchester Story” pageant, part of the Dorchester County tercentenary festivities which commenced last night and will continue inexorably through next Sunday) — who smote my man upside the head as if by accident. And this smite, like my Yes-dears, was by way of reply. For it was Ambrose who cast the first stone, as it were, and not unjustifiably, last Monday, in of all places the bell-less belfry of the Tower of Truth. Let me rehearse our week, blow to blow, whilst my inquisitor sleeps.

Prinz and his pals reconvened per schedule in Cambridge last Sunday, the 13th, to begin shooting on the Monday what Ambrose vaguely calls “the Mating Season Sequences.” If he was apprehensive of retaliation for having gone off to Barataria with Bea Golden, Ambrose gave no sign, not even when we heard nothing from the man (as we expected to) on the Sunday evening or the Monday morning. I believe we decided that, after the hiatus of the week prior, Prinz was in no hurry to revive the contest or even his working connexion with my imperious consort, who for his part apparently considered it infra dig to ring up his employer and ask where the action was to take place. After breakfast Ambrose retired to my study to “reconsider the whole script” (maybe to figure out what on earth in your fiction could be described as “the Mating Season Sequences”?), and I spent the morning poolside (in a remarkable vintage-1930 swimsuit — but I’m allowed to wear a muumuu over it) rereading your Funhouse stories.

On them, a word only. A. assures me that you do not yourself take with much seriousness those Death-of-the-Novel or End-of-Letters chaps, but that you do take seriously the climate that takes such questions seriously; you exploit that apocalyptic climate, he maintains, to reinspect the origins of narrative fiction in the oral tradition. Taking that cue, Ambrose himself has undertaken a review of the origins of printed fiction, especially the early conventions of the novel. More anon. To us Britishers, this sort of programme is awfully theoretical, what? Too French by half, and at the same time veddy Amedican. Still and all, I enjoyed the stories — in particular, of course, the “Ambrose” ones. Your Ambrose, needless to say, is not my Ambrose — but then, mine isn’t either!

Over lunch that same last Monday, an agreeable surprise. In honour of the 180th anniversary of Bastille Day (and 152nd of Mme de Staël’s death: R.I.P., poor splendid woman, one year older than I am now!), he and I would climb Schott’s Tower of Truth. Its phallic exterior is complete; the finishing of its interior has been delayed indefinitely on account, ahem, of Grave Structural Defects ever more apparent in the foundation work. Even so, the dedication ceremonies are now definitely scheduled for Founder’s Day, 27 September, seventh anniversary of Harrison Mack’s establishment of Tidewater Tech/ Marshyhope State College/University College/University. And non grata as we are on Redmans Neck, Ambrose had got from a construction foreman — colleague of Peter’s a key to the premises and leave to climb stairs to the top (no lifts yet installed).

I dutifully suggested we take Angela. Touched, Milord thanked me for that thoughtfulness, but declared there was another female going with us instead. Now, John: our autocratic 5th Stage really has been in full noxious flower since I wrote you last, even though (thank God) Bea Golden had not returned from that Farm after the Doctor’s “funeral.” But for all I knew she might be back in town with Prinz, and now I wondered: Was I really expected to… But no, he was joking! My avant-gardist, it seems, has conceived a passion for old Samuel Richardson (the first to speak of the Death of the Novel, it turns out, in a letter to Lady Barbara Montague dated 1758): the third member of our ménage à trois was to be R.‘s Clarissa!

All four volumes, dear? Sure, and a six-pack of National Premium, two beach towels, and our suntan lotion. Ambrose cannot bear reading that endless novel, you understand: he likes hearing me read him the table of contents and Richardson’s chapter summaries.

Chacun à son goût. He was in good humour (not good enough to let me wear my own clothes; he decked me out in a Roaring-Twentyish cotton middy blouse with black silk sailor kerchief, rather fetching actually, Lord knows where he found it); I was in middle month and wondering whether we might manage the Zeus-&-Danaë trick up in that tower, seeing more conventional deposits had so far failed to yield interest. The weather was of course steamy and threatening thundershowers, which the soybean and corn fields needed; on the other hand, below-normal rainfall had kept the mosquito population down. The campus was deserted. We understand that A. B. Cook has already occupied my office — may be there as I write these lines — but he was not in evidence: only a few student groundkeepers and, over by the Media Centre, a van that we recognised as belonging to Prinz’s crew. We sped past, not to be recognised in turn, parked on the far side of Schott’s Folly, and let ourselves quickly through the padlocked cyclone fence into the construction site.

The scene was dead quiet: one could hear the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Maryland flapping in the damp breeze at their staffs a hundred yards off, and a few desultory cicadas. Round about the site were paper sacks of, of all things, Medusa Cement. We were duly amused, but the coincidence prompted, instead of erotic associations with Danaë’s brass tower, a re-remarking by Ambrose that whereas Medusa turned everything into stone, Mensch Masonry (whose cement it was) could be said to turn stone into everything, except money. Indeed, though allegedly cracked as the House of Usher, the stone-masonry base of the tower is handsomely done, in the same random rubble as the brothers’ camera obscura. The rest of the shaft is a rough-finished reinforced concrete eyesore.

We climbed, A. reminiscing about the alphabet-block towers they’d built together as boys: compromises, not always successful, between Peter’s interest in their engineering and Ambrose’s in what they spelled. I went first up the fire stairs, pausing at unglassed windows less to look at the not-much-of-anything than to give Ambrose occasion to “do a verbena,” as was his wont back in sexy April. (Do you know Maupassant’s tale “La Fenêtre,” about the verbena-scented lady who invites her suitor to her country château but will not yield to him? He consoles himself with her chambermaid and, discovering this latter one morning leaning out a turret window — so he supposes, from his position below and behind her — he resolves to surprise her by slipping up the stairs lifting her skirts, and kissing her knickerless derrière. The little prank succeeds; he quickly plants his lover’s kiss; is confounded by the scent there, not of the maid’s familiar odeur naturel, but of her chaste mistress’s perfume! Scandalised, the lady sends him packing; but — ah Guy! ah, France! — years after, as he retells the tale, it seems to the narrator that he can still summon to his moustaches la senteur de verveine…)

Nothing doing.

We attained the top: dusty concrete floor and a sultry view of loblolly pines, parching grass, Marshyhope U., and white crab-boats on the distant creeks. A view (Ambrose declared after one perfunctory conning, and I agree) better mediated by camera obscura than viewed directly. Exam time again: Do you know Gossaert’s 16th-Century Danaë? A winsome, moon-faced teenager half wrapped in open indigo drapery, she perches on tasselled red cushions in a Renaissance campanile, ankles crossed but bare knees parted, and looks up with puckered unsurprise at the shower of gold which rains past the plump little breast that will one day suckle Perseus, onto the folds of her robe, and out of sight between her thighs. So presently perched I (changes changed) on a pair of clean 50-lb. sacks of Medusa, the only unsoiled seat thereabouts. Ambrose likewise, and fetched out… his beer and his Richardson.

It is the final tyranny of tyrants that, when on occasion they behave like decent chaps, we are inordinately grateful. Milord was merry. Roused already (and knees tentatively ajar), I was roused further by his mere friendliness for a change; further still by our rehearsal of Clarissa’s table of contents. Her mother connives at the private correspondence between her and Lovelace… Her expedient to carry on a private correspondence with Miss Howe… A letter from her brother forbidding her to appear in the presence of any of her relations without leave. Her answer. Writes to her mother. Her mother’s answer. Writes to her father. His answer… Her expostulatory letter to her brother and sister. Their answers… Copies of her letters to her two uncles, and of their characteristic answers… An insolent letter from her brother on her writing to Solmes… Observes upon the contents of her seven letters… Her closet searched for papers. All the pens and ink they find taken from her… Substance of her letter to Lovelace… Lays all to the fault of her corresponding with him at first…

Et cetera. These from the mere 99 letters of Volume 1, with yet to come the 438 of the other three volumes! But we never came to them — Clarissa’s protracted rape and even more protracted repining unto death. For if, admixed with Ambrose’s mirth, was professional envy of his great predecessor’s wind (and the stamina of readers in those days), admixed with mine was a complex sympathy for Clarissa Harlowe — yea even unto her employment (Vol. IV, Letter XCVI, Belford to Lovelace) of her coffin for a writing table! I recalled that Clarissa’s “elopement” with Lovelace had been a major event in Mme de Staël’s girlhood, when, as 15-year-old Germaine Necker, she had doted breathlessly upon Richardson’s novels. And now she was dead, as presently Ambrose, André, I, and all must be, the most of us having done little more, in Leonardo’s phrase, than “fill up privies.” Before I knew it I was weeping instead of laughing, there in my antic getup on my cement sacks: half a century old, childless, husbandless, wageless, surely a little cracked (as Schott unkindly alleged), and stuck on Redmans Neck with an unsuccessful writer and petty despot instead of flourishing in Paris or Florence with some Benjamin Constant…

He kissed me, God bless Ambrose for that: a proper loving and consoling buss before he touched between my legs. Then I did go a bit mad: moaned at him to take me as he’d taken Magda in Peter’s cellar a quarter-century ago. Dear God, I wanted to conceive by him, to get something beyond my worn-out self! And by God we tried, on that hard bed of Medusa Portland. Let Danaë do it her way; I’ll get my Perseus with a regular roger! If there’s connexion between the ploughing and the crop… Comes then the golden shower, not a drop wasted on the draperies; surely that should turn the trick, if we’ve one in us to turn; my joy poured out as A. poured in—

Which is why I didn’t hear what he heard. My Zeus sprang off me as if galvanised, snatched up Vol. I and winged it staircaseward with a curse. Now I heard the whirrs and clicketies over there! By the time I got my legs together and my hem pulled down, he had armed himself with the sack of Vols II, III, & IV and, bare-arsed with his spigot still adrip, was whamming in a rage at Reg Prinz, perched there with his hand-held!

Now, of course, I’m indignant at such sneakery. But at the time I was still too busy feeling Zeus’d to the Plimsoll, too surprised at my lover’s shocking leap off me, too marvellous at his fury to muster a proper indignation. How Ambrose did go at him, cursing, swinging good weighty Sam: first at Prinz’s fuzzy head (who till the last possible frame kept the camera running), then at the instrument itself, when he saw Prinz more concerned for it than for his own cranium. Chucking Clarissa, Ambrose fought for that camera — it was strapped to Prinz’s arm — and threatened to smash it and Reggie’s head together if he didn’t expose that film then and there. By george he did it, too, Prinz shrieking like a wired-up bat the while: prised open the case, did Ambrose, clawed out the reel, and flung it like a Frisbee from the tower top before two of Prinz’s graduate-film-workshop types came to their master’s rescue.

You’re bananas, Prinz cries now (the clearest statement I’ve ever heard from him): that was footage! Shove your effing footage, Ambrose replies, I’m done with it. He comes back now for his britches; the three cinéastes withdraw, examining their precious machine for damage and smirking over their shoulders, the two younger ones, and me at my bottomless beau.

So ends the Mating Season Sequence, I presume! Which I might’ve suspected I was set up for, had Ambrose’s outrage not swept all suspicion before it.

And if Reg Prinz’s riposte today hadn’t so gravely upped the ante. Good as his word (What shall we do for money?), Ambrose cut off his connexion with the film company as of that Monday. Inspired perhaps by Richardson as well as by the Battle in the Belfry, he has vowed to commit himself absolutely to the printed word: letters and empty spaces on the page! The whole hot week since, he has rededicated his energies to Perseus, resolved to redraft that piece (and, I daresay, somehow to work Bea Golden into the plot, now he’s been in her knickers). Bastille Day’s humour passed; his obnoxious “5th Stage” behaviour reasserted itself. I spent my week daily visiting his mum in hospital, wishing they could let the poor thing die; Magda more often than not was with me, a real friend now I’m in “her” stage, urging upon me patience and Italian old wives’ advice for getting pregnant. Between sickbed and seedbed (daily follow-ups to the Shower of Gold, here at 24 L), we watched Apollo-11 & Co. lift off for the moon (Magda’s one of those who seriously wonder, to Ambrose’s delight, whether it isn’t All Faked by the Television People) and Dorchester County, with proportionate to-do, make ready for last night’s opening of its nine-day tercentenary celebration.

We imagined Prinz’s crew to be on the margins of that latter action, though what exactly he’s up to these days in the Mating Sequence way, we can’t well tell. Yesterday evening we went down to Long Wharf to witness the opening-night activities: proclamations by the mayor and the county commissioners, tugs-o’-war between such civic organisations as the Citgo Bushwhackers and the Rescue Fire Co.‘s Chimney Sweepers, calliope tapes amplified from the Original Floating Theatre II at pierside — all amiable provincial entertainment, I don’t mean to belittle it. Most especially we approved the new county flag, a buff field bearing the arms of the 4th Earl of Dorset: supported by twin pards rampant, a shield quarterly or and gules with a bend vair, topped by the earl’s coronet, a fleur-de-lys or, and an Estoile argent of eight wavy points. Under all, the charge Aut Nunquam Tentes Aut Perfice (“Finish What You’ve Started,” shall we say), which it pleaseth us to take for our own, vis-à-vis our project of engenderment, and Ambrose for a particular spur to his myth in progress. Sure enough, the filmists were there, footage, footage, though nothing in the mating way was visibly transpiring. With them, if our eyes did not deceive us, was your odd-duck neighbour Jerome Bray, looking very strange even in the costumed crowd. No sign of Bea Golden, to my continuing relief, nor of Marsha Blank, ditto. Ambrose studiously ignored them all. Prinz gave us a long, neutral look through his viewer and turned away. This morning’s program, for us and for the tercentenary, was to have been a presentation, from the stage of the showboat, called Dorchester County in Art & Literature. But we never got aboard, for as we crossed the municipal park we saw Prinz’s crew setting up their light and sound gear beside that of a mobile television news unit from Baltimore. This latter, alas, was interviewing Ms. Golden — just flown in, presumably, from the Farm, and unfortunately fetching in early-19th-century crinolines (1669 or not, the committee had tapped her to dramatise the county’s resistance to Admiral Cockburn’s Chesapeake foraging raids in the War of 1812, so the telly man was explaining to his microphone) — and Ambrose was inclined to Say Hello. Before we could do that, however, I luckily espied (to my true dismay) J. Bray again, on the fringes of the crowd, in earnest conference with, of all people on the planet, Angela!

Magda, Peter, her twin elder cousins — nowhere in sight. What on earth was Angie doing there, with that person? Ambrose literally ran to snatch his daughter away, once I pointed out to him their tête-à-tête. The pair were passing under Prinz’s mike booms as he overtook them, manned by one of those chaps who’d come to their director’s rescue in the tower. Just as Ambrose collared Angie by her T-shirt top (MARYLAND IS FOR CRABS, with a red claw pinching each prominent nipple) and Bray by his — well, cloak — the boom swept ’round and down and caught him a terrific clout upside the head as aforespecified, dropping him cold as a mackerel to the blacktop.

Bray vanished (no mean trick, you’d think, in that drag, but he manages it); Angie set up a caterwaul; the mike boy was all apologies. One of the twins appeared after all, a husky young replica of Peter who’d only gone for ices; Bea Golden broke off her interview but kept a little distance; the Rescue Fire Co. ambulance crew, standing by, came to our rescue, even giving Carl and Angie a lift home via the hospital emergency room. Magda hurried down from the cancer ward upstairs, Peter over from the Lighthouse next door; it was a regular homecoming.

Ambrose was up by then, but groggy: mild concussion, no detectable fracture of the skull. We were instructed to keep an eye out for nausea and vertigo, barring which, sleep and aspirin ought to do the job; we weren’t to be alarmed at (what now pretty scarily began to manifest itself) his temporary circuit-failure. He was discharged. I overrode P. & M.‘s desire to fetch him chez lui for recuperation, but accepted Magda’s help in getting us back to 24 L (Peter’s leg is worse; he no longer drives).

Here we yet abide, sir, still Getting It Together whilst Apollo-11 and Luna-15 zip ’round their moon orbits, and Thor Heyerdahl’s crippled Ra limps on toward Barbados, and the strange news trickles in from Martha’s Vineyard of Senator Edward Kennedy’s (also peculiar) accident. It was that fucker Prinz, right? enquires my woozy master. I daresay, luv, say I. And I do dare so say, though I never saw him and though the mike boom lad (not the light boom, luv) has rung us up twice, in fear of lawsuit no doubt, to ask after his victim’s condition and to swear it was All Accidental.

Bea Golden has phoned too. Somewhat timidly, I am pleased to imagine. No mention, of course, of their Mating Season Sequence down on Bloodsworth Island. Magda reports that Angela reports that the Funny-Looking Man only wanted to read her T-shirt and warn her that insect repellents cause cancer.

Well, John! As the Chappaquiddick people put it, much is yet unclear. Marvellous though Coincidence can be, in life as in Uncle Sam Richardson’s novels, we strongly incline to our Ambrose’s view that it was that fucker Prinz’s doing. With the mike boom, dear. Which gives us to worry that on this front too, once he recollects himself, what my Dorchester darling hath begun, he may resolve to finish.

We pray not: I mean my friend Magda and her pro-tem Doppelgänger, yr faithful

G.

R: Lady Amherst to the Author. The Battle of Niagara. Surgery for Magda. Lady Amherst desperate.

24 L Street

26 July 1969

John,

Ra’s in Bridgetown Harbour, the moon men are back on earth and quarantined aboard the Hornet, young Mary Jo Kopechne’s in her grave, and Teddy Kennedy’s on probation with a suspended driver’s license. Today’s St Anne’s Day, mother of the Virgin, and — Mother of God! — Dorchester County Day, the windup of “our” tercentenary. “Floats,” high school marching bands (the musicians outnumbered by troupes of strange-looking girls twirling batons), volunteer firemen in procession with their shiny machines, the dénouement of “The Dorchester Story” at the municipal baseball park, and the planting there of a time capsule to be opened in 2069: a sort of letter to the future containing all this news. Whose sender, like myself, may not hope for a reply from the addressee.

Today’s also the 194th anniversary of the inauguration of the U.S. Postal Service. Happy birthday, U.S. Mail! The commencement of dog days. The end (as the full Buck Moon approacheth, and with it no doubt my monthly monthlies) of our unfilmed Mating Season Sequence at 24 L. And, 155 years ago, the day after the Battle of Niagara in 1814, also known as the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, our topic for this week’s letter.

That battle (on the Canadian shore of the Niagara River, just below the Falls) was bloody and inconclusive, a sort of stand-off, as was “our” “reenactment” of it yesterday before the cameras. General Jacob Brown’s Americans had crossed the Niagara from Buffalo earlier in the month and captured Fort Erie on 3 July; two days later, led by Winfield Scott, they managed a considerable psychological victory at Chippewa, just above the Falls, by driving back the British regulars with heavy casualties. On 25 July, they sallied forth to Lundy’s Lane and met a regrouped and reinforced British army. From 7 to 11 P.M. the fighting was close and sharp, including hand-to-hand bayonet engagements in the dark; each side suffered nearly 900 casualties, about 30 % of their actively engaged troops! The Americans won the field, but ill-advisedly withdrew to Chippewa and thence (tomorrow) back to Fort Erie, returning the initiative to the British and abandoning their invasion campaign. Both sides claimed victory.

I rehearse all this to remind myself that I was once an historian of sorts, and to put in what perspective I can the confused, distressing events of yesterday. The “real” historian on the scene this week has been our old friend the new Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English at Marshyhope, you know whom, who appeared from Redmans Neck or Barataria, all smiles and mellifluous couplets, to volunteer his services as Reg Prinz’s historical consultant, at least until the company returns (next week) to Niagara. Cook’s idea it was — since Prinz had postponed that return in order to film the D. Co. tercentenary — to kill two birds with one stone by exploiting the “1812” episodes of “The Dorchester Story,” that ongoing nightly pageant at the ball park which tonight attains the present and projects the future. There were all the “extras” one could use, more or less in period costume (the same outfits serve for the Colonial, the Revolutionary, and the 1812 episodes), dramatising the exploits of the Marshyhope Blues versus Joseph Whaland’s Picaroons in 1776 and the depredations of the British fleet in 1813/14; more than willing to extend their props and performances gratis to The Movie. Since it is, anyroad, not the war we’re interested in but its reenactment — in which 1969 and 1812 (and 1669, 1776, and 1976) are tossed together like salad greens — the historical inaccuracies, the thinness of the sets, the amateurishness of the actors, all play into our hands.

Yup: ours again, John. Aut nunquam tentes et cetera, exactly as I feared on Saturday last. As soon as his head cleared (Sunday morning), Ambrose was furious with himself for having abandoned like General Brown the field he’d won on Independence Day: i.e. (and woe is me), B.C., that all too tangible token of his “victory” over Reg Prinz on the O.F.T. II. Bea is, I am to understand, only the Symbol of What’s Being Fought Over (a flesh-and-blood symbol, alas, which can be, which has been, reslept with): the fight is the thing now, the armature of a drama which has clearly outgrown its original subject. Your fiction is at most the occasion of the film these days; perhaps it was never more than that. One would not be surprised if the final editing removed all reference to your works entirely, which are only a sort of serial cues for Prinz and Ambrose to improvise upon and organise their hostilities around. Those hostilities — between “the Director” and “the Author”—are the subject, a filming-within-the-filming, deadly earnest for all they’re in the “script” and despite Ambrose’s being literally on Prinz’s payroll as of Thursday 24th.

That day, aptly, was Commerce & Industry Day in Dorchester (each day of the tercentenary has had a Theme). On the Wednesday, misfortune resmote the family Mensch, from a most unexpected quarter: with Andrea still a-dying in hospital and Peter imprudently putting off his own treatment till she’s done, Magda, poor thing — La Giulianova, l’Abruzzesa, whom I so wrongly feared and now feel such connexion to — having felt abdominal discomforts for a secret while and gone at last, bleeding, for gynecological advice, was clapped straightway into surgery, one wing over from her mum-in-law, and hysterectomised.

Fibroid tumour; patient doing well enough physically, but in indifferent psychological case. Over and above her concern for the family (Peter is not immobilised yet or otherwise helpless; the twins are looking after things), Magda is suffering more than usually from the classic female set-down at the loss of her uterine function. The woman loved not only pregnancy, childbirth, and wet-nursing; she loved menstruation, that monthly reminder that she was an egg bearer, a seed receiver, generator and incubator of fetuses. More than any other woman I know, Magda relished the lunar cycle of her body and spirits: the oestrus and Mittelschmerz of ovulation, the erratic moods and temperature fluctuations of the menstrual onset, the occasional bad cramps and headaches, even the periodic flow itself. She ought to have borne more children. When I called on her after surgery, she wept and kissed me and said, “Now it’s up to you.”

No comment.

Among the effects of this turn of events on Ambrose was a sober review, with his brother, of the family’s finances. All bad news, of course. Indeed, their mother’s only cheer in her cheerless terminality is that at last they need no longer fear insolvency, having achieved it. Mensch Masonry has passed officially into receivership, and precious little there is for the receivers to receive (the status of the Lighthouse is moot: in an ill-advised moment the brothers designated the camera obscura as corporation property, thinking to take tax advantage of its unprofitability; it may therefore be claimed by M. M. Co.‘s creditors). On Commerce & Industry Day Ambrose put Perseus aside once more — surely that chap will ossify before Medusa gets to petrify him! — sought out Prinz (I wasn’t there), and grimly informed me afterward that he was on salary again, “no holds barred.”

Also, that A. B. Cook was waxing heavy on the 1812 business, which — especially in the forepart of August, up your way — is to be coordinated with the “Mating Flight” and “Conception” sequences. He did not wish to speak further of it, though he might very well require my assistance. However—“especially now” and “given our poor showing on the pregnancy front”—I probably ought to look for things to get even worse between us before they get better. It All Depended.

O John: damn the fellow! And myself for merely damning instead of getting shed of him! I did at least tell him — when he said we-all would be “echoing the Battle of Niagara” in the ball park next evening (i.e., yesterday, Military & Veterans Day), and that Bea and Cook and perhaps J. Bray would be involved — that he would have to fight that battle himself, as I was scheduled to spend the P.M. with his ailing family. He… regarded me, and left to “go over the shots” with his confreres.

For my pains, I get a concerned frown from Peter, a dry chuckle from Andrea, and a mild reproof from Magda for attending them instead of—what, for pity’s sake (I ask M. rhetorically)? Playing the vile procuress Mrs Sinclair to Ambrose’s Lovelace and Bea Golden’s Clarissa? Magda does not know the novel. Holding Bea down, then, whilst he climbs her for the cameras? Magda replies, not to my questions but to my condition: When is my period due? Is there yet hope? Due Monday or Tuesday next, I respond, and there’s been no hope from the outset. Meanwhile, what is Ambrose up to out at that ball park?

Why, as best I can piece it together this sore Saturday, he was up to some mad staged replay of that set-to in the tower, reported in my last, which not surprisingly caught Prinz’s and Ambrose’s retrospective fancies in equal measure. “Background footage” only, at the ball park: a certain amount of military bustling about with those handy extras to “echo Lundy’s Lane” whilst the county high school bands play martial airs and the twirlers twirl by way of “pre-spectacle entertainment” before the evening’s installment of The Dorchester Story. Which last, vertiginously, was to deal with the county’s contributions to the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Korean “conflict”! (No mention of Vietnam, too confusing a matter for pageantry.) Then out to Redmans Neck for the Mating Season sequence: the shooting script itself substituted for Clarissa; Bray this time (quite at home in that belfry, I’ll wager) to aid the Author’s assault on the Director, “their common foe,” in hopes of then eliminating the Author in turn and gaining sole sexual access to… my stand-in!

I.e., Bea, in 1930’s costume. Their (simulated) copulation interrupted as ours was on Bastille Day by the Director, who films it with his hand-held and is filmed filming it by the regular camera crew. The Author to succeed as before in destroying that first film (but with Bray’s aid, who I suppose has been hanging by his feet from a rafter, shooting overhead stills) and to retire with his lady in apparent triumph. Whereupon the Director reappears in the empty belfry, surveys without expression the pile of ruined film, reloads his camera, and exits. Lengthy shot of deserted belfry (Where’s Bray?) to remind viewer that Author’s victory is at best ambiguous, since entire scene has been filmed and is being viewed. Got it?

The Battle of Niagara ended before midnight on 25 July 1814. Ambrose came home by dawn’s early light this morning. Late next week, up in Buffalo, in similar juxtaposition to a very minor skirmish there known as the Battle of Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek (2 August 1814), they will replay the mike-boom “accident” of last Friday week: the Director’s Revenge on the Author. Thus the Author informed me this A.M., truculently, at the end of his account of last night’s action.

Never mind Conjockety, I said, and demanded to inspect his penis.

His what?

Yer bloody ’and-’eld, said I. Fetch ’im out!

He did, defiantly, for he knew what I was after, we having remarked together in frisky April how the old Intromitter, when thoroughly applied, will look, even hours later, recognisably Applied. I forwent inspection: his gesture and manner were confession enough. Sick to tears — and angry! — I went at him at last, with the first weapon that came to hand (I was at my desk): a brummagem letter opener marked Souvenir of Niagara Falls, Canada, where in a campy June moment we’d bought it. Nicked his writing hand, too, I did; first blood drawn between us, not counting my four menstruations since the bloke first applied his opener to me in March. Should’ve gone for that instead, made a proper Abelard of him! He caught my wrist then, as men do, and made me drop Niagara Falls; forced me to a chair and held me (I don’t mean lovingly) till despair got the better of my rage and I broke down.

He apologised. Not particularly for having humped Bea Golden again, but for the Inevitable Pain he’s been putting me through in this Stage. To me it seems Evitable! And by way of soothing me — as he leaves just now to fetch Angie to the Dorchester Day Parade — he supposes that my hyperemotionality is premenstrual! I shriek and scrabble after that Souvenir… but he’s out before I can find it, or reach the kitchen for a better blade.

Thus am I reduced to this one, Clarissa Harlowe’s: a decidedly poor substitute for the sword, in this author’s opinion. I do not forgive my lover this new trespass. I do not forgive him this whole 5th Stage, or the 4th before it. Even if (they’re all so “into” the Anniversary thing) his Reign of Terror should end with the French (tomorrow 175 years ago), I find myself conceived — if of nothing else — of an impulse grand as Roderick Random’s: for revenge.

But what would even touch the man? Not to mention sting him, as he’s stung me! Ought I to bed with Reg Prinz? With A. B. Cook? With Peter Mensch? None of them, for their different reasons, would give me a tumble, much less a tumbling. Oh, unfair!

Who’s keeping you company these days, dear Addressee? Have you scores of your own to settle in this line? Shall I make a side trip from the Battle of Conjockety and hand-deliver next Saturday’s letter from your

Germaine?

Y: Lady Amherst to the Author. Odd business in Buffalo.

Scajaquada Motor Inn

Niagara Falls Boulevard

Buffalo, New York 14150

2 August 1969

Near but Distant Neighbour,

“Your Germaine” will post this after all, like its predecessors, instead of delivering it to you herself. Your silence has drawn so many words from this pen — which has still a few to write—’twere pity to break it with conversation.

The Buck Moon filled five days since; no sign yet of my “period.” I do not doubt that what we have here is a mere irregularity for a change, or a mere missed monthly, or that at last I’m putting the old lunations behind me in the natural way, without benefit of hysterectomy, oöphorectomy, salpingectomy. I’m nearly fifty!

But the effect on Ambrose of this delay (together with our set-to last Saturday with that Souvenir; the sobering decline of his mother and brother; perhaps too his sense of what’s about to happen in the Movie) has been marked; was so even before we flew to Buffalo yesterday. Since the morning of the letter opener, for example, he has not to my knowledge “been with” Bea Golden: a lapse of attentions that plainly piques her. He has allowed as how I may wear my own clothes, John: neither the teenybopping or hipsy-potsy costumes of June nor yet the flapper drag of July, but my own clothes! Sensible middle-aged mid-lengths! Admirable Abercrombie’s! Blessed Bonwit’s! Bliss! He has waxed humorous, friendly, even affectionate, as back in March, but without March’s posturing and bluster. Daily, discreetly, he enquires… No, I haven’t, say I, but don’t be so ruddy foolish as to suppose… Of course not, he agrees. Still…

Okay: I like it that his Robespierre’s gone to guillotine at last. Though I believe life to be no more probable in my old womb than Tuesday’s Mariner-6 photographs show it to be on Mars, and though the season’s maiden tropical storm (Lady Anna) is moving our way from the Caribbean, I am much gratified by this serene “developement” and look forward with appropriate interest to learning what the character of the Sixth Stage—our stage! — of our affair will be. (I would be tempted to wonder, with your Menelaus, how Proteus can ever be confidently known to be “himself again, having been all those other things — but a mad experience last night has shown me how.) I still truly love Ambrose, don’t ask me why; daresay I shall even if he comes ’round to loving me, as he most certainly appeared to do from March through May.

Nevertheless, sir, and though my late behaviour argues contrariwise, I am not by disposition a hand puppet, whether it’s Ambrose’s or even André’s hand under my midlengths. Mr Mensch’s apparent abdication of his tyranny has not ipso facto cancelled my resentment of so extended and public a humiliation as mine since spring: the loss of my job, my “self-image,” my self-respect. When in my last I threatened reciprocal infidelity — a rum sort of retaliation, that, and retaliation itself a rum sort of game — I was only half-serious. I.e., I was half-serious! I came back up here with Ambrose because I do still love him; but I did in fact try to ring you up, no doubt with mixed motives, but principally I’m sure with a view to terminating all tyrannies, including this insulting one of our one-way correspondence. I learned among other things that you’ve vacated this city to live year-round in your Chautauqua cottage… whereupon I lost interest in your pursuit, realising I’d prefer after all not to discuss with you what I have at such immoderate length confessed. Hence my salutation.

I even imagined myself ready to kick this habit, my Saturday epistolary “fix,” whatever the withdrawal pains. Then came last night’s dreamlike adventure, which, though I was its victim, I am still far from understanding.

As we have seen, all doors open for the maker of movies. Reg Prinz & Co. had preceded us to Buffalo, and a bit of judicious PR had evidently preceded him. Both local campuses of the state university, I don’t have to tell you, have modest but active departments of film, and I gather the city prides itself generally on its hospitality to new art. A word to the right people that Prinz will be “echoing” the Scajaquada Creek Battle of 1814 has put at his disposal, with attendant fanfare, as much of Delaware Park (through which Scajaquada Creek runs, I learned yesterday, dammed now to form Delaware Park Lake but memorialised by an eponymous expressway) as he needs for as long as he needs it, plus the resources of the flanking institutions: the Erie County Historical Society and the Albright-Knox Museum of Art. Plus more graduate-student volunteer helpers than he can sort out, all eager to improve their credentials, and at least half of them (so it seems to me) stoned out of their American minds.

We were scarcely checked into this unpronounceable motel (accent on the antepenultimate) before being whisked off last evening to a cocktail buffet in the Park Pavilion, hosted by the directors of the institutions aforecited. Hello from a cultural attaché of the mayor. Welcoming statements from the two curators, praising what they took to be our combination, in this Belligerently Antihistorical Decade, of the historical foretime and the avant-garde present, a combination nowhere more aptly symbolised than in the architecture and the collection of the museum beside us: half Greek revival and half front-edge contemporary. Trustees and local patrons of the arts turned out spiffily in evening clothes among the jeans and patches of the with-it young. Whatever justice there may be in the proverbial put-downs of Buffalo, N.Y., I found it agreeable indeed to be back in a genuine city, among what appeared to be genuinely civilised folk: the black-tie crowd and the blue-jean crowd on easy terms; the night balmy; the catering not bad at all; the sweet smell of Cannabis sativa mixed with that of roses, pipe tobacco, and chafing-dish chicken tetrazzini; taped rock music on the pavilion P.A. Add Ambrose’s new mildness, the contrast with Dorset Heights, the being back in my own clothes, even the absence of humidity and mosquitoes — I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Joe Morgan was there! Come over from the Farm as historical consultant (A. B. Cook, it seems, remained behind in Maryland), he was more conventionally dressed than at last sight, but still long-haired, necklaced, somewhat crazed-appearing about the eyes. In the spirit of the evening I was delighted to see him; we hugged hello and had a good talk. Crazed or not, Morgan has still his low-keyed, quick-smiling, intense, but almost boyish authority, once so appealing to his students and colleagues. He has I gather rather taken over the Farm, by his natural leadership, since the Doctor’s death, but we didn’t speak of that. We talked History for a bit, apropos of the occasion, two ex-professionals reminiscing: How a pathetic remnant of the Iroquois League, some 100 warriors, fought on the American side under General Brown in these last engagements on the Niagara Frontier, hoping to retain what was left of their reservations in western New York. How underrated by historians was the influence of anti-British sentiment among French Canadians generally throughout the war, and the particular Anglophobia of wealthy French refugees from the Terror, who like Mme de Staël had bought huge landholdings along Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, but who unlike her had emigrated, raised impressive châteaux in the forests, and after 1814 confidently expected fallen Napoleon to appear among them and establish a sovereign French-Canadian state. Et cetera.

When Ambrose and Bea — separately — joined us, the talk turned to gossip. My lover had been dancing with, of all people, Ms. Merope Bernstein — remember? — who, her bum apparently mended, had come over from the Farm with Morgan and their polyglot comrades: a large black girl, a somewhat sinister-looking Latin, and an echt Manhattan greaser of indeterminate ethnicity. Her quondam stepmother had been dancing with this last, looking alas neither unattractive nor out of place in a boutique redskin outfit — Tuscarora mod? — and came to our table clearly to flirt with Morgan in demonstration of her indifference to us. I paid her no mind. Ambrose merely smiled. Joe indulged her lap-perching and osculatory effusions with mild indifference. Bea soon went off to find her Reggie.

Ms. Bernstein, Ambrose reported, was relieved to find her erstwhile protector Bray nowhere in evidence. She and her colleagues had come armed with unspecified weapons against possible menace from him, whom they regard as a dangerous lunatic and counterrevolutionary. Their attitude gave Ambrose to wonder, temperately, about the physical welfare of his ex-wife, last seen (we recall) on 4 July in Bray’s company aboard the O.F.T. II. Thereby, it turns out, hung a little tale, which discreet Saint Joseph had been going not to tell, as not particularly our business, but now judged it best to:

Seems your ex-protagonist (and Morgan’s old antagonist), creepy Jacob Horner, has conceived some sort of—love? — for Marsha Blank (we laughed at once, derisively; Morgan did not), and in his way was Much Concerned at her failure to reappear at the Farm after Independence Day. Especially when Bea Golden came back from Maryland with the glib report that “Pocahontas” had gone off with Bray to his Lily Dale goat ranch, presumably as Merope Bernstein’s successor, Horner grew distressed.

Ambrose and I are grinning guiltily; the whole business is bizarre! But Bray is a lunatic. Ambrose takes my hand; heart-stirred (yet still resentful) I squeeze his. Now: in the Doctor’s absence, and as part of some larger, ongoing project of his own, Joe Morgan has assumed the role of Jacob Horner’s therapist and spiritual advisor: the Director, as he put it, of a sort of personal “remake.” In this capacity, fast and loose with their text as Reg Prinz with his, he cancelled whatever had been Horner’s therapeutic programme and prescribed instead that he sally forth from the Farm, make his way to Lily Dale, determine whether Marsha is there with Bray and if so whether voluntarily, take whatever action seemed appropriate to that determination, and report back to his therapist.

This Rx, mind, for a chap who has seldom ventured from that peripatetic commune in fifteen years! But — with every hesitation and apprehension in the world, I gather — Horner managed not only to fulfill his quest, but to fetch back the empty Grail herself. Bray wasn’t home (we know he was in Cambridge again by this time, at the Dorchester Tercentenary); Marsha was, in a condition of some dishevelment and mild derangement, but not apparently against her will. She actually returned to Fort Erie with Horner — they expect Bray will be furious to find her gone — and is now (ready, John?) Horner’s woman, so Morgan neutrally declared. She is, however, mysteriously obliged, to Horner’s further distress, to go back to Bray temporarily in mid-August, to finish, in her words, some unfinished business.

You may be sure we are mightily intrigued by this bit of gossip; but Morgan, characteristically, would not deal in details. If Ambrose was curious about his ex, he was free to visit the couple (!) at the Farm. Insofar as anything on those premises is normal, they cohabit and receive guests like any normal couple. Joe himself had been their “dinner guest” only a few nights since, in the common dining hall. They are contemplating marriage!

He would not say more; visibly disapproved of Ambrose’s raucous whoops. “Pocahontas” and Jacob Horner: movable object meets resistible force! Morgan turned the conversation back to “our” film, its apparent theme of echoes and reenactments. 1812 was obviously something of a reenactment of 1776, and he Morgan was more and more inclined to oscillatory hypotheses, both historical and cosmological. But he hoped we all understood that redreaming history, reenacting the past, is a deadly serious, sometimes a seriously deadly business. (He would not elaborate; his eyes got That Look again, that I never saw before he left Marshyhope, vanished from Amherst, and surfaced among the crazies at Fort Erie.) As for our other theme, which “Bibi” Golden had told him of on her return from “Barataria”—the mano a mano between Author and Director, Fiction and Film — Morgan gently scoffed at it, and was supported in his deprecation by the young media types in our conversational vicinity. In their opinion, that was a quarrel between a dinosaur and a dead horse: television, especially the embryonic technology of coaxial-cable television, was the medium that promised to dominate and revolutionise the last quarter of the century.

These young people — Morgan too — were discreetly smoking marijuana laced with hashish, as were numbers of the artsy faculty crowd; at Morgan’s invitation Ambrose and I shared their smoke. In some spirit compounded of dope, curiosity, the residual grudge mentioned above, and who knows what else, I asked “Saint Joe” in Ambrose’s hearing (apropos of Eternal Recurrences), how fared my protean friend “Monsieur Casteene.” Was he still at the Farm now the Doctor was dead, or had he moved the hot center of the Second Revolution back to Castines Hundred, where I had once been party to no trifling reenactment of my own?

Why, declared Morgan (and his eyes were the penetrating sympathetic blue now of my friend’s and employer’s at Marshyhope, not the wigged-out middlescent casualty’s), the chap was somewhere about the pavilion; fact is, he had gone up to his baronial digs for most of July, but was back now at the Remobilisation Farm and had come over to the party with Merry B. and the others. Should we look for him outside?

I would look for him myself, I said, declining also Ambrose’s carefully put offer to assist me. What I really wanted, I declared, was to clear my head. My ex-master considered this declaration for a grave half second, smiled, bade me take care on the stairs (we were in the open upper storey of the pavilion, overlooking the park lake to the front and an extensive rose garden to the rear, towards the floodlit museum). As I left, they were back to the Movie again, Morgan asking what exactly was this Mating Flight sequence Bea had mentioned, and how it related to the skirmish at Conjockety, or Scajaquada Creek. I was tempted to stay for a reply to that one, but I made my way out and down through silky night air to the paved, lamplit, leaf-shadowed lake edge — where, on the first bench under a streetlamp hard by the pavilion, as in a crudely plotted dream, I promptly espied my André!

Not A. B. Cook VI, John. Not any of the various “M. Casteenes” of Fort Erie. André: the André who’d last materialised between acts at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 1967, rendezvoused with me après-theatrically at the Wolpert Hotel, fetched me thence home with him to Castines Hundred, and there — a mating flight indeed — impregnated me with his unerring sperm. It could be no other; it could be… no other. André!

He saw me too, perhaps had done before I saw him, and stood to greet me with two hushed baritone syllables: “Germaine.”

Pipe dream? Then repass the hookah, please! So fine, so gentle, this man; so truly masterful, in the way that made me feel so easily my own again: Germaine Gordon the aspiring writer; familiar of Hesse, Huxley, Mann; acquaintance of Joyce and Stein; scholar; woman! He took my hand. It was the most natural thing in the world to stroll with him along the little lake, out of range of the loudspeakers, and say easily to each other the things one felt to say. E.g., that life goes by, most of it vanity and vexation of spirit; that we understand too late what is truly precious, how we ought to have lived. Yet after all one has survived in this monstrous century, and not fared so ill. The Six Million are dead, the dozens of millions of others; the Second Revolution has not come to pass, any more than the Second Coming. Yet here we walk among the lights and roses, well dressed and fed, fit still and handsome, much vigorous life left in us. Forgive us then our trespasses, as we etc., and never mind all the vast unanswered questions. Surely it was André!

We attained the rose garden, a little open labyrinth of teas and multifloras. The Albright-Knox could have been the Louvre, Scajaquada Creek the Seine, Lincoln Parkway the Champs-Élysées. I wept; my André comforted me, without pointless apologising. That business of Andrew Cook IV’s letters, which I’d refused to play his game with? A baritone chuckle: too ingenious by half, no doubt, all that indirection: occupational hazard in his line of work. We were past two-thirds through the century, doubtless through our lives as well; God knew what form the Revolution would take, and when: maybe it would come to nothing more than two-way telly by 1976! André had in fact lost entire track of our son; was reduced to writing long letters to him which he could not post for want of address. Should he ever discover one, or otherwise locate that young man (he took both my hands; we found a secluded bench; the night was aromatic), Henri Cook Burlingame VII would be straightforwardly apprised of his true parentage and the circumstances of his rearing, let him make of those facts what he would, and urged to put himself in communication, if not with his father, at least with his too-long-suffering mother. Might it come to pass before Guy Fawkes Day next!

It was astonishingly easy, John. Heaven bless whatever chemistry made it so! Was he alone these days? I enquired. André smiled and sighed: Oui et non. He believed I knew of his little arrangement with the Blank woman? That had become quite impossible. He was both relieved and sorry to hear that she had involved herself with the peculiar M. Bray; felt perhaps even sorrier for Jacob Horner for having “rescued” her and — as was said to have been the custom in prerevolutionary China concerning preventers of suicide — thereby assumed lifetime responsibility for her welfare. Himself, he satisfied his needs with whatever lay untroublesomely to hand — I would be amused to hear that the Bernstein girl, for example, had conceived a veritable passion for him, which he saw fit to indulge shrug-shoulderedly whilst deploring her want of personal hygiene — but he had no companion; he was alone, and neither happy nor wretched so to be. But how was it between me and my friend, whose ex-wife had unbecomingly reported about him so many and poisonous things? I was, André was gratified to observe, in my own clothes again: might he take that to mean that Ambrose and I had worked out our difficulties and were happy?

Things had indeed been troubled, I replied, but seemed less so presently. And I loved Ambrose, yes.

Eh bien. And he me?

In his way. As you did, André. My fate.

For some moments we reflected silently in the dark. André bade me excuse him for thirty seconds. It took some doing not to clutch at his jacket sleeve, but I said, “Just now I could almost excuse you these thirty years.” He brushed my forehead with a kiss; stepped into the shadows behind our bench; returned smiling in half a minute or less. Then: Would I take a short drive with him? He had a thing to show me. I smiled and declined. He clucked his tongue. The scent of the roses was preternaturally strong; no doubt the hashish intensified my perceptions. When André put an arm about my shoulders and drew me to him on the bench, I kissed him unhesitatingly, but without passion. His tone changed. He touched me; I responded. Just into the car, he whispered; please? I shook my head, but permitted myself after all to be led off, a proper Clarissa. The drug really was getting to me; the little walk from bench to curb seemed miles.

Even so, I drew back when he opened the door of a small black car. André Castine in a dusty Volkswagen? He was huskily urgent: Who cared where? In the road, in the treetops, in the sky! Firmly now I said no. And he — what a grip! — yes. Really, I would call out! He clapped a hand over my mouth, forced me toward the car like any rapist. I bit his finger; felt at once a tremendous shock from behind (where he now was), as if I’d backed into one of those electric cattle-prods the riot police used to be so fond of. I managed (I think) a single shout.

Dot dot dot.

Hashish plays hob with time! Ambrose and Joe Morgan discovered me on the park bench in the rose garden in less time by far, so it seemed to me, than it had taken to walk the fifty feet from that bench to that car (now gone) with André (ditto). They were of course alarmed to have found me “passed out” (they’d heard no cry; my clothes were intact; I seemed uninjured; no aches or pains, though my head was woozy). Casteene? He had been with them the whole time, in the pavilion; had joined them directly I left to find him, thinking his company not welcome to me since our little difference of June, concerning which he assured Ambrose he bore no grudge. I was okay?

Well, it appeared so, though I felt mighty strange right through. For a particular reason, I did not see fit to tell them then and there what had happened, as best I understood it. I pled the dope; begged to be fetched to our motel at once; was. Then, whilst Ambrose at my insistence showered first, I investigated the clammy sog I’d commenced in the cab to feel between my legs. My clothing, I’ve reported, was in place, underpants included, though now sopping; it even occurred to me, along with the obvious ugly alternative, that my belated menses had arrived after all. But now I discovered (here goes, John) a dime-sized tear or… puncture, smack in the crotch of my knickers, and a greenish discharge unlike anything I’ve leaked hitherto: neither semen nor menstrual flow nor spontaneous abortion nor thrush nor monilia nor cystic discharge nor, for that matter, urine either normal or jaundiced. The old vulva, too, was a touch inflamed and tender. I hid the drawers under trash in the basket, showered, applied my travelling douche. Seeing I wasn’t ill, Ambrose made to make love to me by way of solicitude and reassurance. I demurred, slept like a tot from the dope, awoke this A.M. clearheaded and feeling fine. Then we did make love: no problems; tenderness and “discharge” gone; a great comfort to leak the real thing again. No evidence whatever of Whatever: the whole P.M. a clear but distant dream, a dream.

Well! was I Mickey-Finned and raped? By André Castine in an old Volkswagen? By whom, then, and with what? Could it truly have been a terrific hash dream? (No: I rechecked those drawers. Ugh.) Thank heaven John Schott won’t be reading this letter!

I am damned if I know. I will keep last night to myself — ourselves — at least until I can check out “Monsieur Casteene” across the river, where no doubt our filmage will fetch us in time for the great Fort Erie Assault & Explosion of 15 August 1814. If I actually was raped last night, I must say it was as painless, scarless, hangoverless a business (but for that single shock) as smoking dope, its main consequences one ruined pair of knickers, a powerful curiosity to learn what’s come over my old friend André these days, that he gets his sex by C.I.A. methods… and, even as I speak so lightly, a welling up of tears from what I had believed the long-healed fracture of my heart.

Whew! As I’ve spent the morning abed in the Scajaquada Motor Inn, penning this and shaking my head over last night, the Author and the Director have been prepping Delaware Park for the Conjockety and Mating-Flight shots (with echoes of Long Wharf and that mike boom business), which I myself am to play some role in later in the afternoon or evening, if I feel up to it.

I find, to my surprise, I rather do. Ambrose was truly tender with me this morning: not a word about my going off to look for André, only concern and — well, love. I may never know what hit me last night in that rose garden, but I know I’m anxious about the coming confrontation between my Author and his adversary, especially if Bea Golden has rejoined Prinz and if Ambrose’s only ally, besides myself, is that erratic—

Omigod.

No. And yet…

No!

No more now!

G.

V: Todd Andrews to his father. His Second Dark Night of the Soul. 13 R.

Dorset Hotel

High Street

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

July 11, 1969

Thomas T. Andrews, Dec’d

Plot #1, Municipal Cemetery

Cambridge, Maryland 21613

Old Father,

Very hot, still, and airless where I am. How is it with you? Time itself has gone torpid in Maryland since the solstice; summer limps like one long day, my last, after my last Dark Night.

In an eyeblink this mid-morning — in mid-sentence in mid-committee meeting — the clear message of the three weeks past was delivered to me, with its plain postscript re the future. It’s a message I ought to have got two chapters ago at least, in May: but never better than late, and I’m as buoyed as the Choptank channel by it.

Where were we? That was Jane, of course, on the telephone back in June, calling my bluff. Ah, so I was back from Baltimore early — or hadn’t I gone? In any case, she’d be a bit late for our evening, was tied up at work. And could we take a rain check on the fish? No no, she wasn’t breaking our date; but she’d spent the whole day on an exciting proposal to extend m.e. (remember me, Dad?) into the fast-food-chain business, a real growth venture, wait till I heard; and then she’d happened to learn that Jeannine (Bea Golden) was flying in to open a revival of The Parachute Girl on the O.F.T. II at 8:30. Why didn’t I meet her at her office at six? We’d have a drink somewhere, catch dinner at one of those Awful Colonel Sanders Things to check them out, and then take in the show?

My pause was not strategic. Hurt to the auricles, I’d’ve begged off, but before I could relocate my voice Jane said (in a much less presidential one of her own): I know, Toddy, you wanted to show me the cottage and all. But I’m really into this fast-food thing! Wait till you hear. Maybe after?

Her office, then. Six. I was a dear. No need for me to drive in: she’d send John out with the Continental. Bye. Bye.

There was, in germ, the Message, but I didn’t read it. Among my stillborn preparations I waited with a rye and ginger. Age tinkled my ice (my hands have begun to shake a bit more this year, Dad). To perfect my disappointment, our Author saw fit now to disperse the late-afternoon thunderheads out over the Bay. It was going to be a fine evening.

En route to town I reviewed the hard-crab run with Jane’s chauffeur: still poor in the river, we agreed, but down-county they were getting the big jimmies and the sooks. Not like before, though.

I had been permitted to share the front seat, windows down. Approaching Cambridge, John radioed ahead and was given instructions: he raised the windows, cut in the A.C. to cool the car, and at the me parking lot suggested I move to the rear seat while he fetched Miz Mack. I was to help myself from the bar or wait for him to serve me, whichever. But even as I shifted places and he showed me how to work the backseat bar, a second buzzy message countermanded the first: I must come up and see the layouts for this newest Mack Enterprise; we could have our cocktails right there.

Jane, Jane. Did Love ever arouse you like the passions of Commerce? Another rye and ginger for me (she made a face); the Usual for her. As John mixed and blended (come on, Author: you’ll really have her drink only that Galliano concoction called Golden Dream?!), I was shown how me would send Roy Rogers and Colonel Sanders back where they came from: Maryland fried chicken, Chesapeake Bay fish and chips, oyster(-flavored) fritters — and Crabsicles.

That’s right, Dad. PR wasn’t sure about the spelling yet—Crabsicles looked hard to say, and Crabsickles had the wrong suggestion amidships — but the Basic Concept looked to Jane like a winner, and it had to be good news on the bottom line that to make a crabcake hold together on a popsicle stick you were obliged to use less crabmeat and more Fillers and Binders.

The key, you see — she explained to me over a tub-o’-chicken in a Route 50 outlet named for a former Baltimore Colts football star — was logistics. Where did Sanders’s East Coast outlets get most of their Kentucky Fried? From the big brooders right here on Delmarva Peninsula! Jane’s idea was to buy into that industry and, by raising her own fryers and exploiting me’s existing cold-storage, trucking, and food-processing capacities, lower the unit cost per tub-o’ enough to undersell the other chains in the Middle Atlantic States at least. The Crabsicles and oyster fritters would be low-profit window dressing with high Recognition Value; PR was working up a name for the chain that would sound both salty and southern-fried; something like Colonel Skipjack or Chicken of the Sea. Dive-Inn Belle had been considered and rejected. The idea was to sell the Shore. What did I think of Cap’n Chick?

I thought, I said, that some combination of Galliano and corporate capitalism must be the secret of eternal youth. Also, that a Mack as enterprising as Jane had no need to go to law over Harrison’s estate: a simple four-way out-of-court split among herself, her two children, and Harrison’s Follies (as we’d dubbed them) would give each a half-million before taxes, enough for her “Lord Baltimore” to buy a chunk of Cap’n Chick before it hatched; her passions thus wedded like fried chicken to Crabsicles, that investment would surely quadruple in value ere the Bicentennial, and she could both have her title, her two million, her children’s goodwill, and her oyster(-flavored) fritters, and eat them, so to speak. Finally, that unless she put away her half of our tub-o’-chicken with a celerity more commensurate to that of its preparation and service, we’d miss Jeannine’s entrance.

I was half joking, Dad. And not altogether unbitterly. My feelings were still bruised. Jane’s tirelessness made me tired; the impersonality of her greed depressed me. She would sell the Shore if it were hers to sell, and not entirely for the profit — which, given her existing wealth, would be mainly of trophy value — but for the sake of grand and sharp transaction. Moreover, the Ocean City-goers who jammed the place were watching us with interest, assuming no doubt that so elegant and elegantly chauffeured a lady in a fast-food joint must be part of some jokey ad campaign, and where were the cameras? Nor did that traffic itself, swarming bumper to bumper over that particular nearby bridge, cheer me: the Eastern Shore of Maryland was not Jane’s to sell because it had been sold, resold, oversold already.

But she took my utterance as oracular. Polishing off her drumstick-with-thigh-attached and scolding me for scolding her when I’d scarcely touched mine (she insisted on adding it to John’s tub-o’; after all, we’d paid for it), she pressed to know, en route to Long Wharf, whether I really was inclined to an out-of-court division of Harrison’s estate along those lines. More important, did I truly think Cap’n Chick could achieve a four-to-one stock split in seven years? She’d figured maybe three to one at best by the mid-1970’s, if indeed she capitalized the venture as a semiautonomous subsidiary…

The Original Floating Theatre II. I had hoped after all — so I must infer from my disappointment — for some fertilization of our future from our past. It was, almost, the solstice, anniversary of a certain corner-turning (13 L) aboard the original Original in ’37; a good bit of evening lay yet ahead; nostalgia was the showboat’s stock in trade. I even took Jane’s hand — kept it, rather, after helping her from the cool car into the heated evening. But John returned from the box office with tidings that Miz Golden had had airplane problems (the plot ground, if I remember rightly, of The Parachute Girl) and would not be arriving till tomorrow. The minstrel-show half of the evening would be presented as usual; a medley of silent-film comedies would replace the postintermission drama. The management was offering refunds on advance ticket sales.

Oh Toddy, Jane said. I chose to read her tone as rue for having changed my original plan for the evening, but she may have been merely piqued at this thwarting of hers. We stood about for a bit, deciding. Most patrons seemed to be going aboard anyhow. The taped calliope music on the P.A. was “Bye Bye Blackbird,” but again I didn’t get the Author’s message. Oh well, she left the choice to me. I opted, without enthusiasm, to give the O.F.T. II a try, if only by way of checking out the foundation’s philanthropies. We could always leave.

We did, after half an hour. The theater was having air-conditioning problems. The emcee-interlocutor, a branch-campus drama major by the look of him, was more Cap’n Chic than Captain James Adams, and the civil-rights ruckus was still too recent history to permit any honest revival of blackface comedy. In its place was a pallid liberal “satire” that neither offended nor entertained anyone save the summer-jobbing students who enacted (and had presumably composed) it. Jane’s mind was mercifully elsewhere — on unit costs per Crabsicle, I supposed, or franchise contracts. Mine, though still blind to the obvious, was on that right-hand column of correspondences set forth some letters back, which I’d lost the key to since Polly Lake failed me on June 17. In midst of some plastic levity between the pale surrogates of Bones and Tambo, I touched Jane’s arm to ask her pleasure; she was out of her seat before I could put the question.

John was napping at the wheel; our Author likewise, or he’d have fetched us straight from Long Wharf to Todds Point and 12 R instead of routing us through the next diversion. Jane had, I now learned, been Thinking. About what I’d said at dinner? Mm. Why not wrap up the Whole Estate Thing out of court, and quickly, along some such lines as I’d suggested? Even a three-to-one Cap’n Chick stock appreciation would go far toward compensating for the difference between such a compromise and what she might get for her fiancé by hard-lining it, especially when one considered the reduced legal costs and the advantages of early reinvestment of her share. What’s more, if the will were uncontested she could forget about that blackmail threat, which still distressed her though nothing further had come of it. The nigger in the woodpile, she reckoned (her term, used unabashedly in John’s hearing as we drove into the Second Ward and the diversion now to be recounted), was the willingness of the prime beneficiary to agree to such a division: i.e., the Tidewater Foundation, as represented ultimately by its executive director and counsel. Aha.

But it had been my suggestion in the first place, had it not? She would tell me what: Why didn’t we call on Drew and Yvonne then and there and put the idea to them, absolutely unofficially, just to see how it went down? What a pity Jeannine wasn’t with us too! But if three of the four main interested parties seemed to agree that it sounded at least worth considering further, Jeannine would surely not hold out, didn’t I think? She’d never been troublesome that way. We could wrap it all up and forget about it in time for her, Jane’s, remarriage…

I saw. And for when, pray, was that last-mentioned transaction scheduled? She patted my hand, smiled girlishly: not till fall. You are wondering, Dad, how it is we were driving already into the Second Ward when Jane impulsively decided to visit her son and daughter-in-law. So was I, until that throwaway announcement, like a casual grenade, disoriented my priorities. She and “Lord Baltimore” each had business to wind up before tying the knot, Jane declared. André was right that that “September Song” business was wrong: the less time left to one, the more patient one became about biding it.

Ah, Dad. Never mind the validity of the paradox: that sentiment, so clearly not Jane’s own (who seemed as deaf to Time’s chariots as she was historically amnesiac), stung me to the quick, as unexpected and intimate a revelation of her lover’s reality as that breathtaking blackmail photograph. I was dizzied; wished myself out of there, wished myself—

What Jane wished, as we entered the new federal low-rent housing project on the edge of “Browntown,” where the Drew Macks lived, was that me had been foresighted enough to see Tomorrow Now in 1967 or before, while all the Trouble was going on in the Second Ward. She could’ve bought out the slumlords for a song when Rap Brown had everybody scared, and never mind that fire insurance didn’t cover riot-related incendiarism: arson was cheaper than professional demolition, and she’d’ve been in on the ground floor of the New Reconstruction boondoggle.

“I’m joking,” she explained.

We Stock Liberals are not at ease in the Second Ward, Dad, especially exiting from black-chauffeured Continentals. People watched; I waved wanly to a few I knew. What’s more, Yvonne Mack, smashing as always in her hair-scarf and Nefertiti makeup, was plainly edgy about our visit. The kids were away at camp in the Poconos; Drew was at a Big Meeting elsewhere in the project and wouldn’t be back till Lord knew when. Yvonne is normally hospitable, more so than her husband, but we were offered none of the Tanqueray in clear view on her sideboard, for example. Jane sat without being invited to; I waited to be asked and was not. Yvonne popped up and down, sure that Drew would be sorry he’d missed us. Could she take a message for him? Bye, bye, then.

Well, Jane growled, back in the car. She of course was as at ease in the Second Ward as in the me boardroom, but miffed that Yvonne was learning discourtesy from Drew, and cross that we couldn’t after all just Wrap the Whole Thing Up, Damn It.

Not my night for seeing the nose on my face, Dad: Drew in deep conference on the eve of Marshyhope’s commencement ceremonies, the disruption whereof we’d feared since September last! But I was too preoccupied by now with the incremental deflation of my plan du soir: Cap’n Chick, the O.F.T., Jane’s invocation of her affiancement and of the Cambridge race riots, which put me in mind of my adventure on the New Bridge with Drew and dear brave Polly. I was ready to call it quits — even formed that phrase in my head without hearing what I was telling myself. But now Jane was hungry! Now she was up for a real dinner! At the cottage! Let’s pretend the whole stupid evening hasn’t happened! Let’s start over and do it right this time!

If only she’d not made that last exhortation. But now her girlishness was determined, and her language came straight from the Author: Late as it was, it was not too late to save our evening.

Back out to Todds Point! Bye, bye, John: Mister Andrews will fetch me home! I found myself asking, like a scared adolescent, Was she sure she…

She was sure.

Attend now, Father, my last evening as a late-middle-aged man. I fooled with drinks and charcoal briquettes and rémoulade while Jane ummed and hummed about the place, not so much unimpressed by what I’d preserved, restored, or remodeled as uncertain which was which. No time to bother with the fresh asparagus; it would be rockfish and a simple salad. But I was watching Jane; forgot to oil the fish grill; clapped my brow at the late recognition that my creamy garlic dressing for the salad was redundant, given the rémoulade; neglected to preheat the oven for the French bread; saw Jane, finger at her chin, begin to inspect the bedroom just as it was time to fork the fish.

A debacle. The fish skin burnt to the grill; the splendid animal overbroiled to a flayed, licorice-flavored mush; the sauce unappetizingly curdled; the salad indifferent; the bread doughy; Jane’s airy compliments insulting; her banalities about bachelor cooking particularly silly. I guzzle the wine (its back broken by overchilling) and chew a bread crust, too gloomy either to apologize or to correct her. She stuffs herself, chiding my want of appetite. She is beautiful. My spirits are plummeting. Ten-thirty.

Well, I say, and begin to clear the table. The president of Mack Enterprises takes my arm and purrs a directive: Let ’em soak.

That is how our Author works: having put us exquisitely out of sorts, he then brings to pass our dearest fantasy. Bitterness smote me; Jane’s extraordinary body (zip-zip, Dad: there it was) was a positive affront. I was surly; I was glum — and, of course, absolutely, almost belligerently impotent. Jane Patterson Paulsen Mack: Jane, Jane! So altogether, so impersonally self-willed and — centered, you could not only be “unfaithful” without a qualm, perhaps without even acknowledging to yourself that Infidelity was what was transpiring; you could (I realized to the bowels) even “love” a man and somehow be untouched by your own emotions! Cold as that Appalachian Chablis, I seized the hands that tried to rouse me; my voice came clotted, furious. Did she remember, God damn it? That this was the bedroom she’d strode naked into on the afternoon of August 13, 1932, Virginia Dare’s birthday, to fuck me while Harrison went for ice? Did she remember that we’d been lovers from that day till March of the following year, and again from July 31, 1935 (Pony-Penning Day in Assateague, Va.), till the Dark Night of June 21 or 22, 1937? God damn it, did she not recall that Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden was very possibly my daughter? Had she never understood that — together with certain other, itemizable causes — it was love of her that had brought me, on that last-mentioned calendar date, to an impotence and despair not unlike those I was currently entertaining, thence to a resolve to blow up myself, her, Harrison, Jeannine, and the entire Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera? Finally, finally, did she not bloody understand, as I had come since the spring of this year to understand, that I still loved her desperately — there was the exact adverb — that I still loved her desperately desperately desperately?

Even as I spoke I saw that of course she didn’t, couldn’t so remember, recall, understand. Jane was properly alarmed at my outburst (and offended by my coarse language); I saw her consider how to deal with me. I released her, apologized, told her I’d wait on the porch till she was ready and then drive her home. Her self-possession was at once restored. I wasn’t to be silly: it was late, she was tired; it had been an unfortunate evening, her fault; she should be the one apologizing. Et cetera. Come on, now. As for All That Stuff: of course she remembered, most of it anyhow, at least now I’d reminded her. Really, though, some of it she thought I’d made up over the years, or got from That Novel. I was such a romantic! Most men were, she supposed: certainly Harrison had been, Jeffrey had been, André was. Come on, now. The thing was, not to make a big thing out of it.

Absolutely unironically, Dad, she held my 69-year-old penis in her hand — the penultimate time that instrument shall ever be thus held — as she urged the above.

No sex? Why then, we’d sleep. Wouldn’t be the first time! She winked, Dad; used the bathroom; soon returned in one of my old cotton shirts; voiced her gratification that we weren’t air-conditioned, she much preferred the old-fashioned electric fan; bid me good night.

Our Author’s proclivities notwithstanding, my life’s recycling has not been slavishly mechanical. There was no Polly Lake to fart on PLF Day, 11 R. My previous Dark Night occurred in the Dorset Hotel, not the Todds Point cottage, and my impotence then was as sustained as my despair. A rather worse thing happened now. Under the glass of my desk here in the Dorset is a 69th-birthday card given me last March by Polly: a reproduction of a 1921 advertisement for Arrow shirts. Against a beige background are painted, in the handsome style of such advertisements in that period, a young couple in the cockpit of a sailboat. The vessel itself is invisible but for the highly varnished coaming over which the seated young woman negligently rests her elbows (and against which her companion stands facing her) and the attractively molded tiller on which he leans. Her auburn hair is piled Gibson-girl fashion and bound with a saffron scarf; she wears a beige middy blouse, sleeves rolled above her forearms; she fingers the end of its black neckerchief and smiles at something off their starboard quarter. He regards it too, benignly but more reservedly (her lips are parted; his are not, but his dark hair is, on the left); his black-belted trousers and (Arrow) shirt match her blouse, except for his starched white collar and green figured necktie, and like hers his sleeves are neatly rolled to the elbow. If the craft is under way, it is gently running before the wind, which lifts the forepart of his tie toward her face; but considering the hard angle of the tiller against which he casually leans, I judge it more probable that they’re in a slip (not moored or anchored, given the aft breeze): no sheets, spars, or sails can be seen — neither can any dock lines — and it is unlikely he’d be looking so placidly astern, with neither helmsman nor crew minding any sheets, while coming about. Quite possibly of course the artist was no sailor, or chose not to clutter his illustration with lines, blocks, and cleats, just as he chose not to paint in a background or, for that matter, a deck and topsides. The couple are the thing (particularly, to be sure, their shirts), and he has got them right: they are young, privileged, well-bred and — dressed, easy in the world, sunny, beautiful. They are Jane Mack and Todd Andrews once upon a time.

It is, by the way, a fairly erotic advertisement, Dad: “Jane” wears no bra, and the spread of her elbows thrusts her breasts at me under the middy; the slip of her fingers down that scarf is inches from my trouser fly, plainly pouched in her direction; our legs, out of sight beneath the rounded coaming, must surely be touching, if not intertwined. No wonder the knobbed tiller thrusts up at her from behind me at just hip-height and must be put hard over; no wonder even my necktie will not stay down! It is after all an Arrow shirt, and she its willing target. But there is no vulgar urgency. We have everything, including time; we mildly look away, perhaps at Harrison returning noisily down the dock with extra ice.

Polly sent me that card unmeaningly, I believe, beyond the obvious evocation of my sailing habits. But it was on the date of its receipt, a month after Harrison’s funeral, that Jane stopped by the office and, in a sense, commenced my recycling: indeed, our Author did not scruple to have me literally considering Polly’s card when Jane came in! Now (I mean then, this fateful Friday, out at the cottage) her reappearance from the bathroom in my old tan shirt — with, yes, a contrasting white collar, made fashionable again by the last Roaring Twenties revival — her unbelievably youthful figure even more attractive half-clothed than naked, put me irresistibly in mind of that card. Impotence might have been easier, more soporific: a fit end to a misfired evening, to be slept off. Instead, “Oh, changed his mind, did he?” she said when she noticed me, and briskly lay back, parted her lips, and steered me into her (there’s the final fingering). Half-erect, I ejaculated instantly; tried to keep going for her sake, but slipped out and couldn’t reenter. Anyhow, she wasn’t interested in an orgasm. Her eyes were closed, no doubt from fatigue, it had been a long day; she half smiled, whispered nighty-night, rolled over, and quickly fell asleep.

She slept busily as a child till morning, sometimes snoring. Not so I, on whom now, in the dark, 12 R came blackly down. As unbearably as in 1937—oh, more so, there were 32 more years of it — my emptiness, my unconnection, my grotesqueness came meticulously home, Then, though, I had thought Life devoid of meaning: luxurious, vain projection! Now it was my life, merely — how the boy in that sunny advertisement had misspent his mortal time. The world was what it was, and unbearable. Already by 1921 the first installment of Armageddon was astern. Farther aft lay, for example, the Napoleonic catastrophe, the genocide of native Americans, the wars of religion, the unimaginable great plagues — horror after horror, like dreadful buoys marking a channel to nowhere. Too much! The cottage creaked; the world rolled on, to no purpose. I was old, spent, silly. I was done with.

Towards first light I dozed enough to have a limpid, shattering dream. I was perhaps thirty, leaving “home” for “the office” on a luminous May morning, dressed in the manner of National Geographic advertisements of the time. There was the new electric refrigerator with coils on top; there were the glass quarts of unhomogenized milk on the steps. My black La Salle waited at the curb; my young wife Jane, still in her robe, held our son Drew, two years old at most, rosy and slumbrous in his blue Dr. Dentons. She wanted him to wave good-bye to me, but he was too drowsy: his fingers were in his mouth; his other arm lay loosely behind her neck; he laid his cheek against hers. I kissed them both: Drew smelled of milk and toast; Jane of soap and sleep. The light, the air, were unspeakably tender.

“Bye-bye to Daddy, now. Bye-bye? Bye-bye.”

I awoke a truly old man: shaky, achey, fuddled. Did not at first know where I was, why, with whom. Then I knew, and groaned aloud without intending to. The sound roused Jane, fresh and ready though puffy-faced from her hard sleep. She was shocked: told me I looked like death warmed over; wondered whether I was ill. I could scarcely manage breakfast for shaking; slopped my coffee, cut myself shaving, could barely tie my tie. Head hurt; heart fluttered.

“You must’ve had a bad night!” Jane cried, uncertainly breezy. I started up the car to take us to town and realized I couldn’t drive; Jane had to chauffeur me to the Dorset and call John from there. Marian the desk clerk was visibly startled too: both women urged me to call a doctor and forget about the commencement program that afternoon. I declared a nap was all I needed.

Good-bye then, Jane said. She’d be out of town again for a while. I’d better take care of myself; sleeping pill, maybe. Good-bye, then.

I got up the 28 steps to my room as toilsomely as Captain Osborn Jones used to, lay down fully clothed, and slept till noon. Not a whole lot better. My head was woozy; my face in the mirror astonished me. I looked exhumed; Jane must have felt she was delivering an ancient derelict to the flophouse. I redressed and took a cab out to Redmans Neck to join the foundation trustees on the platform. Drew was missing; everyone else was there, and they all Noticed, asked me jokingly had I been ill. I don’t know what I replied.

As I ought to have foreseen from Drew’s absences, the ceremony was of course disrupted after all. Ambrose Mensch, our first honorary doctor of letters, had evidently conspired with Drew and a number of non-students, as well as the Marshyhope radicals, to stop the show. I don’t believe Germaine Pitt had anything to do with it: she seemed more alarmed than I was, and indignant to the point of tears (she’s been sacked anyhow). I myself was too “strung out,” as the students say, to realize at once what was taking place. His citation read and degree conferred, Mensch launched into an unscheduled, Kurt Schwitters-ish sort of nonsense harangue, not at all scandalous I thought: a rather appropriate sort of inappropriateness, a properly nostalgic impropriety, evocative (to me) of the Dadaists and others who didn’t wear Arrow shirts and sail elegant sailboats back in 1921. Even when Drew and the youngsters began Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minhing and spraying the air with spray guns (to suggest our herbicidal campaigns in Southeast Asia, I presume), I thought them part of the entertainment. Granted, my wits were not quite about me; even so I was surprised to see so lively and harmless a stunt stop the show — and thus, I suppose, deny Drew the best part of his triumph. He himself hardly got into the act; he was still a hundred feet from the microphone when the campus cops nailed him.

And nailed the kids. And Mensch. And even Lady Amherst, at John Schott’s insistence, though I was able to persuade them to let her go before they got hit with a false-arrest suit. I was not able to persuade Schott to resume the ceremonies: he was as certain the Commies had further tricks up their sleeves as I was that they hadn’t, and I suppose he understood (his sort would) that terminating the exercises would magnify the gravity of the disruption and thus justify whatever reprisals he chose to indulge in. I got myself together enough to hitch a ride back into town in a state police car (Patrolman Jimmy Harris, our friend from the New Bridge Incident, q.v., scolded Drew all the way to the courthouse: an educated fellow carrying on like a nutty kid!) to see that everybody got decent bail and that the sheriffs people didn’t rough them up. My excuse to Schott would be that mishandling the arrests or the arrested would blow the college’s prosecution.

Anyhow, the police had learned a few things since the civil-rights years: the shouted obscenities offended but didn’t anger them; they brought charges but cracked no heads. Drew said I looked awful and recommended a macrobiotic diet. Beyond that we had no conversation; he did not thank me for arranging bail (Mensch did, cheerily). I learned that one of the nonlocal demonstrators, by odd coincidence, was Jeannine’s ex-stepdaughter, her second husband’s child. I telephoned Schott’s office to urge him not to take action until we could confer; no one answered. I was too exhausted to trek back out to Redmans Neck. The kids all said thanks and ’bye.

The Message, so long and repeatedly telegraphed, was buzzing at my ears, but not yet intelligibly. I crossed the park to the hotel, thinking vaguely I’d catch another nap and see Jeannine that evening on the O.F.T. II. As it turned out, I slept from four in the afternoon till five the next morning.

For all that, I felt no younger on the Sunday, nor looked less wasted. I seem truly and irrevocably to have moved overnight from middle to old age. I got through to Schott: he’d terminated both Mensch and Pitt, and was determined to revoke Mensch’s doctorate. Three days earlier, I believe, I could have talked him out of those actions; clearly I’d lost authority! I telephoned my sympathy to Lady Amherst, who undeniably was on some wrong track with that Ambrose Mensch (why didn’t she dress her age?), but was surely blameless in this affair. Miserable, she nonetheless thanked me — and hoped I was feeling better! To my surprise, Drew stopped by the room to make sure I was all right; an extraordinary gesture on his part, which at any time in the past many years, until three days since, I’d have tried with my utmost tact and gratitude to make the most of. As it was, I could scarcely register his confession of disillusionment with petty disruption, his shaken but not yet shattered faith in the Second Revolution. The 1960’s were about done with; he himself would soon be 31. It was time, I believe he asserted, for the Movement to escalate from “trashing” to serious demolition; for himself to escalate his struggle against a real pull in him toward Centrism or worse, the gravitation of his age and ancestry. A surprising admission! At once embarrassed to have made it, Drew went on more surlily to predict that if he lived long enough he’d turn into me at best, his father at worst, and that he’d rather die.

Where in the world was I? At least, in my geriatric stupor, I didn’t turn him off with Judicious Sympathy. He fidgeted awhile — a large, handsome, ineluctably wealthy-looking young man no matter what he wore — and then courteously bid me good-bye. Buzz buzz went the Message, no more clear.

Though I daily expected they would, things did not get better. Everyone at the office was concerned; at their insistence, and because I truly was not clearheaded enough to work, I took a week’s leave, then another, thinking that perhaps a bit of a cruise on Osborn Jones would restore me to myself. But I was too dispirited to provision and cast off. What was the point of sailing, of anything, except in 1921, with a beige Arrow shirt and the girl in that middy blouse? I languished out at the cottage with gin, tonic, and aspirin. Jane did not inquire. Others did — even Drew and Yvonne again! — but I didn’t pick up on the opportunity to work something out, somehow, between us, after so many years. That tender, devastating Dark Night dream remained as fresh in my imagination as the morning I’d dreamed of; nothing interested me any longer.

Last Friday, July 4, I bestirred myself enough to drive into town. Jeannine had joined the list of Inquirers After My Welfare and invited me to view the evening’s fireworks from aboard the O.F.T. II, which Reg Prinz had chartered for some sort of combination cast party and filming session. I thought, vaguely, to sound her out on her mother’s proposal to settle the estate contest out of hand and out of court; and I felt more than ever — but vaguely, dully — on the verge of seeing belatedly something obvious to our Author but not to me.

It was a peculiar voyage — I’m not sure whether even my former self would’ve quite comprehended what Prinz and Mensch and Company were up to! — but not a voyage of discovery. I condoled Peter Mensch and wife (he’s bankrupt and unwell, and his mother’s dying, an old flirt I’ve known all my life and even courted briefly in the Nineteen-Teens, before she made a bad marriage to Hector Mensch). I chided his brother — mildly, as it was after all none of my business — for having so inconsiderately embarrassed his good friend Lady Amherst, whose reinstatement I was by no means confident I could effect. He told me, more or less, it was All Right, without telling me how so. I do not greatly like nor much comprehend that fellow! Germaine herself was not there — just as well for her self-respect, since Dr. Mensch seemed in ardent pursuit of Jeannine; whether in earnest or in connection with their experimental movie, I cannot say.

I did not see Jane, either. I apologized to Jeannine for having missed her opening two weeks earlier; she to me for having missed it too, that first night. She wondered politely if I was feeling better; said I looked as if I needed a vacation. There was no opportunity to bring up the will; anyhow it was hard to remain interested. Neither the literal fireworks from Long Wharf nor the figurative ones aboardship (too complicated and obscure a business for me to recount, Dad) illuminated the Message. It thrummed in my head again when Jeannine, at the party’s end — she appeared to be running off somewhere with Ambrose Mensch! — bid me good night in an odd tone that seemed to me to have nothing to do with her promiscuous behavior. But I didn’t quite catch it.

Then today — three Fridays and three dozen pages since 12 R! — the message of that Dark Night dawned on me. John Schott convened a morning meeting of what amounted to an ad hoc executive committee of the college: himself, his new provost Harry Carter, sundry deans, and (for reasons not at all clear and never explained) A. B. Cook the poet, who is to replace Germaine Pitt in September as Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English but who presently has no official connection with the institution. I was there as counsel to the college, and in clearer days would routinely if cordially have challenged the chap’s credentials; but I didn’t care. He inquired, solicitously, Had I been ill? We were met, Schott announced, to review the events of June 22, their implications and consequences. We did so: the disruption, the arrests, his cashiering of Adjunct Professor Mensch, his dropping of criminal charges against Acting Provost Pitt in return for her resignation, his intention to press them against Drew Mack and “the hippies,” and his recommendation to the board of regents of the state university that Mensch’s honorary degree be revoked.

Asked for confirmation, I acknowledged that no rules of the American Association of University Professors or bylaws of the state university had been violated, inasmuch as they did not cover adjunct and visiting professorships. Ms. Pitt’s appointment as acting provost had been unusual in the first place, given her visiting status, and might be argued as de facto regularization of her professorial appointment; but if she really had resigned instead of being fired, she could of course not litigate. Had she, though? I asked. And why, since the college clearly had no case against her? Indeed, I declared (as forcefully as I could in my still-torpid state), it had been my intention to urge once again her reinstatement, the dropping of all charges against the demonstrators, and the recall of “our” recommendation to the regents concerning Mensch’s Litt.D. The 1960’s were winding down; so was our war in Southeast Asia; such demonstrations were not very likely to recur in the coming decade unless our government embarked on another adventurist binge, and inasmuch as (this time) no property damage to the campus or personal injuries were involved, prosecution of the demonstrators, including our founder’s son, seemed to me likely to gain us little more than undesirable publicity. Even as we foregathered, I pointed out, the U.S. Court of Appeals was reversing the conspiracy convictions of Dr. Spock and Messrs. Coffin, Goodman, and Sperber: a sign of the changing climate of public and judiciary opinion.

Schott disagreed. What it was a sign of, in his view, was simply the old liberal Commie-coddling responsible for such conspiracies in the first place. Today was the anniversary, he observed, of the worst of the first series of Cambridge race riots, in 1963, a summer so violent that even the July 4th fireworks had had to be canceled. His point seemed to be that uncompromising prosecution could have spared us the decade, and was still necessary if we were not to carry the sixties into the seventies. The deans did not disagree. Harry Carter, less flaccidly than usual, reminded me (so had my authority waned!) that we had after all pressed no charges against Lady Amherst. There were none to press, said I. He and Schott smiled knowingly at each other.

Cook then, apropos of who knows what, remarked that today was also the anniversary of Alexander Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr on the Hudson palisades at Weehawken. We must be vigilant, gentlemen! And just seven years ago, on 7/11/62, Telstar I had inaugurated the era of satellite communications with a transmission from Maine to England. This very moment, eight Russian vessels were steaming toward Cuba! Who knew, he asked darkly, what seven years hence, the 200th birthday of our republic, would bring? Again I considered questioning his presence in the room. But to my surprise he here came off his patriotic bluster and, with a show of reluctance, agreed that revoking Ambrose Mensch’s degree would prolong the publicity of the late lamentable events; he urged Schott to withdraw his recommendation in that matter. Further, he declared himself gratified to hear that Lady Amherst had not been stigmatized by summary dismissal: no doubt she was under young Mensch’s unfortunate influence; very likely she’d been a party to the disruption; he Cook even understood that the pair were, ah, a couple. But she was, after all, a lady.

Schott’s secretary made an audible, disagreeable hmp. Her employer, with a reproving smile, asked her for The Letter. There were then triumphantly distributed to us photocopies of a document which Schott directed us to read forthwith and return: it could not decently be read aloud, he averred, and ought not to go beyond our meeting room. But it would, he trusted (with a glance at me), put to rest any notion of continuing Professor Pitt on the faculty, and explain both his demand for her resignation and her tendering it without protest.

Well, it was a remarkable letter: more precisely, a 7-page abridgment or reverse bowdlerization of the discarded carbon copy of an 18-page draft of a letter from Germaine Pitt to the author of The Floating Opera and other fictions, with whom she has evidently been in personal, if one-way, correspondence. It was typed on the letterhead of the provost’s office and dated 7 June 1969. It commenced with the outcry John, John, and set forth its writer’s complaints about her tyrannical lover Ambrose Mensch, who among other things obliged her to dress beneath her age and dignity, use narcotics, and forgo contraception (he wants a child by her). The language was candid and British, often witty, the detail intimate, the complaint affecting, the spirit prevailingly good-humored, even brave. I was more touched than scandalized; indeed, my chief surprise was that so admirable a woman would put up with such bullying from so otherwise feckless a fellow, go on about it at such (apparently) unreciprocated length, and foolishly make a copy of her confessions. But the letter itself suggested an explanation: the woman is middle-aged and lonely; she upbraids herself for indulging her lover’s whims; is indeed at a loss to account for her own behavior, of which she vigorously disapproves; finally, she loves the chap despite his misbehavior, in part it seems because he evokes for her an earlier passion, in her young womanhood, for a Frenchman, by whom she bore a child. The letter was unsigned, but no one else in Dorchester County could have written it. My heart went out to Germaine Pitt: lucky, undeserving fellow, that Mensch, whose promiscuity with Jeannine aboard the O.F.T. II irked me now even more in retrospect!

My interest was caught too (should have been even more so, but other scales had not yet fallen from my eyes) by the coincidence that her former lover’s name was André Castine: I recalled, before she invoked, the Castine-Burlingame intrigues in the Sot-Weed Factor novel and the peculiarity of Andrew Burlingame Cook VI’s having a French-Canadian son named Henri Burlingame VII (we met him at Harrison’s funeral, Dad, remember?). I was struck too, of course, by the further coincidence that Jane Mack’s mysterious fiancé was named André: no more meaningful an accident, I suppose, than that Cook’s first name and my last are nearly alike, or that I happen to live on Todds Point, next to Cook Point — we’ve seen how that other Author works! But still… And there were tantalizing implications of some connection between this modern Castine and our Mr. Cook: near the letter’s end, for example, Lady Amherst complains of being variously tormented by “you [i.e., ‘John, John,’ who does not reply to her letters], Ambrose, André, A. B. Cook.” But if that connection was illuminated in the original, it was lost in the abridgment.

The committee were mightily entertained. I was not, and objected as strenuously as I was able both to the distribution of the letter in the first instance and to its abridgment in the second. Schott replied that we were not a judicial body: he had excerpted and put before us evidence of Professor Pitt’s moral turpitude by way of justifying to us his demand for her resignation, a demand he was in fact under no legal obligation to justify. I responded that my objection was moral, not legal, and all the stronger for his being not legally obligated to justify his action. Schott countered — cleverly for him — that his obligation was moral, too. As for the abridgment, Cook now put in, he would attest that it was mainly in the interest of moral — he smiled: Perhaps he should say immoral? — relevance and consideration for our valuable time; but also (and this is why he himself had been shown the “original”) his good friend President Schott had seen fit to delete references to a matter Cook would now reluctantly acknowledge, and which would explain Lady Amherst’s including him among her “tormentors.” One of the novels written by the addressee of the letter involved his, Cook’s, ancestor, the original poet laureate of Maryland, as well as an early New-Frenchman from whom (for example) the town of Castine, Maine, takes its name. Among the regrettable aberrations of Lady Amherst — for whom otherwise Cook professed esteem — was her persuasion that there must therefore be some connection between himself and that former French-Canadian lover of hers. She had, embarrassingly, gone so far as to fancy that his son by the late Mrs. Cook might be her own illegitimate child by that early romance! The missing portions of the letter, then, included her account of an expedition earlier in June to his house in Anne Arundel County, in pursuit of this aberration. Fortunately he had not been at home: his former secretary-housekeeper had reported the visit of a strange Englishwoman who claimed to have urgent business with him. Aware of Lady Amherst’s delusion and its origins, he had avoided her, and she’d not bothered him since.

Schott gruffly declared that he himself never read novels. Neither, said Provost Carter, did he. A great pity, Cook cordially chided: though his own muses were those of poetry and history, he believed that fiction, and in particular the novel, was your great mirror up to life. A dark mirror sometimes, to be sure, in which nevertheless, and whether transfigured or merely disfigured — here he gave me a surprising, meaning wink — we could best recognize our world and ourselves.

Perhaps he meant what I took him to mean by that wink: that he had read the novels in which the Macks and I — and Schott and Carter — are severally “figured.” Or perhaps the wink was no more than a sort of conspiratorial self-irony: “You and I see through these high-minded clichés, eh?” It might even have been a mere tic. But my mind had wandered from poor Germaine Pitt to Jane Mack and the young fellow in the beige Arrow shirt in 1921; from the Floating Opera novel (wherein young “Todd Andrews” sees himself copulating in a mirror) to my experience on Captain Adams’s Original Floating Theatre on June 21 or 22, 1937: my happy resolve (13 L) to blow up the showboat and myself after that dreadful dark night before.

Some things that are perfectly obvious to others aren’t obvious at all to me, “Todd Andrews” remarks somewhere in that novel, and vice versa: hence this chapter; hence this book. OK, Dad: you saw it coming a long way back (let’s presume you’re closer than I to our Author). But it took me now by total, exhilarated surprise, what Cook’s mid-sentence, mid-committee wink disclosed to me; nor can I say now what connects the wink to the revelation, any more than I can say what if anything connects A. B. Cook to André Castine. But there it suddenly, astonishingly, beautifully was: 13 R, not yet in detail, but in clear principle, as plainly as if carved into the conference table.

Well! Too bad, Germaine: nothing I could do for you beyond insisting that those photocopies be destroyed at once (I shredded mine; Cook followed suit; the others were duly shamed by our example); I wish you a better job and a better companion, or better luck with the one you have. Adieu, Jeannine: if you can’t find what you want, may you at least learn what it is you can’t find. Adieu, Drew, less and more my child than your sister is. And bye-bye, I think, dear Jane: belatedly cured of the passion I belatedly recognized, I leave you to “Lord Baltimore” and Cap’n Chick.

Good-bye! Good-bye!

But having been so tardy, now I’m being premature. I shall be seeing you all again. We have business together. Even as “Lord Baltimore” observed, there is no hurry, no hurry, not even to resolve the details of what’s so clear in outline: 13 R.

The threshold once crossed from middle to old age, it is not recrossed: I am still and irrevocably an old man, and the world is what it is. But my energies returned, and my self-possession. My authority with Schott I judged to be impaired for keeps; therefore I called for the sense of the committee on the question of dropping all charges against the demonstrators, declaring in advance my resignation as Marshyhope’s counsel if they chose to proceed. The vote to prosecute was closer than I expected (I’m surprised Schott permitted one; it was strictly advisory), but the ayes — loudly led by Cook and Carter — carried the resolution. I shrugged and bid them cordial good-bye, good-bye.

Back to the office: Ms. Pond & Co. cheered to see me Myself again. I put in a couple hours’ fruitful clearing of my desk, another of yet fruitfuller staring out my window at the oyster-shell pile. Yes, yes!

Then here (Thank you, Marian; I feel better, too), where I thought to reopen at once my Inquiry, then understood I’d better address the old Letter first.

Ahem, Dad: Nothing has intrinsic value! Everything has! Notwithstanding which, bye-bye!

I’ll get back to you. What an Author! But then, what a reader, your slow son

T.

I: Jacob Horner to Jacob Horner. His discovery that he is in love.

7/10/69

TO:

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

FROM:

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

In a sense you Are Jacob Horner, Making Ready to Leave Baltimore in July 1953 at the Doctor’s prescription to be Interviewed by John Schott and Joseph Morgan at Wicomico Teachers College as a Prospective Instructor of English grammar. It is the birthday of John Calvin, Giorgio de Chirico, James III of Scotland, Carl Orff, Camille Pissarro, Marcel Proust, James McNeill Whistler. The Allies are landing in Sicily, Apollo-11 has sprung a leak, Vice-President Fillmore has succeeded Zachary Taylor to the U.S. presidency, the first contingent of U.S. Marines is leaving Viet Nam, Ben Franklin is proposing a Colonial Union modeled after the Iroquois League of Six Nations, the Germans have begun their bombing of Britain and ratified the Versailles Treaty, Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra is swamping again in rough seas and may not make it to Barbados, Korean truce negotiations have begun, the stock market continues its decline, and Woodrow Wilson has presented his League of Nations proposal to the U.S. Senate. But Der Wiedertraum is out of synch, out of focus, perhaps out of control. The world’s turned upside down; you Scarcely Recognize yourself; you Begin To Wonder who’s writing whom, at whose prescription.

Three Thursdays since, when last you Wrote you, the Minstrel Show was on the verge, which in the event turned all our screws. In the Progress and Advice Room, just before it, you Observed to the Doctor that you’d Experienced no Recurrence of Reparalysis since April 2, Casanova’s birthday; nor had you on the other hand Achieved Suicide. You Remarked Further that your Scriptotherapy could not claim the credit, inasmuch as Joe Morgan’s reappearance had inspired both your Immediate Resumption of that therapy and your Later Relapse into the condition it was meant to treat. It Was your Guess that Morgan’s Wiedertraum, despite the Doctor’s misgivings and your own, was the mobilizing factor, if only because it occasioned the reinstitution of these weekly P & A’s.

Et cetera. You Nattered On to fill the time; your mind was Nervously Elsewhere. The Doctor’s too, you Would Have Thought — though he mouthed his dead cigar and regarded you as entomologically as ever. It was his afternoon to fish, but the day, indeed the approaching weekend, looked to be another stormy one, and he was chagrined. Presently he said, as confidently and acidly as ever in 1953: “Merde Homer. Blank attracts blank. You are In Love with Pocahontas. You would be Better Off Paralyzed.”

You were Entirely Startled. Indeed, you Blushed. But you Could Not Deny what till then you’d Not Acknowledged even to yourself: that Ambrose Mensch’s ex, the blonde Medusa who froze even limber Tombo, somehow moved your Heart — if not to Love, at least to a Surprising Sympathy. It Seemed Likely to you, however, that this unlikelihood was in some measure another aspect of Der Wiedertraum: Marsha Blank’s miscasting (as the high school teacher you’d Bedded Cavalierly in Wicomico in 1953) had occasioned your Reviewing both herself and “Peggy Rankin” in a new, more compassionate light. Sixteen years after the fact, you Wished you Had Been Less Cynical with Ms. Rankin; and you Dared Say Pocahontas had her reasons for being bitchy.

Genug, the Doctor ordered: your Balls, such as they were, were your Own, to Lose as you Would, but kindly Spare him the smarmy sympathetics. He did not regard you as Prepared for a Genuine Emotional Engagement — you Recalled perhaps that he’d advised against it in 1953 as well, vis-à-vis the late Rennie Morgan? — but neither did he regard you as Capable of one. If your Feeling for Marsha Blank helped keep you Alive and Mobile, the rest was your Funeral.

Der Wiedertraum itself he still considered dangerous, both to the mobility of its principals and to the security of the Farm, which he did not want jeopardized so near to his retirement. What was more, he didn’t understand the timetable. The novelized version of the original trauma corroborated his own recollection: that Mrs. Morgan’s abortion and death had occurred in late October 1953. Wherefore then “Saint Joe’s” ultimatum that she be redreamed, reborn, by Labor Day, which would fall this year on the 1st of September? More important, whatever Morgan’s dramaturgical calendar, how could the reenactment imaginably have a positive outcome? It was a time bomb, and unless (what the Doctor could not conceive) you Had Some Possible Strategy for defusing it, he was resolved to move it off the premises before it blew.

What Struck you as Odd about this colloquy was that for all his customary hauteur the Doctor appeared, for the first time in your connection, to be consulting you. He was asking your Advice! Moreover, he seemed now not only superannuated but impotent, at least far from omnipotent. It Occurred To you, irrelevantly, that by the rules of B-movie dramaturgy he was as of that moment a dead man. You Were Not Surprised when thunderstorms crashed as if on cue immediately thereafter, and a tornado watch curtailed the evening’s show. That the twisters spun off Lake Erie, not into Ontario, but into New York State across the way (and wrecked specifically the Chautauqua Lake locations that Prinz and Mensch had just done filming) underscored the portent. And if you Did Not Quite Assume — when after the abbreviated entertainment the Doctor declared an end to Der Wiedertraum, gave two weeks’ notice to Casteene, Morgan, and the draft evaders to begone from the Farm or be removed therefrom by the provincial police, and forbade the film company ever to return (Bea Golden excepted, whose family’s patronage was still prized) — that it was his own termination notice the Doctor thus pronounced, it is because you Doubted Fate was such an artless hack.

You Were Not Displeased at his ultimatum, only A Touch Anxious that Morgan might now attempt whatever he had in mind by Independence, rather than by Labor, Day. The prospect of Casteene, Morgan, and the hippies gone, yourself and Marsha Blank still here — not displeasing, not displeasing. But no one was perturbed by the Doctor’s orders; no one made the least motion either to protest or to accede. July 4 came, birthday of Louis Armstrong, Calvin Coolidge, Stephen Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne; with a final muttered warning that They’d better be packing when he got back, the Doctor went fishing. Another tremendous Friday P.M. storm promptly exploded on Lake Erie. Among the 200 Feared Missing thereafter: il vostro dottore, no trace of whose body or boat has as of this writing been found.

You Miss him. A Little.

The Remobilization Farm moves on, under altered management. Tombo X continues as Resident Physician and Chief of Physical Therapy, yourself (who Can Account for nothing) as General Accountant, Monsieur Casteene as Prime Mover — and Saint Joe as Progressor & Advisor, with whom this afternoon, ☌♀☽, you Recommenced your Weekly Interviews, Reviewing your Schedule of Therapies and Der (likewise altered) Wiedertraum.

Suppose — Mister Bones had Inquired of Mister Tambo in effect and in desperation at the Minstrel Show — Rennie Morgan were by some miracle restored to him by 9/1/69: What then? Why, sir, rejoined Mister Bones (while Monsieur Interlocuteur beamed upon us all), the dream will take its course: she will reacquiesce to your Seducements or not, reconceive or not, rechoose abortion or not, et cetera. And why 9/1? Asked Bones. Can it be, added M. Interlocuteur, for the reason that on 31 August 1953—Day 44 or thereabouts of your original Hundred Days — after a month of horseback-riding sessions during which Jacob Horner Learned of Joseph Morgan’s passionate rationalism and Played Devil’s Advocate thereto with hapless Rennie, the two equestrians happened to espy upon return at twilight from their latest session that same Morgan, solo in his study, simultaneously masturbating, picking his nose, and speaking nonsense syllables to his reflection in a mirror? And that that (for her) shocking revelation of her husband’s less than absolute rationality can be said to have led, in the plot of that novel at least, to her initial infidelity on Day 46, Nine/Two/Fifty-three?

Not impossibly, Tambo acknowledged. Not impossibly.

Then why, pressed M.I., is not Nine Two rather than Nine One our deadline? By your own chronological abstract of the novel based upon Mister Bones’s Account of this adulterous connection, nothing happened between said espial and said consummation save Horner’s Quarterly Visit, on Day 45, to the Doctor, to Report his Progress and Receive Advice. N’est-ce pas, Mister Bones?

That is how it is, you Affirmed, in that novel.

And see here, Casteene went on: ought we not to consider, for the edification of Mesdames et Messieurs our audience, such matters as the double paradox of Joseph Morgan’s unreasonable rationalism and Jacob Horner’s reasonable irrationality, which, in that novel at least, surely accounted for their mutual attraction? What of Morgan’s complicity — the term is not too bold! — in his own cuckolding? Eh? I mean his proposing those riding lessons in the first place, to divert his wife with Horner’s Company whilst he completed his dissertation? His deliberate and foolish trial, as it were, of her fidelity? I do not even mention his insistence, when the adultery came to light, that she reenact it, on Nine/Eleven and Nine/Sixteen, to “clarify her motives”—which reenactment may feasibly have led to her impregnation? Eh? Eh?

Those are all matters to be considered, Joe agreed: every one.

It was here, you Believe, that the tornado watch supervened and the Doctor issued his futile directives, before you could Point Out that (in that novel, at least) there was no proof that Rennie ever conceived, by you or Joe or anyone else, that fall! Not that it mattered, morally and ultimately, perhaps; but still. And was it in that abortive Minstrel Show or in this afternoon’s paralyzing knee-to-knee in the P & A Room that your Sixteen-Year Penance was reviewed, from your Voluntary Sterilization to your Hornbook and other Scriptotherapeutic Disciplines? There, there, there was the sticking point, declared your new Advisor; and he would come to explaining why, in time. But not just now. For just now, he and Monsieur Casteene had cause to believe, you had a More Pressing Concern, antitherapeutically distracting beyond doubt, and which too might call for some alteration of Der Wiedertraum’s timetable.

Oh?

You are as Distressed as we are, Horner, that the Doctor is not the only member of our cast of characters who has not been heard from since July Fourth. Yes?

Yes.

You are Nowise Comforted by Bibi’s report, upon her return from Maryland for the Doctor’s memorial service on Monday, that Pocahontas was last seen on the night of Four July aboard the Original Floating Theatre Two on the Choptank River off Cambridge, Maryland, in the close company of your former night-school student and later fellow patient Jerome Bray of Lily Dale, New York, a man of questionable rationality, let us say, as well as obscure motive?

Nowise. If ever you Were a Devil’s Advocate of the Irrational, you Had Not Been for sixteen years. On the contrary: you Had Come Desperately To Prize poor fragile Reason, as precious as it is rare. Especially Confronted with Saint-Joe-the-Mystic, you Passionately Wished yourself what you Could Scarcely Aspire To Be: a barrister of Calm Rationality, as Joe Morgan had once been.

Never mind that. The fact is, Horner, your Distress at Marsha Blank’s disappearance with Mister Bray exceeds mine for the loss of a patient, say, or Casteene’s for the loss or absence of his secretary-plus. Inasmuch as while I tolerated or indulged her, and Casteene made various use of her, you yourself Had Come to Feel love for her. Correct?

Well. You Didn’t Know whether you’d Call it love, exactly.

I’m sure you don’t. However, we will so denominate it: you Love Marsha Blank, Horner, for whatever reasons. You are Concerned Indeed for her whereabouts and welfare, the more so in view of Merry Bernstein’s confused but clearly frightened condition when she came to us in May. Even if you Learned, for example, that Blank is shacking up with Bray at Lily Dale of her own volition and is content to continue doing so, you Would Find that information less painful than none at all, or than information that she was being in some way victimized. Respond, if you Please.

Yes.

That is called caring, Horner. We will not split hairs about terminology: you Care for the woman, a rare if not quite unprecedented emotion for you. Now: today is July Tenth, almost a week since Blank’s disappearance. Our schedule for Der Wiedertraum calls for you to “Leave Baltimore” on the Nineteenth and Proceed To “Wicomico Teachers College” for a Job Interview with “Joseph Morgan” and others, following which you were to Go To “Ocean City,” Pick Up a fellow English teacher named “Peggy Rankin,” Engage In Sexual Intercourse with her in “a local motel,” et cetera. My prescription, instead of that, is this: until the Nineteenth you are to Do Nothing. On the Nineteenth, if we have heard nothing from Marsha Blank to contraindicate, you will Leave the Farm, Horner. On your Own! You will Make your Way from here, not to Wicomico, Maryland, but to Lily Dale, New York, thence wherever else you Deem Likely, to Find and Ascertain the circumstances of the woman you Care For.

But.

Having so Found and Ascertained, you will Return and Report, with or without Ms. Blank, depending. In time, we hope, for the next major episode of Der Wiedertraum: your Dinner With Rennie And Me on July 23, 1953, at which I propose that Rennie give you riding lessons in August while I complete my doctoral dissertation. But in no case later than August 1, when Prinz’s company will return to the Niagara Frontier for further shooting.

Entendu? asked Monsieur Casteene, who as Prime Mover comes and goes as he pleases, even into the Progress and Advice Room.

You Pointed Out that though you Had A General Idea of Lily Dale’s location (from the Farm’s having been situated there for the decade 1956-65), you Had Not Been farther than a kilometer or two from the Farm, wherever its location, on your Own, since 1953. They turned to each other and began to speak of other things. It is impossible to be at ease in the Progress and Advice Room; but it is not easy elsewhere, either. Your Mind began to wander; your Eyes to unfocus. Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, etc.

Presently Morgan re-regarded you — their conversation had, it may be, reached some confidential matter — and said Go Write It All Down now, Horner. You’re good at that. Another letter to yourself. Go.

~ ~ ~

S: A. B. Cook VI to his son. The first of A. B. Cook IV’s “posthumous” letters summarized: the deaths of Joel Barlow and Tecumseh.

A. B. Cook VI

“Barataria”

Bloodsworth Island, Md.

July 9, 1969

My dear son,

So: after five months’ silence, your laconic message — undated, no return address — from which, as from your fifth-month stirring in your mother’s womb, I infer that you are alive, or were when you wrote. Further, from the postmark, that you are in Quebec, or were when your note was mailed. Finally, from your curt questions, that you have somehow acquired and read your great-great-great-grandfather’s four letters to his unborn heirs.

Not very graciously, you ask whether those letters are authentic. How am I to reply, when (a) you do not mention which texts you read or how you came by them (the originals, authentic indeed, are in my possession, awaiting your firsthand examination; I have copied them only twice: once for a certain historian, again for a certain novelist; we shall see which you saw), and (b) you do not give me a return address? I must hope that this latter omission means that you’re en route to Maryland to reput your queries in person — and less brusquely. Meanwhile, like Andrew Cook IV in 1812, I am too full of things to say to you to await your arrival; I must address you as it were in utero and begin to explain not only our ancestor’s “prenatal” letters to Henry and Henrietta Burlingame V but also his “posthumous” epistles to his “widow” (Andrée Castine II), which neither that historian nor that novelist has yet seen. May you interrupt me, here at our family’s second seat — close and breathless this time of year as the womb itself, and as humid, and as saline: a better season for Castines Hundred! — before I end this paragraph, this letter…

At least, before I shall have indited this series of letters, my second such since we saw each other last on Redmans Neck in February, at Harrison Mack’s funeral.

Dear Henry: The undisguised, unbecoming suspicion of your note prompts me to rebegin with a confession. A.C. IV’s four letters are genuine; my transcriptions of them — first for Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, whom you may remember from that funeral, later for the author of The Sot-Weed Factor, a historical novel, with whom I am collaborating on a new project — are faithful. But my motive for providing those two with copies of the letters was, while I hope defensible, not without a measure of guile. So be it: the originals await you. Lady A. and I have no further business. (Mr. B. and I do: was it he whose path somehow crossed yours, and who showed you what I neither granted nor explicitly denied him permission to share? I should like to know. Indeed, as I plan to send him summaries of these “posthumous” letters too, I here ask him directly: Are you, sir, in some sort of correspondence with my son, Henry Burlingame VII? If you sent him the four “prenatal” epistles, will you kindly forward this as well, and the ones perhaps to follow? And tell me where he is!)

Revelation of the Pattern, Henry: that was to be the first stage of your conversion of my cause. As it has been revealed to you willy-nilly, by whatever agency, I attach a copy of my letter of June 18 last to the aforementioned author, summarizing the consequences — rather, the pitiful inconsequence! — of its revelation to Andrew Cook IV, and of his revelation of it to his heirs. I pray you pause and review that letter now. All the man wanted, Henry, was to clear the generational decks: better, to unstack the deck of History and deal “Henry or Henrietta” a free hand. Weep with me for the Cooks and Burlingames!

And having wept, let us proceed — straightforwardly, sans ruse or stratagem — to the second stage of your conversion. No need to rehearse to you, of all people, what our Revolution is about, or wherein lies its peculiarly revolutionary character: I know you know it intimately well, and I well know you oppose it utterly. But I know too that while it may well come to pass without your aid — even despite your best efforts to thwart it — I have small interest in its realization, the consummation of our history, if you are not its Consummator-in-Chief.

My son, I love you. You are 29, about to commence your second “Saturnian revolution.” You approach that point—“nel mezzo del cammin,” etc. — where many a journeyer before you has strayed right off the map, to where (Homer tells us) “East and West mean nothing,” nor any other opposites. What follows is propaganda, meant to win you to me. How franker can I be? But it is as loving propaganda as ever was penned. I do not expect you to take this letter on faith: you are a Burlingame! But read it, read it — and come to Bloodsworth Island for confirmation!

Read what? (I stall. I dawdle. Why do you not appear in midst of this parenthesis, as you have more than once astonished me by appearing, without sound or apparent vehicle, as if materialized from ether, with your mother’s eyes, your mother’s accent?) Why, read my digest of my decipherment of the first of Andrew Cook IV’s “posthumous” letters: three removes from an original (before me) whose author’s own wife would not accept it as bona fide!

Read on. I said decipherment. Andrew Cook IV was reported killed by an errant Congreve rocket just before dawn on September 14, 1814, during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor. The five letters which arrived at Castines Hundred over his initials in the seven years thereafter were all in what their author himself refers to — in code — as “the simple family cipher.” (I exclude a sixth letter, the 1827 one from “Ebenezer Burling” of Richmond to Henry and Henrietta V, inviting them to join their father in Baltimore; it is in as plain English as this.) The code is simple, by cryptological standards: a systematic anagrammatizing of individual words, usually by mere inversion, followed by the substitution of numbers and other symbols for alphabetical letters. The phrase Drolls & dreamers, for example (which opens the first letter) is “scrambled” into SLLORD & SREMAERD and ciphered)00‡(†&)(8958(†. With a little practice, one can read and write it readily as English. Omit the first step and you have the code cracked by William Legrand in Edgar Poe’s story The Gold Bug (1843): a coincidence I cannot explain beyond observing that young Poe was “Ebenezer Burling’s” traveling companion in 1827 and that he met the Burlingame twins in Baltimore five years later.

Surely Andrée Castine knew this code. Her apparent refusal to decipher it (or to acknowledge her decipherment) argues that she regarded her husband’s final departure from Castines Hundred in 1812 as an abandonment. She did not disclose these ciphered epistles to the twins in 1825, on their thirteenth birthday, when she disclosed to them the four “prenatal” letters; neither, on the other hand, did she destroy them. Henry and Henrietta themselves, characteristically, professed only mild surprise and equally mild curiosity when “their” son, Andrew Cook V, turned the documents up in the library of Castines Hundred in the 1890’s; if they recognized the cipher, they chose not to acknowledge the fact.

That Andrew, my grandfather, was by his own testimony an able counterfeiter but no cryptanalyst, beyond his telegrapher’s Morse: see my account of him in the letter to B., attached. Interestingly, he seems never to have mentioned the coded letters to my father, nor did my father to me. It was my mother (Andrée III) from whom I first heard of them, just after my father’s death at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Among Mother’s gifts was a prodigious memory for dates: she remarked, in her grief, that my father had been killed on the 27th anniversary of the Bolshevists’ murder of the Romanovs at Ekaterinburg, which she had deplored despite her own bolshevism, and the 130th of my ancestor’s “second posthumous letter in the great code.” She spoke distractedly and in French; I could not imagine what she meant by “lettres posthumes” or “le grand chiffre,” and I was at the time too bereft myself — and too busy in the immediate postwar years — to inquire. During her own untimely dying in 1953 (cervical cancer), she alluded to them again, this time even more cryptically, so to speak, as “le chiffre le grand.”

1953, Henry, was the mezzo of my own cammin, a road I shall retrace in another letter. True to the family Pattern — of which I was not yet aware — I spent that orphan winter in the library of Castines Hundred, executing Mother’s estate, redefining for myself the Second Revolution, and, in both connections, reviewing like my ancestor before me the archives of our line. I did not then discover (would I had!) the four “prenatal” letters of 1812. I did find what I would come to understand, in the spring, here on Bloodsworth Island, to be les cinq lettres posthumes of Andrew Cook IV, written in what I instantly recognized as resembling “Captain Kidd’s” code in The Gold Bug: Legrand’s cipher!

After a few false starts (SLLORD looked Welsh to me, SREMAERD vaguely Gaelic; I knew neither tongue) I saw the inversion device and set about deciphering and transcribing the first letter. After half a dozen pages I could almost “sight-read” the text aloud. And indeed, as I began to comprehend what I had discovered — not so simple a matter for one who had not first read, as you have, the “prenatal” letters! — I put by my transcribing, read straight to the end… and changed the course of my life.

As shall be told. But to the letters! I found the five to be divisible into a group of two dealing with their author’s adventures in the 1812 War, another group of three dealing with his efforts in behalf of exiled Bonaparte and the Second Revolution. The first two are dated a year and one week apart: July 9, 1814, and July 16, 1815. The second three, oddly, are also dated a week apart, but over a period of six years: August 6, 1815; August 13, 1820; and August 20, 1821. Nothing in the letters accounts for this curious sequence, which I therefore presume to be coincidental, or conformable to some larger pattern unknown to their author. The additional coincidence of your note’s arriving this morning—of all mornings on the calendar! — reminds me of what another has called the Anniversary View of History; and while I don’t yet know what one is to do with such coincidences (beyond tisking one’s tongue), it will be convenient for me not to resist so insistent a pattern. Unless therefore, as I profoundly hope, you interrupt me by appearing and demanding the originals, I will summarize for you les lettres posthumes over the coming weeks on the anniversaries of their inditing, and (poor second choice!) post them to you when you deign to give me your address.

Some similar constraint must have obtained in the case of the first of our ancestor’s letters, the date of whose composition you will have remarked to be not “posthumous” at all, but a full two months and more before the British attack on Baltimore. Yet the annals of Castines Hundred (in this case, a memoir of Andrew Cook V, my grandfather) declare that no word from Andrew Cook IV reached there until well after the news of his death at Fort McHenry. The explanation is that the letter headed Off Bermuda, July 9, 1814 has a brief postscript dated Fort Bowyer, Mobile Bay, February 1815, in which the writer explains, not altogether convincingly, why it has taken him nearly two years to write to the wife he said au revoir to in 1812, and (what I pray may not be the fate of this) another seven months to mail the letter!

Drolls & dreamers that we are, he begins, we fancy that we can undo what we fancy we have done. He had left Andrée and the newborn twins early in June 1812, with the object of hurrying (by the standards of the age) to aid Joel Barlow’s negotiations with Napoleon: the same he had previously tried to obstruct. Thoroughbred Cook/Burlingame that he is, he decides that the most effective, perhaps even the swiftest, course is not to take ship for France directly, but to rush first to Washington and expose to President Madison or Secretary Monroe the fraudulent nature of the Henry Letters, urging them additionally to negotiate in person with Tecumseh and to dispatch himself by fast frigate to Paris as a special diplomatic aide to Barlow. To our modern ears the mission sounds absurd; but this is 1812 (the numerical equivalent, I note, of AHAB), when our high elected officers were almost bizarrely accessible, and such white whales as this of Andrew’s were occasionally harpooned. No matter: Joel Barlow has already reported from Paris that the “Comte de Crillon” is an impostor; the Henry Letters, authentic or not, have done their bit to feed the Hawks; Cook reaches the capital on the very day (June 18) that Madison signs the Declaration of War passed by the Congress on the day before.

He is dismayed. He dares not permit himself to wonder (so he wonders plainly on the page!) whether a fortnight’s-shorter pregnancy at Castines Hundred might have aborted the War of 1812. The War Department, he learns, has already ordered General Hull to invade Canada from Detroit; incredibly, the orders have been posted to Hull in Frenchtown by ordinary mail! Cook knows that Tecumseh and General Brock will hear the news at least a week earlier, via the network of John Jacob Astor’s voyageurs, which Cook himself has organized. He considers intercepting the mail, forging counterorders to Hull; he considers on the contrary sending counterinformation through the fur trappers to Brock. Shall he rush to aid Tecumseh? Shall he promote the secession of New England, the defeat of Madison in the coming election? Shall he sail for France after all and help Barlow juggle the delicate balance of international relations? (Still annoyed at Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan decrees, the Congress came within a few votes of declaring war on France and England together; only Barlow’s assurances to Madison — that a treaty indemnifying U.S. shipowners for their French losses is forthcoming — has made England the sole enemy. The British cabinet, in turn, are confident that America will revoke its declaration of war when news arrives that the Orders in Council have been repealed; perhaps even now it is not too late…) Or shall he do none of these, but return to Castines Hundred and be the first father in our family to parent what he sired?

He cannot decide. To clear his head he crosses the Chesapeake, first to Cook’s Point at the mouth of the Choptank, then hither to Bloodsworth Island, with the vague project of locating the site of that Ahatchwhoop village where the dream of an Indian-Negro alliance was first conceived by his forefathers (and where, he remarks in an illuminating aside, Henry Burlingame III learned “Captain Kidd’s Cipher” from his fellow pirates Tom Pound and Long Ben Avery). “The longest day of the year”—I presume he means the literal solstice — finds him wandering aimlessly along these marshes, “devouring [his] own soul like Bellerophon.” A strange lassitude overtakes him: the fatigue of irresolution, no doubt, combined with a steaming tidewater noon. “On a point of dry ground between two creeklets, in the shade of a stand of loblolly pines,” he rests; he dozes; he dreams…

Of what? We are not told; only that he woke “half tranced, understanding where [he] was but not, at once, why [he] was there,” and that he felt eerily as though he had aged ten years in as many minutes; that he was — odd feeling for a Cook, a Burlingame, but I myself am no stranger to it—“a different person” from the one who had drowsed off. He fetches forth and winds the pocketwatch sent to him so long ago in France by “H.B. IV”—and suddenly the meaning of his unrecorded dream comes clear, as surprising as it is ambiguous. He must find his father, and bring that father to Castines Hundred, to his grandchildren!

You sigh, Henry. I too! No more reenactments! But our ancestor sighs with us — nay, groans, not only at the by-now banality of this familiar imperative, but at its evident futility. What father? “Aaron Burr,” in his cups in Paris? “Harman Blennerhassett,” God knows where? Or perhaps himself, who we remember closed his last “prenatal” letter by referring to himself as his own father, and who surely feels a generation older since this dream?

Sensibly, he returns to Castines Hundred for Andrée’s counsel. She is startled at his changed appearance, even suspicious, so it seems to him. The twins are healthy; but she remains reserved, uneasy. Napoleon crosses the Niemen into Russia. General Hull receives his mail in Frenchtown and crosses the Detroit into Canada. By way of desperate demonstration of his authenticity, Andrew forges in Andrée’s presence a letter from Governor-General Sir George Prevost to General Brock, describing mass movements of Indian and Canadian troops en route to aid him at Detroit: a letter designed to fall “inadvertently” into Hull’s hands so that he will panic, take flight from Canada, and surrender the city. Andrée cautiously approves a provisional strategy: to prevent or minimize battles where possible and promote stalemate. But she seems to require, “like Penelope, further proof that this much-changed revenant is her Odysseus.

In August the false letter will do its work (not, alas, bloodlessly), but its author, heart-hurt by Andrée’s continuing detachment, will have left Castines Hundred for France. Is it that he could not, Odysseus-like, rehearse the ultimate secret of the marriage bed? We are not told; only that he goes. He will see Andrée at least once more; she will not ever him.

Mme de Staël is nowhere about. Having fled Paris for Coppet, Coppet for Vienna, Vienna for St. Petersburg before Bonaparte’s advance, she must now flee Russia for London, maybe thence for America if Napoleon cannot be stopped. Andrew seeks out “Aaron Burr” and confirms at once that his dream must be reread: not because that wrecked old schemer could not imaginably be “Henry Burlingame IV,” but because he is so indisputably the fallen father of the woman whose brilliant letters, imploring him to return to America and rebegin, Burr ungallantly exhibits to his visitor. “My daughter, don’t you know. In Charleston. Theodosia…”

Andrew winds his watch. Burr gives no sign. Go to her, the younger intrigant urges the older: Rebegin.

He himself then rebegins by presenting himself to the only father he has known. Disguised as one Jean Baptiste Petry, a minor aide to the Duc de Dalberg, he enters a familiar house in the rue de Vaugirard. There is rubicund Ruthy, there gentle Joel, who nonetheless sternly informs M. Petry that he is fed up with the foreign minister’s deliberate procrastination and equivocating. Seventeen more American vessels have been taken as prizes by the French navy, who seem not to have been apprised of the “Decree of St. Cloud.” Secretary Monroe has written (Barlow shows the letter) that an early settlement is anticipated with the English, after which the full hostility of both nations will be directed against France. It is time for a treaty of indemnification and free trade: a real treaty, not another counterfeit like that of St. Cloud, more worthy of the impostor Comte de Crillon or the legendary Henry Burlingame than of the Emperor of the French.

“Jean Baptiste” smiles. The son of that same M. Burlingame, he declares, has reportedly come to Paris to offer his talents to M. Barlow. Indeed, the fellow has audaciously gained access to privy sanctums of the Duc de Dalberg disguised as the aide now speaking these words, whom he happens to resemble, and has ascertained that while de Dalberg is indeed equivocating with Barlow on instructions from the Duc de Bassano, he regrets this equivocation as genuinely as Barlow does, whom he regards as a true friend of France. He has urged the Duc de Bassano to urge Napoleon to put an end to the business with a solid treaty of commerce between the United States and France, and expects daily to receive word of the emperor’s approval. All this (“Monsieur Petry” indignantly concludes) the false “Jean Baptiste” has no doubt promptly communicated to Monsieur Barlow, at one can imagine what detriment to the real Petry’s credibility. It is too much, this “Burlingaming” of Bonaparte as if he were some petty Algerine Bashaw!

Andrew pats his brow in mock exasperation; reaches for his watch chain. No need: Barlow’s eyes have widened, squinted, rewidened; he scowls, he grins; now they are clapping each other’s shoulders, kissing each other’s cheeks, whooping Ruthy into the library to see what on earth…

Then Andrew doffs all disguise (except his irrevocably aged “real” features) and to the two of them earnestly puts his case. What he has reported is the truth: the Duc de Dalberg (who has only got as good as he gave) is expecting word momently from Vilnius, the emperor’s Lithuanian headquarters, that Barlow should hasten there to conclude his treaty with the Duc de Bassano. Napoleon cares little for American affairs; his mind is on Moscow, which he must take before winter comes. But not everyone in the Foreign Ministry is as sanguine about the Russian expedition as is their emperor: it will be imperative, once the summons arrives from Vilnius, to move posthaste and get the matter dispatched.

Ruthy begins to cry: another separation! Joel too is sobered: Vilnius is no carriage jaunt to Coppet, but 2,000 and more kilometers across Germany and Poland! He too has heard opinions that Napoleon has overreached himself this time; that the Muscovites will burn their city before surrendering it. Moreover, pleased as he is to see le grand Andrew again (and to hear of the twins!), he cannot be expected to swallow unskeptically such a story, from such a source. About his own objectives he is quite clear: like Mme de Staël he has become anti-Bonaparte but not pro-Bourbon; for France’s sake, for Europe’s, he hopes Napoleon is defeated without too great loss of life, and the Empire replaced by a constitutional monarchy on the English model. For the United States he wants an early and honorable settlement of this “Second War of Independence,” for which he holds no brief. For himself he craves the speedy success of his diplomatic errand and the family’s return to Kalorama in Georgetown, to end his days like Thomas Jefferson cultivating his gardens, writing his memoirs, perhaps establishing a national university. A dozen years into the 19th Century, he is weary of it already, its Sturm und Drang and gloire and romantisme. He prefers Mozart to Beethoven, Voltaire to Goethe, reason to passion; he wants to go home. What does Andrew want?

Our progenitor points out that he has disguised himself this time simply to put by that disguise, in warrant of his good faith. He explains what he has learned from Andrée about the family Pattern; his chastened resolve that the “second cycle” of his life neutralize its misdirected first. Indeed, he affirms, Neutralization can be said to be his programme: he too hopes to see Napoleon neutralized before he ruins Europe; then a quick settlement of the American war before the United States can seize Canada on the one hand or, on the other, a Britain done with Napoleon can turn her whole might against her former colonies. It is his hope that an equitable treaty will guarantee Tecumseh’s Indian Free State below and between the Great Lakes; for himself he wants no more than to return to Castines Hundred, raise his children, and perhaps write a realistical 18th-Century-style novel based on his adventures. To this end he puts himself again and openheartedly at his old friend’s service. He is confident that together they can reenact and surpass their “H.B.-ing” of Hassan Bashaw; that they can Burlingame Bassano, Bonaparte, and the British prince regent into the bargain, if need be, to their pacific ends.

For Ruthy’s sake, Andrew imagines — she maintains through these declarations as apprehensive a reserve as Andrée’s — Joel does not immediately consent to the proposed alliance, nor does Andrew press the matter. While Tecumseh’s Delawares attack white settlements in Kentucky, and his Chicagos besiege Fort Wayne, and Tecumseh himself heads south once more to rally the Creeks to his confederacy; while Madison decides to invade Canada from upstate New York despite Britain’s lifting of the Orders in Council and Hull’s fiasco at Detroit; while Brock gathers his forces on the Niagara Frontier for the fatal battle of Queenston Heights (his Indians are Iroquois led by John Brant, the 18-year-old son of our old friend Joseph); while Beethoven meets Goethe at Teplitz and Goya paints Wellington’s portrait and Hegel publishes his Objective Logic and the Brothers Grimm their Fairy Tales and General Malet conspires to restore Louis XVIII in Napoleon’s absence, Cook and the Barlows carefully renew their friendship. Young Tom Barlow (Joel’s nephew and ward) and “Jean Baptiste Petry” explore Paris together through September, to improve the lad’s postgraduate savoir vivre. But on October 10, when the Duc de Dalberg himself brings the word to 50 rue de Vaugirard that the Duc de Bassano awaits Barlow’s pleasure at Vilnius, for all his and Ruthy’s misgivings Joel makes no secret of his delight, especially when the aide assigned to accompany the American minister is named to be Monsieur J. B. Petry!

8¶8608285! Andrew’s letter here cries out, as if in ciphered Slavic: EVEILEBEM! Believe me! It would have workt, had not that dear great man, with half a million Frenchmen, froze to death at the bitter end of the alphabet!

Toward October’s close, as the Grande Armée begins its retreat from the ashes of Moscow (in Canada, Brock is dead, but his battle won; the U.S.S. Wasp has defeated the sloop-of-war Frolic but surrendered to H.M.S. Poictiers; Decatur in the United States has taken His Majesty’s frigate Macedonian; the war is a draw as election day approaches), Joel, Tom, and “Jean Baptiste” leave Paris. In mid-November they arrive in Vilnius, where the ground is already frozen. Despite all, it is a joy to be adventuring together again; if Andrew is older and more grave, Joel is in as youthful high spirits as when they calèched across Spain in 1795, en route to Algiers. He writes Ruthy almost daily — so Andrew blithely reports, without explaining why he does not follow that loving example! — he drills his nephew in German; with M. Petry’s inventive aid he translates passages of the Iliad and the Columbiad into imaginary Polish. There is a merry if uneasy fortnight in the old city, crowded with the ministers of half a dozen nations: they pool their consular provisions, dine with the Duc de Bassano, make merry with the Polish gentry, and prepare their negotiation strategy — there seem to be no serious obstacles — while, what Barlow will not live to learn, his friend James Madison is very narrowly reelected over DeWitt Clinton of New York. That state, New Jersey, and all of New England except Vermont vote against the President — but do not secede after all when a few Pennsylvania precincts decide the election. The War of 1812 approaches 1813; the Duke of Wellington enters Madrid; the French army dies and dies.

Believe me! Andrew cries again: Despite all, it would have workt! The Duc de Bassano still assures everyone that Vilnius will be the emperor’s winter quarters; M. Barlow may expect his treaty in a matter of days. True, the retreat from Moscow has become less than orderly; nevertheless… By early December the panic is general; everyone flees Vilnius before the Cossacks come. No winter has ever been so cold so early; the crows peck vainly at frozen French corpses along every road, and flap off to seek the not quite dead. Joel is revolted into the last and strongest poem of his life: Advice to a Raven in Russia (“… hatch fast your ravenous brood, / Teach them to cry to Buonaparte for food;” etc.). Andrew reads the poem in Warsaw on the bitter day—12/12/12, and the mercury -12°F — when Joel writes to Ruthy, in a cipher of their own, that Napoleon has overtaken and passed them already in his closed, unescorted sleigh, fleeing his own as well as the Russian army.

’Twas with no advice from me he advised that raven, Andrew declares, whose image must haunt me evermore, till I find another poet to exorcise me of it. Now is the time, he nonetheless believes, to take best advantage of the Duc de Bassano, when Napoleon needs all the goodwill he can buy. On the 18th they leave Warsaw, hoping to overtake that gentleman before the Cossacks do. On the 19th, in the valley of the Vistula, Barlow himself is overtaken, by a cold to which a fever is added on the 20th. His condition worsens rapidly: at the little Jewish stetl of Zarnowiec, “the bitter end of the alphabet,” on “the shortest, darkest, meanest day of 1812,” half a year exactly since Andrew’s imperious dream, Joel declares he can travel no farther. The mayor and postmaster of the village, one John Blaski, is sympathetic: “Petry” overcomes the man’s fear of Cossack reprisal and persuades him to take the American minister in. Doctors are summoned, to no avail beyond the diagnosis of pneumonia. On the day after Christmas, which out of respect for their host the visitors do not observe, the Plenipotens Minister a Statibus unitis America, as Joel Barlow’s burial tablet in the Zarnowiec Christian churchyard denominates him, Itinerando hicce obiit.

Tom Barlow and Andrew bury him at once, thank John Blaski for his courageous charity, and flee: the Cossacks need no particular excuse for ravaging a Jewish settlement. The two will reach Paris three weeks later, no longer friends. Indeed, while he charges no one by name of slandering him, and specifically “absolves” Ruthy (of what, we must infer) by reason of her “inconsolable grief,” Andrew concludes this portion of his letter with the meaning observations that, as Ruthy’s favorite and Joel’s nearest relative, nephew Tom will surely inherit the Barlow estate upon Ruthy’s death; that “of all the calumnies ever suffer’d silently by those whose profession does not permit reply, none stings me so sore as that ‘J. B. Petry’ saw to it Joel’s treaty was never sign’d! As well accuse me of his pneumonia, who gave up my own pelisse to warm him at the end!”

Be that as it may — and I for one, Henry, do not credit for a moment the insinuation that Andrew derived “the blanket trick” from Jeffrey Amherst’s bacteriological tactic against the Indian besiegers of Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s conspiracy — he acknowledges frankly that the death of his “father” liberates as well as grieves him. Negotiations with the Duc de Bassano cannot now be resumed until a new minister arrives from Washington: late spring at the earliest. Though Napoleon executes General Malet for treason and welcomes the declarations of war on France by Prussia and Austria as his excuse to raise yet another army and atone for the Russian debacle, he has little interest in the British-American diversion. For one thing, the Americans seem to be holding their own without assistance: though Tecumseh’s Indians have been victorious around the western Great Lakes, and Admiral Cockburn has blockaded the Chesapeake to play off the mid-Atlantic states against New York and New England, the new U.S. invasion of Canada bids to be successful. General Prevost is repulsed at Sackett’s Harbor on Lake Ontario, and the Americans loot and burn the Canadian capital at York (Toronto). The British virtually evacuate the Niagara Frontier from Fort George at the mouth to Fort Erie at the head of the Niagara River; only the timidity of old General Dearborn keeps the Americans from pressing their advantage and seizing Canada. The U.S. Navy, too, is flexing its new muscle: though of insufficient force simply to destroy the British blockade (which however generates in Baltimore an enormously profitable fleet of privateers and blockade-runners), American captains are distinguishing themselves in individual engagements. One brig alone, the Argus, after delivering Joel Barlow’s successor to Paris, wreaks such havoc with British merchant shipping in the English Channel that marine insurance rates shoot up like a Congreve rocket — a mode of economic warfare so effective that the prince regent now considers seriously Czar Alexander’s offer to negotiate a settlement of the war.

Non grata in the rue de Vaugirard, Andrew follows these developments attentively from across the Channel, where he has gone in March to test the British political weather before returning to Andrée and the twins. The Americans, he concludes, are doing altogether too well to consider yielding to the British demand for an Indian Free State, especially while Napoleon remains a threat in Europe. Cockburn’s depredations in the Chesapeake are little more than a nuisance; only Tecumseh (and Dearborn’s pusillanimity) is keeping Canada in the British Empire. But word has it that young Oliver Perry is building an American fleet from scratch at Presque Isle on Lake Erie, to help William Henry Harrison defeat Tecumseh finally and for keeps. It is time, Andrew decides, the scales were tipped a bit the other way.

Before leaving London he pays one call on Mme de Staël, who with her entourage is enjoying great success in the city. He finds her in good spirits but indifferent health: the last pregnancy, her fifth, took its toll on her, and its issue proved unfortunate. “Petit Nous” is imbecilic; they have named him Giles, invented an American parentage for him, and left him at Coppet with wet nurses. Germaine is tired and no longer attractive; her young guardsman-husband, though devoted, is crude and given to jealousy; she is using far too much laudanum, can’t manage without it. She is not displeased to see that Andrew too has aged considerably. She introduces him to young Lord Byron, whose company she enjoys despite his unflattering compliment that she should have been born male. At her request, for Byron’s amusement and by way of homage to the memory of Joel Barlow, Andrew for the last time recounts the tale of “Consuelo del Consulado.” The poet attends, applauds politely, suggests that “with some reworking” it might appeal to Walter Scott, but believes that Gioacchino Rossini may have already made use of it in his new opéra bouffe L’Italiana in Algeri. Germaine herself, this time around, declares the tale palpable rubbish. The truth is (she announces pointedly to Byron) she is surfeited with Romanticism, almost with literature. She prefers Jane Austen to Walter Scott, Alexander Pope to Wordsworth and Shelley, and would rather read Malthus and Ricardo and Laplace than the lot of them. Her own novels have begun to bore her: so much so that she is writing a quite 18th-Century essay against suicide to counter the “Wertherism” so morbidly in fashion, from which her own Delphine, for example, suffers. Oh that she were Byron’s age! She would devise an art that saw through such improbable flamboyances as Napoleon and “Consuelo” to those complex realities which (as her financier father knew) truly affect the lives of men and nations: the commodity market, currency speculation, the mysteries of patent law and debenture bonding.

Byron is bored. Andrew has heard the argument before; he coins the terms “post-Romantic” and “neo-Realist” and, begging their pardons, wonders casually whether Germaine’s new passion for economic and political history as against belles-lettres is not as romantical in its way as Byron’s fascination with “action” as against “contemplation.” He also wonders whether (this fancy much pleases both Byron and de Staël) “romantic” unlikelihoods such as his interlude with Consuelo not more likely to occur in reality, even to abound, in the present Age of Romanticism than in other ages, just as visions and miracles no doubt occurred more regularly in the Age of Faith than in the Enlightenment. The most practical strategists in the Admiralty, for example, have been unable to deal with the American Argus nuisance in the Channel, whereas any romantical novelist deserving of the adjective would recall at once how Mercury slew the original “hundred-eyed Argus” by first charming the monster to sleep (some say with fiction). Suppose, instead of wool and timber and wheat, the Argus were to capture a ship loaded to the gunwales with good Oporto wine, whilst over the horizon a British man-o’-war stood ready to close when the Yankees were in their cups…

Germaine is impatient: the effect of Lloyd’s marine insurance rates on British foreign policy intrigues her, but not the application of classical mythology to modern naval warfare. Byron, on the other hand, is enchanted with the idea. He has a naval cousin, Sir Peter Parker, in H.M.S. Menelaus in the Mediterranean, and other Admiralty connections to whom he must rush off at once and propose the scheme. Mr. Cook is quite right: it is an age in which the Real and the Romantic are, so to speak, fraternal twins. He himself, now Cook has put the bee in his bonnet, would not be surprised to learn that Lady Caroline Lamb, who has been forging letters over his signature, is Consuelo del Consulado, up to her old tricks!

They part (Andrew will not see either again; he cannot interest Byron in Barlow’s raven, for which the poet declares the only useful rhyme in English is craven; the kindness of the Jew John Blaski appeals to him more; he is considering a series of “Hebrew melodies” to be set by his friend Isaac Nathan. But off to the Admiralty, and well met!): on the first of August, his conscience stung by Byron’s reference to twins, Andrew takes ship from Ireland to Nova Scotia. There is a lull in the war: Madison’s peace commissioners are in St. Petersburg with John Quincy Adams, but the prince regent, perhaps in view of Dearborn’s failure of nerve, declines after all to send representatives of his own. Napoleon’s momentum in Europe, like Dearborn’s in Canada, shows signs of flagging; President Madison has recalled the old general, but there is no one to recall the emperor. Andrew will not learn of this until he reaches Canada, or of Admiral Cockburn’s sack of Hampton, Virginia, or of Commodore Perry’s improbable launching of his Lake Erie fleet, or of the capture on August 13 of the drunken Argus by His Majesty’s brig Pelican. Meanwhile, as if his baiting of Germaine de Staël has provoked the gods of Romance…

Twenty-four hours out from Cobh, as he stands on the quarterdeck with other passengers anxiously scanning the Channel for the dreaded Argus, he fetches out and winds the old Breguet. A veiled lady beside him catches her breath. Not long after, a sealed, scented envelope is delivered to his bunk in the gentlemen’s cabin…

“Rossini, von Weber, Chateaubriand: your pardon!” Andrew here pleads. “Above all yours, Andrée!” But there she is, like the third-act reflex of a tired librettist. A still-striking, if plumpish, thirty-three, she has been the mistress of the Spanish minister to London; but her implacable ex-lover Don Escarpio, now a royalist agent in Rome, continues to harass her for her disobedience in Algiers. It is to flee his operatives and begin a new and different life that she has taken ship for Canada. But what honorable profession, in 1813, is open to a woman of no independent wealth who would be dependent on no man? Only one, that Consuelo knows of: following the examples of Mrs. Burney and Mrs. Edgeworth, above all of her idol Mme de Staël, she is determined to become… una novelista! Indeed, she is well into her maiden effort: an epistolary account, in the manner of Delphine, of her imbroglios with Serior Barlow and the wicked Escarpio. There is a new spirit abroad in Europe — perhaps Senor Cook has not heard of it — called romanticismo: as she has had alas no luck with the booksellers of Madrid and London, who advise her that the novel is a worn-out fad, Consuelo intends to introduce el romanticismo to North America and become the first famous Canadian novelist. For old time’s sake, will her carisimo Andrew read through the manuscript and help her English it?

Three weeks later they part, affectionately, at Halifax. Andrew says no more of their shipboard intimacy (he is, after all, writing to his wife, and tardily) or of his friend’s novel, except that, searching promptly for the truth about the poisoned snuffbox, he finds it metamorphosed into a poisoned letter-opener (“¿Mas romántico, no?”) and suggests she rework that passage, among others. But that their reconnection was not merely editorial we may infer from Andrew’s immediate guilty assumption — when upon reaching Castines Hundred in September he finds Tecumseh there with Andrée — that in his long and newsless absence his wife has returned for consolation to her Indian friend.

He does not “blame her”—or question her, or even make his presence known. For three days he haunts the area (the same three, ye muses of romantical coincidence, of Tecumseh’s single and innocent visit to his Star-of-the-Lake), surreptitiously satisfying himself that the twins are well, his wife and Tecumseh likewise. He hears the news that Perry has met the enemy at Put-In-Bay and that they are his; he understands that this victory spells the end, at least for the present, of British control of the Great Lakes, and that Perry’s fleet will now freely transport General Harrison’s army to meet Proctor and Tecumseh somewhere above Detroit. It wants no strategist to guess that another, two-pronged American invasion of Canada is imminent: one thrust from New England against Montreal, the other up from Detroit. Does Tecumseh understand that the battle to come is the most crucial of his life?

Comes again the baleful plea: EVEILEBEM! If he acknowledges now his rueful return to Halifax and “Consuelo the Consoler” (la Consoladora), it is because he had rather Andrée tax him with infidelity than with the least complicity in Tecumseh’s death. To the charge that I might somehow have aided our noble friend, and did not, I plead nolo contendere, he writes. To the charge that I idled & self-sorrow’d in Halifax whilst Proctor cowardly fled the field at Thames and left Tecumseh to be shot & flay’d & unmember’d by the fierce Kentuckians, I plead guilty. But believe me, Andrée: to the charge that I wisht Tecumseh dead; that I pointed him out to Colonels Whitely & Johnson on the field; that I myself gave a strip of his skin to Henry Clay for a razor-strop — innocent, innocent, innocent!

He does not say whose charges those were. “Soul-shockt” by the loss of Tecumseh so hard upon that of Joel Barlow — and with Tecumseh the only real leadership of an Indian confederacy — Cook languishes in Nova Scotia while Andrew Jackson massacres the Creeks in Alabama and Madison’s two strange replacements for General Dearborn launch their Canadian campaign. John Armstrong, the new secretary of war, is the same to whom in 1783 Henry Burlingame IV perhaps dictated the infamous “Newburgh Letters”; General Wilkinson is the same Spanish spy who conspired with “Aaron Burr” and then testified against him to save his own skin! Like its predecessor, this expedition will be a fiasco of mismanagement; by November’s end it too will have failed, and in December, with the British capture of Fort Niagara, the tide of war will begin to turn. But the retreating Americans will have burned Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) in addition to York; they will still control the Lakes; no one will have remarshaled the scattered Indians in Tecumseh’s stead — and Andrew lingers on in Halifax.

But he is not altogether idle, and nowise inattentive. Prevost’s burning of Buffalo on New Year’s Eve in retaliation for Newark, he observes, while thorough and brutal, is scarcely of so demoralizing a character to the U.S.A. generally as to prompt Madison’s peace commissioners to cede the Great Lakes to Canada. Who cares about Buffalo? Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British blockading fleet, before leaving Halifax for winter quarters in Bermuda, proposes a letter to Madison threatening further such retaliation: he would begin on the coast of Maine come spring and burn one town after another until the Americans yield, working south if necessary as far as Boston. This too, it seems to Andrew, will be a blow from the wrong quarter: the Federalists will simply be driven into supporting Madison’s war, and the southern states will be privately delighted to see New England get its comeuppance. Admiral Cockburn’s season in Chesapeake Bay, on the other hand, while of limited military effectiveness — a few buildings burned, a few women raped, much tobacco confiscated, and the port of Baltimore closed to normal shipping — strikes Andrew as having been of considerable symbolic import and strategic promise: his fleet has cruised half a year with impunity at the front door of Washington; the city newspaper is even delivered regularly to his flagship, so that he can read the editorial denunciations of himself and keep abreast of the war! Now he is wintering on Cumberland Island, off Georgia, and allegedly arming Negroes for a general rising. The plan is not serious — Andrew has seen copies of the British directive to accept in service any free or escaped Negroes who volunteer, but not to permit a slave insurrection, lest the example spread to British colonies — but it terrifies the southern whites. Andrew admires Sir George Cockburn’s panache; Prevost and Cochrane, he believes, are looking at the wrong part of the map…

Making use of his earlier connections with the Canadian secret service, Andrew spends the early months of 1814 establishing himself as a special liaison between the governor-general and the Royal Navy attaché in Halifax, while “assisting Consuelo with her novel-in-letters.” Except for Jackson’s campaign against the Creeks, who are finally destroyed in March at Horseshoe Bend, there is a general pause in the American war: all eyes are on Europe, where Wellington’s Invincibles have crossed the Pyrenees into France and Napoleon’s fall seems imminent. In the wake of the second Canadian fiasco, American Federalists are calling for Madison to resign or be impeached; Armstrong and Wilkinson are too busy now vilifying each other to prosecute the war. Ruthy Barlow, having wintered with the Robert Fultons in New York, returns to Washington and reopens Kalorama. In London, Mme de Staël, unenthusiastic about the prospect of a Bourbon restoration, hopes Napoleon will defeat the Allies but be killed in the process; in any event she and her friends make ready to end their exile. Byron writes his Corsair, Walter Scott his Waverly, Consuelo her Cartas argelinas, o, la Delfina nueva.

Her collaborator and translator, as he privately prepares to avenge Tecumseh’s death, amuses himself with certain problems raised by the manuscript. He has persuaded Consuelo that a new realismo must inevitably succeed the current rage for the Romantic; to buy into this growth-stock early, so to speak, she has reworked her story to include all manner of ghosts, monsters, witches, curses, and miracles, in whose literal reality she devoutly believes, but which she’d omitted from her first draft as insufficiently romántico, there being none in Delphine, Corinne, or The Sorrows of Young Werther. Andrew is delighted — and gently suggests that she revise her ambition and residence to become the first great Mexican or Venezuelan Post-Romantic novelist. It is too cold in Canada anyway, no? And the Halifax literary community has not exactly laureled her like Corinne. Why do they not sail down to Bermuda together, where he has business, and assess the literary situation from there?

Consuelo agrees, the Allies enter Paris, Napoleon abdicates and is banished to Elba. Admiral Cockburn returns to the Chesapeake and renews his subscription to the National Intelligencer; General Ross in Bordeaux receives orders to take Wellington’s brigades to Admiral Cochrane in Bermuda for the purpose of “chastising Brother Jonathan” in some as yet unspecified way; Andrew Cook completes his strategy. As soon as Lake Erie is free of ice, he is certain, the Americans will re-retaliate in some fashion for the burning of Buffalo. Prevost himself waits for that occasion to prod Admiral Cochrane into action (the letter to Madison has not been sent, though Andrew has offered the governor-general numerous drafts). Sure enough, in May a raiding party from Erie, Pa., crosses the lake to Ontario and pillages the Long Point area. Prevost, into whose confidence our ancestor has by now entirely made his way, sends him at once from Halifax to Bermuda with orders for Cochrane both to demand reparation from Madison and, without waiting for reply, to initiate forthwith his proposed schedule of retaliation. Aboard the dispatch boat, as Consuelo prays to Maria Stella Maris to preserve them from sea monsters, cannibals, and other such realidades, Andrew adroitly redrafts the orders (and terminates abruptly, in mid-forged sentence, this first and longest of his posthumous letters, whose postscript you remember he added later, and whose interrupted sentence he resumes at the commencement of his second), substituting, in the catalogue of Cochrane’s targets, for Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts, and Newport in Rhode Island, the words Baltimore in Maryland…

(And here I too break off, to resume in his fashion, quoting our forefather quoting himself, when I take up his second letter on the anniversary of its composition one week hence — by when surely you will have interrupted

Your loving father)

ABC/ss encl

cc: JB

&: A. B. Cook VI to his son. A. B. Cook IV’s second posthumous letter: Washington burned, Baltimore threatened.

A. B. Cook VI

Dept. of English

Marshyhope State University

Redmans Neck, Md. 21612

July 16, 1969

H. C. Burlingame VII

(address pending)

Dear Henry,

&*‡;364)5$!

Thus (missing, silent son) our ancestor opens this second of his “posthumous letters” in “Legrand’s cipher,” the first of which closed with his forged — and interrupted — alteration of Governor-General Prevost’s order to Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane to destroy, not “Castine in Maine, Boston in Massachusetts,” etc., but Baltimore in Maryland…

&NOTGNIHSAW!

(Where are you, Henry? Better your suspicions, your rude interrogations, your peremptorosities, than this silence. Why can I not share with you my amusement at writing this from my new and temporary office — formerly tenanted by that historian I mentioned in my last, now mine as “Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in English” at this newly christened university — to be transcribed, as was my last, by my new and formidable secretary? My appeal to you last week, to join me here in Maryland for good and all after so many years, nay generations, of strained and partial connection; to take up with me the formulation and direction of our Second 7-Year Plan — seems to have been as futile as Andrew IV’s postdated postscript to his “widow” [from Fort Bowyer, Mobile Bay, February, 1815] imploring her to join him there at once with the twins, now that the War of 1812—whose most memorable event he will rehearse for us today — is ended. The second letter is dated a year and a week after the first: 154 years ago today. It is headed [without immediate explanation] Aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon, Off Rochefort, France, 16 July 1815. Napoleon, his 100 Days done, has just surrendered there to Commander Maitland; Apollo-11, after a flawless countdown and a 9:32 A.M. lift-off from Cape Kennedy, has left its earth orbit to land the first men on the moon; my father has been vaporized at dawn in and with a certain tower in Alamogordo, New Mexico; your father feels ever more deeply, though he understands no more clearly, the Anniversary View of History. Et cher fils, où es tu?)

& Washington!

We review the strategy with Andrew. The British government are convinced from the start that Madison is the tool of his mentor Thomas Jefferson, at whose instruction he has coordinated the 1812 War with Napoleon’s activities in Spain and Russia; while Britain is thus stripped of her allies and engaged in the peninsular fighting, the U.S. intends to add Canada and the Floridas to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. From the time of the emperor’s retreat from Moscow, and more particularly in the first quarter of 1814, the British Cabinet’s strategy becomes not only to retain Canada by sending new forces to Prevost’s aid, but to capture New Orleans as well, and, by tightening the Chesapeake and North Atlantic blockades, to force the secession of New York and New England. The Canadian border will then be adjusted to include a buffer state extending 100 miles south of the Lakes (i.e., most of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, as well as western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and New England); British jurisdiction will extend from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. The United States will thus be contained effectively by the Hudson and Mohawk rivers on the north, the Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers on the northwest and west. The Floridas are perhaps negotiable.

Only the Duke of Wellington is not sanguine. Even from the perspective of southern France, the map of America depresses him: that endless wilderness; the terrific problems of supply and reinforcement. “The prospect in regard to America,” he writes to Earl Bathurst, the prince regent’s secretary of war and the colonies, “is not consoling.’’

Admiral Cochrane, on the other hand, even before Andrew reaches Bermuda with Consuelo and his doctored orders, is so full of ambitious plans that he cannot decide among them. He will kidnap Secretary Monroe, say, maybe even Jefferson, as hostages to be ransomed by “all the country southwest of the Chesapeake”; or he will capture and destroy the Portsmouth Navy Yard and send Wellington’s army across New Hampshire to join forces with Prevost; or he will exceed Bathurst’s instructions and recruit a large cavalry of disaffected Negroes, a kind of black cossacks, to terrify the South into capitulation: the chain of Chesapeake Islands from Tangier up to Bloodsworth will be armed and fortified as their refuge and training base. Or he will seize New York City, or Rhode Island; or he will take Philadelphia, or perhaps Richmond, and either destroy or indemnify them. New Orleans alone, when his black cossacks and Creek Indians win it, ought to fetch four million pounds’ worth of goods and ransom, of which his personal share will exceed £125,000!

As Cochrane schemes, unschemes, reschemes, Byron’s cousin Peter Parker in the Menelaus, together with sixteen other ships and 2,800 of Wellington’s Invincibles under command of General Ross, sail west from Bordeaux to rendezvous with him in Bermuda, and Andrew and Consuelo sail south to that same rendezvous in Prevost’s dispatch boat. La novelista’s confusion makes her cross with her lover and advisor: en route to Bermuda he has pressed upon her Jane Austen’s new Pride and Prejudice as a refinement of 18th-Century realism of the sort that might anticipate what 19th-century novelists will be doing 50 years hence, when the Gothic-Romantic fad has run its course. At the same time he translates aloud for her E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Phantasiestücke. But Consuelo finds Austen’s meticulous interest in money—its sources and the subtleties of its deployment — as exótico as the rites of a strange religion, whereas Hoffmann’s goblins and revenants she accepts as the most familiar and unremarkable reportage, less marvelous by half than the table talk in Colmenar, her native Andalusian village. Mexico, she is now convinced, will be a desert, as inhospitable to romanticismo as La Mancha, and Venezuela a jungle full of monkeys and alligators. As for Bermuda, it bores her in two days: it is not Prospero’s island, but Nova Scotia with more sunshine and fewer booksellers. Most unromantical of all, she brings her Gulf Stream seasickness ashore, cannot eat, yet puts on weight. In her fortune-teller’s opinion, she is with child.

What confidence Andrew has in Andrée, so candidly to acknowledge this news! Which, however, he does not instantly credit. He knows for a fact that Consuelo cannot be more than five weeks pregnant; what’s more, in her pique at his cavils about realismo she has attempted vainly to rouse his flagging ardor by permitting herself a small romance with a junior officer aboard the dispatch boat…

Andrew has been advanced a sufficiency for his mission from Prevost’s secret-service budget. When Admiral Cochrane, on receipt of the (emended) instructions, orders him at once to Chesapeake Bay to report on Cockburn’s black-cossack enlistments and to sound the man out on Cochrane’s own inclination to ransom rather than burn the Yankee cities, Andrew gives Consuelo half of this advance. He informs her that his errand may keep him in the Chesapeake all summer; he declares that she no longer needs his aesthetic counsel, and suggests that New Orleans — with its links to France, Spain, and England as well as to the United States — might be the most romantic and fertile soil available for the future of the Novel. He himself saw and admired the city during his pursuit of Aaron Burr and Harman Blennerhassett some years since; he would be delighted to discover, should he revisit Louisiana with his wife and family after the war, that his brave and handsome friend has restored that poisoned snuffbox to their adventure and become the founder of Cajun Neo-Realism or Gumbo Gothic, whichever.

Consuelo is tearful and excited; Andrew gives her a letter of introduction to a Louisiana legislator he once caroused and swapped pirate stories with, one Jean Blanque, who he is confident can recommend a good physician and midwife if the need arises, or a hoodoo-lady if she wishes to postpone motherhood. ¡Hasta la vista, Consuelo la consolada!

Andrew is happy to be off in the dispatch sloop St. Lawrence. He feels more self-reproach for encouraging his friend’s literary aspirations than for sleeping with her, and Admiral Cochrane’s combination of ambitiousness and irresolution bothers him. George Cockburn, on the other hand, he finds immediately appealing upon their rendezvous at the mouth of the Patuxent, which the rear admiral is already charting for invasion purposes. Prevost, declares Cockburn, cannot see beyond the St. Lawrence River. Cochrane, though no coward, is the sort who will change his mind a dozen times before making it up and another dozen after, with little sense either of real opportunity or real improbability. The kidnapping scheme, for example, is a piece of foolishness: nobody in Madison’s cabinet is popular enough to command a decent ransom! And the “black cossack” business is another chimera: despite their best efforts, Cockburn’s men cannot recruit more than one or two blacks daily. Unlike your red Indians, who in a vain effort to preserve their sovereignty form desperate alliances with either Madison or the Crown, your Negro has no more wish to fight one white man’s battle than another’s. But Cochrane knows neither blacks nor Indians! Moreover, the man is greedy, in Cockburn’s opinion, beyond the permissible prize-taking activities of any responsible commander. In order properly to be feared, one must sometimes destroy instead of ransoming; but the destruction must be calculated for the best psychological effect. It astonishes Cockburn that either Prevost or Cochrane has had wit enough to suggest what he has been urging upon them for above a year, the seizure of Brother Jonathan’s capital city — and he is not surprised that Cochrane is already equivocating on the matter.

Andrew takes a gamble; confesses that he himself has altered Prevost’s instructions; demonstrates on the spot his knack for forgery. He volunteers his opinion that the capital should be seized first and briefly, just long enough to destroy the public buildings, with no discussion of ransom whatever; then a joint land and sea attack should be made on Baltimore, the economically more important target, whose privateering harbor should be destroyed and the rest of the city indemnified. If the Americans do not then sue for peace, the two cities should be garrisoned as a wedge between North and South while campaigns are mounted against New England and New Orleans. He Andrew knows the capital fairly well and is acquainted with several high elected officials, including the President and the secretary of state; he will be happy to serve Cockburn as guide, spy, or whatever.

The gamble pays off: Cockburn is as charmed by the counterfeit as by Andrew’s further proposals for exploiting sectional distrust among the Americans. Compromising documents should be forged, for example, to confirm the rumors that Secretary of War Armstrong has deliberately neglected the defenses of Washington because he wants the capital relocated further north — perhaps in Carlisle, Pennsylvania — to weaken the influence of the Virginia Combine. Letters should be written to Madison by “a spy in Cockburn’s fleet,” warning the President of the attack — and found later in War Department files. A well-timed sequence of false and true reports, from false and true double agents, ought totally to confuse the already divided Americans. Above all, the operation should be decisively executed, to point up as demoralizingly as possible the Yankees’ disorganization. To this end both Admiral Cochrane and General Ross — the one irresolute, the other reputedly overcautious — will need a bit of managing if they are not to spoil the essential audacity of the plan.

That word carries the day: it is audaciousness, exactly, which Prevost & Co. — even Wellington himself! — are short on, and which Cockburn and his friend the prince regent admire even in their adversaries. Old Bonaparte, damn him, has it aplenty; likewise the Yankee Commodore Joshua Barney, whose Baltimore flotilla of scows and barges has effectively hampered Cockburn’s Chesapeake activities this season. He Cockburn fancies himself not altogether without some audaciousness too, and is encouraged to fellow feeling, if not to unreserved trust, by the plain evidence of that trait in our ancestor.

To the audacious man, Andrew ventures further, the settling of old scores is as agreeable as the taking of prizes. He himself has a little grudge against Josh Barney (at whose house in Baltimore their mutual friend Jérôme Bonaparte was introduced to Miss Betsy Patterson) for nearly capturing the St. Lawrence en route to this present conversation. Like the picaroon Joseph Whaland before him, Barney strikes quickly and then runs his shoal-draft boats up into creeks too shallow for his pursuers to follow. Moreover, the fellow has good tactical sense: the current presence of his flotilla in the upper Patuxent argues that he anticipates an attack on Washington. Let him then be hoist with his own petard: along with other diversionary maneuvers, let the main landing force go ashore at Benedict on the Patuxent and strike first at Barney’s boats, which Cockburn’s fleet will prevent from escaping. The Americans thus will be kept from guessing until the last possible moment whether Baltimore, Washington, or Annapolis is to be attacked first (and indeed the target can be changed if unforeseen defenses should arise), or whether Barney’s flotilla is the sole objective.

Cockburn is now clapping Andrew about the shoulders like dear dead Barlow, eager to be on with it. July is running like the tide; Cochrane will have changed his mind seven times since Andrew left Bermuda; the Americans have captured Fort Erie and won so decisively at Chippewa, just above Niagara Falls, that their gray uniforms worn in that engagement have been officially adopted by the military academy at West Point. It is time to move. The St. Lawrence is redispatched to Bermuda with detailed plans for the operation: one small diversionary force to be sent up the Bay to feint at Baltimore and the upper Eastern Shore; another to move up the Potomac and take Fort Washington and Alexandria; the main force to ascend the Patuxent, land at Benedict, march on upriver between Washington and Baltimore — and then swing left to assault the capital. By the time the dispatch boat reaches Bermuda, the convoys from France and the Mediterranean ought to be there too; unless Cochrane in the meanwhile has dreamed up some harebrained alternative, Washington can be theirs by the time of the Perseid meteors in August.

Shall Andrew fetch the plan to Cochrane himself, to insure its effective delivery? Cockburn smiles: Mr. Cook will remain where he is, to insure its accurate delivery. Once the St. Lawrence is safely out of the Chesapeake, he may either begin his campaign of sowing the Eastern Seaboard with doctored letters, or join the Royal Marines in their sporting raids upon the Maryland tobacco crop.

Andrew opts to do a bit of both: on July 27 he drafts an anonymous letter to President Madison, informing him plainly of the British plan (the same classical tactic used by my father in 1941 vis-à-vis Pearl Harbor), and with Cockburn’s approval “smuggles” it ashore to be mailed.

Your enemy have in agitation an attack on the capital of the United States. The manner in which they intend doing it is to take advantage of a fair wind in ascending the Patuxent; and after having ascended it a certain distance, to land their men at once, and make all possible dispatch to the capitol; batter it down, and then return to their vessels immediately…

(Signed) Friend

A few days later he lands with a foraging party from H.M.S. Dauntless near the village of Tobacco Stick (since renamed Madison after the addressee of the foregoing), thinking to make his way to the place where in 1694, having escaped death at the hands of the Bloodsworth Island Ahatchwhoops, his ancestor Ebenezer Cooke was reunited with his twin sister. Andrew wants to review his own position from that perspective, to reassure himself that he really means to aid the destruction of Washington rather than its preservation. His woolgathering separates him from Lieutenant Phipps’s party, who are guided by a liberated slave woman. The tender leaves without him, runs aground in the Little Choptank, and is captured by the local militia, who jail the 18 Britishers and return the black woman to the mercies of her former owner. Andrew must make his way back to the fleet via Bloodsworth Island and a stolen bateau.

He confides to Andrée that Cockburn’s confidence in him is not increased by this episode, and while he does not report any change in his own attitude, he sees that he must do something to reestablish his credibility. Cockburn grants his request to make an intelligence-gathering visit to the capital, charging him specifically to report whether Madison and Monroe have managed to prod Secretary Armstrong into any real measures of defense since the receipt of Andrew’s letter: if not, then either the Americans still doubt that Washington is the target, or they plan not to resist its capture, or their plans mean nothing. If on the other hand real defense measures are at last being taken, their strength must be expertly assessed before Ross and Cochrane’s arrival.

Where are you, Henry?

On August 1, as Andrew’s false true warning is postmarked from New York, Madison’s Peace Commission (now in London) are being depressed by the tremendous joint celebration there of Napoleon’s exile to Elba, the 100th anniversary of the Hanoverian accession, and the 16th of Lord Nelson’s victory on the Nile: in the mock naval battles accompanying the festivities, the “enemy vessels” ignominiously vanquished include a significant number of “American” along with the customary “French.” On August 3, while Andrew broods at Tobacco Stick, Admiral Cochrane’s reinforced Bermuda fleet weighs anchor for the Chesapeake. On the 8th, as Andrew makes his way unchallenged into Washington, the British and American treaty negotiators meet for the first time in the Hotel des Pays-Bas in Ghent, each to confront the other with unacceptable demands, and each hoping that news of fresh successes in the fighting will weaken the other’s bargaining position. Why do you not appear, and we make plans together?

Andrew goes first to Kalorama, to advise Ruth Barlow (through an old servant-friend from the rue de Vaugirard; Ruth will not receive him) to place her valuables and herself under the diplomatic immunity of her former tenant, the French Ambassador Sérurier. By the simple expedient of installing himself then in the lobby of McKeowin’s Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, where orders and counterorders come and go like transient guests, he quickly ascertains that no serious measures of defense have been accomplished. Of the 1,000 regulars and 15,000 militia authorized by Armstrong for the district, only 500 of the former and 1,600 of the latter actually exist, most of them in Baltimore, which the secretary still believes to be the British target. The rest, but for Barney’s flotilla, are scattered all over southern Maryland; the city is virtually open. Only Madison and Monroe appear to believe that Washington is truly in danger; they seem about to take its defense into their own hands, but as of the Perseid meteor shower on August 12, they have not yet done so.

Thus Andrew’s report to Cockburn, Cochrane, and General Ross aboard the Tonnant on August 15, Napoleon’s 45th birthday. As Cockburn foretold, Cochrane’s resolution has faltered en route from Bermuda: their 5,000 men are insufficient to assault a capital city some 40 miles inland, in absolutely equatorial summer heat. Ross inclines to agree: they will do better to pack it in and head north to Rhode Island. Only Andrew’s report (together with a little demonstration raid up the St. Mary’s River for Ross’s benefit, and a final review of the options open to them if any real resistance should materialize) saves Cockburn’s plan. On the 17th the final strategy is outlined to the assembled captains: a squadron of eight ships to go at once up the Potomac, destroy its fortifications to clear an alternate route for the army’s retreat if the Patuxent should be cut off, and capture Alexandria. Byron’s cousin to take the Menelaus up the Bay, make a reconnaissance feint at Baltimore and the upper Eastern Shore as if to cut off the roads to Philadelphia and New York. The rest of the force to navigate as far up the Patuxent as possible and march on from there. On Thursday the 18th, Andrew with them, they labor up the narrowing river against contrary winds and tides; by anchoring time, at steamy sunset, they are strung out for nine miles, from Benedict to Broom Island, the deeper-draft ships farthest down. The Patuxent, its high handsome wooded banks, are deserted. Tomorrow the troops will disembark with three days’ rations for the 40-mile overland march to Nottingham, to Upper Marlboro…

& Washington!

Here Andrew interrupts his narrative to quote a New York Post editorial published some dozen days later: “Certain it is, that when General Ross’ official account of the battle and the capture and destruction of our CAPITOL is published in England, it will hardly be credited by Englishmen. Even here it is still considered a dream.” He goes on to invoke Andrée: Give me the words, Muse to whom these words are all addrest, to tell that dream, your dream come true: Prevost’s revenge for York, ours for Tecumseh!

As if to repersuade himself that his conviction is firm, he reviews the moments when he might have “undream’d the dream”: a forged letter from Madison to Armstrong, say, urging him to “maintain his pretense of indifference & confusion, till the enemy may be cut off from all retreat,” would have alarmed Ross and Cochrane past all of Cockburn’s suasion. A tip to Secretary Monroe, to place sharpshooters at Benedict to pick off Cockburn the moment he steps ashore — the fleet would be altogether demoralized.

Now in the three days’ march from Benedict come new such cruxes. The tidewater August weather is unnerving; hardened veterans of the Peninsular Wars fall out by the dozens as anvil clouds pile up through the afternoon, then huddle awed as a furious American thunderstorm, like nothing they’ve seen in Britain or Spain, shocks their first night’s bivouac in Maryland. A bit of a night ambush on the heels of it, by a hundred or so militiamen painted like Indians, and Ross would have packed his army back to more civilized carnage. On Sunday the 21st, permitted to reconnoiter on his own, Andrew crosses paths with James Monroe himself, alone on horseback, down below their encampment! Frustrated by inaction and discrepant reports, Monroe has persuaded the President to let him leave the State Department, saddle up, and scout the enemy personally — the first and last time a cabinet officer has ever done so — and he has got himself behind the enemy he is trying to locate. Andrew makes no sign, either to warn Monroe or to capture him. By that same Sunday evening Ross is fretful at the slowness of their advance, their distance from the fleet; he has half a mind to forgo even their immediate target, Joshua Barney’s flotilla at Pig Point. Cockburn must be at him incessantly with encouragements, till Ross agrees to give that objective one more day. When Cockburn leaves him on the Monday to lead a little force of attack barges up to Pig Point, Andrew considers telling Ross that Barney has already fused his ships for scuttling and removed their cannons to defend the approaches to Washington. He refrains; the boats are blown; Ross settles down nervously with his army for the night at Upper Marlboro.

Seven miles away, at Long Old Fields, the American defenders are noisily encamped under General Winder, a Baltimore attorney. The threat to Washington is clear now to everyone except the secretary of war, and a bit of defense is beginning confusedly to rally: 3,000 infantry, mostly militia, and above 400 cavalry — of which Ross has none — are strengthened now by Barney’s 500 flotillamen and their artillery. Andrew contemplates the map. An open road shortcuts from Long Old Fields and under Upper Marlboro to the Patuxent: in one hour Winder’s cavalry could cut off the British rear while his infantry move against their left. Even if the attack cannot be sustained, it will move Ross to withdraw, the more readily now that his token objective has been accomplished. Andrew says nothing.

Even so, General Ross is so inclined to retreat that his junior officers secretly send for Cockburn again to give their commander another pep talk. It would be no problem to have the admiral ambuscado’d en route to Dr. Beanes’s house, where Ross is billeted… The fact is, Earl Bathurst’s orders to the general explicitly forbid his engaging in “any extended operations at any distance from the coast”; it is Cockburn’s task, and those ambitious junior officers’, to persuade Ross that Bathurst himself would rescind that order before such an opportunity. For the moment they succeed: Andrew and one of Cockburn’s lieutenants are dispatched on the 23rd back to Cochrane’s flagship at Benedict to report the destruction of Barney’s flotilla, the taking of 13 schooners full of prize tobacco (which the Royal Marines are now sending downriver), and the army’s intention to move on Washington next day.

Here is Andrew’s last, best chance. As apprehensive as General Ross, Admiral Cochrane seizes upon the news. He too has been looking at the map: how easily a modest force of cavalry could cut off the army’s rear and — more alarming! — how easily a few barges, scuttled across the lower Patuxent channel, could bottle up his fleet, make them sitting ducks for artillery mounted on the riverbanks! They have accomplished something, with very small loss; who knows but what Barney’s boats and those tobacco schooners might have been a choice bait to lead them so vulnerably far upriver? He gives Andrew and Lieutenant Scott an emphatic and unambiguous letter for Cockburn, to be eaten if they are in danger of capture and delivered orally should they escape: he and Ross have done enough; they are to return to the fleet at once. Under no circumstances are they to march on to Washington!

The messengers return by different routes, to improve their letter’s chances of delivery: Scott by the main road back to Dr. Beanes’s house in tipper Marlboro; Andrew by that shortcut road towards the Wood Yard and Long Old Fields, where the army will have moved to a new bivouac during the day. Our ancestor is mightily tempted: his and Andrée’s program (he reminds her), at least until Tecumseh’s death, had been to promote stalemate; any youthful relish he might once have taken in spectacles of destruction has been long since sated by the French Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. With Barney’s fleet destroyed, Cochrane can put enough blockading pressure on the U.S. economy to force concession of an Indian free state; it is not necessary to destroy the young capital city. Barney’s men, at least, will stand and fight; this will be no bloodless “cossack hurrah.” And this time Andrew need do nothing on his own initiative: Cochrane’s letter is genuine; Lieutenant Scott will deliver it; he Andrew need only not impede its delivery, or at most confirm it with the news that Secretary Monroe is pressing for an attack on the British rear that same night.

This last he learns from a rapid visit to the city itself (which he enters unchallenged, so ill organized is its defense), together with the news that Winder has rejected that proposal. The general fears it will be the British who attack that night, to nullify his advantage in cavalry and artillery; he has therefore withdrawn his army from Long Old Fields back into the city, where they lie exhausted in the navy yard. There is no order; the place is pitifully exposed; the approach bridges across the east branch of the Potomac have not even been mined; only a few trunkfuls of government records have been packed out of town for safekeeping. There is a token guard at the President’s House, which Andrew approaches without difficulty. He chats with the guards; they cheerfully inform him that Madison has rejected the idea of blowing up the Capitol before it falls to the British: it will “stir the country more,” he has decided, if the enemy themselves destroy it. Incredibly, through a window of the house he catches sight of James and Dolley Madison themselves! Someone is gesticulating at the little man, who wearily shakes his head. Dolley, turning a wineglass in her fingers, seems to be directing servants; with her free hand she briefly touches her husband’s shoulder. People come and go with messages, advice.

The streets are empty. Andrew rides out of town about midnight with a defense party dispatched at last to burn the Potomac bridges. They tell him that a slave revolt is rumored to be in progress throughout Maryland and Virginia; that the British have armed 2,000 blacks with specific instructions to rape all white females regardless of age and station; that the non-defense of Washington is New England’s revenge on Madison for sending up southern generals to lose the Canadian campaign, which if successful would have added more non-slaveholding states to the Union. Holding his peace, Andrew passes with them through the sentries at the river. Except for a force of militia at Bladensburg, the northeastern approach to the city, there are no American troops beyond those sentries. So far from fearing capture in the five-mile ride back to the British camp, Andrew suffers from loneliness on the vacant country road, where “nothing stirr’d save the owls, and their prey.” Nevertheless, the night is sweet after the oppressive afternoon; he takes his time. As he finds Ross’s and Cockburn’s quarters, about 3:00 A.M., he sees a glow behind him from the burning bridges.

The general and the admiral are up and pacing about outside. Lieutenant Scott stands by with other aides, his letter delivered uneaten — and evidently undigested by the addressee. The tableau is clear: Ross shakes his head like Madison; Cockburn gesticulates, expostulates, curses, coaxes. Ross points to the fire-glow; no matter, Cockburn replies, we will attack by way of Bladensburg, a better approach anyhow, since the river there is shallow enough to ford if the bridge is blown. The local militia will never stand against Wellington’s Invincibles, who after their victory will surely be renamed Ross’s Invincibles. On the other hand, Earl Bathurst and the prince regent will be furious to learn that such an easy, spectacular plum has been left unplucked, should we turn back now.

The decision must be Ross’s, and he cannot make it. Cockburn looks about, rolling his eyes. A whippoorwill starts, the first voice that Wednesday morning besides their own. Andrew himself, remembering Dolley Madison’s hand on her husband’s shoulder and missing Andrée (but perhaps mindful also of a third tableau: Andrée walking and talking with Tecumseh at Castines Hundred), decides to grant this much to the American, at least the Maryland, line of his descent: if his advice is solicited, he will point out that symbolic losses meant to demoralize can sometimes have the reverse effect: if they do not crush your adversary’s spirit, as the loss of Tecumseh dispirited the Indian confederacy, they may unify and inspirit him instead.

There is a pause. Ross looks his way but does not ask, may not even recognize Andrew in the darkness. Then he claps his brow, “as reluctant a conqueror as ever conquer’d,” and declares to Cockburn, Yes, all right, very well, God help us, let it be, we will proceed. On to Bladensburg—

& Washington!

I write these pages, Henry, in my air-conditioned office on Redmans Neck, on another torrid tidewater Wednesday. The leaves I decipher and transcribe — and must now, alas, more and more summarize (the afternoon is done; I have business of my own in Washington tomorrow, which I will enter as Ross’s army did, via the Baltimore Pike through Bladensburg) — our ancestor ciphered on a milder July 16 on the orlop deck of Bellerophon, where Napoleon surrendered the morning previous to escape arrest, after his second abdication, by officers of the restored Bourbons. Andrew will not explain until his next letter (August 6, 1815) what has fetched him to Rochefort; how it comes that he has not only witnessed the emperor’s surrender but is about to dash overland to Le Havre and London with Allied dispatch couriers to negotiate British passports to America for Napoleon and his suite. He merely announces, in this letter, that such is the case, and that he must therefore leave “to another day, or another Muse,” the full singing of the fall of Washington, the bombardment of Baltimore, and his own “death & resurrection.”

It is a song, Henry, your father had thought to sing himself, in the years before I turned (to cite the motto of this border state) from parole femine to fatti maschii: from “womanly words” to “manly deeds,” or from the registration of our times to their turning: my Marylandiad!

Sing of wee scholarly Madison’s kissing Dolley farewell that Wednesday morning, buckling on the brace of big dueling pistols given him by his treasury secretary (who has quit and left town in disgust), riding bravely out to Bladensburg, right through the center of his troops drawn up for battle… and almost into the British columns assembling just below the rise! Sing of the heat of that August forenoon: temperature and humidity both in the high 90’s, and the redcoats dropping already of heat exhaustion as they quickstep to Bladensburg. Half a canto then to the confusion and contradiction among the Americans, now some 6,000 strong as new units rush in at last from Annapolis, from Baltimore, and opposing an attack force of no more than 1,500 British. But those are Wellington’s Invincibles, the Scourge of Spain, under clear and unified command, where these are farmers, watermen, tradesmen, ordered here by General Winder, there by General Stansbury, elsewhere by Secretary Monroe, elsewhere again by Francis Scott Key, the Georgetown lawyer who wanders up now full of advice for Winder, his fellow attorney. Some units are in the others’ line of fire; many do not know that the rest are there, and think themselves alone against Ross’s regulars; many have disapproved of the war from its outset, or believe it intentionally mismanaged; most have never seen combat before.

Half a canto therefore — and no more, and not without sympathy — to the “Bladensburg Races.” The battle is joined; men begin to die. Unbelievably, the Americans have not blown the Bladensburg bridge; it must be seized at once. For the last time, Ross wavers — homespun militia or not, it seems to him a very large number of Yankees over there, defending after all their own capital city — and for the fifth, sixth, seventh time Cockburn cries Attack, attack. Between artillery blasts from the American earthworks the British race across the bridge and take cover; lacking artillery themselves, they open up on the Americans’ second line of defense with Congreve rockets fetched in from the fleet. Marvelously inaccurate but fearsome to behold, the Congreves fall among the soldiers, the horses, the crowds of spectators come out from Washington and Georgetown to see the show. The rockets are easily and quickly launched, from a simple tube; flight follows flight of them, sputtering and shrieking, as the bright British bayonets move toward the front line — and suddenly all is panic. Horses whinny and bolt, onlookers scream and run; the whole center breaks, and the left, and the right, and the second line, not a quarter hour after the first redcoat crosses the bridge. Cannon are left behind unspiked, muskets thrown away; the swift trample the slow; Madison’s party is swept back in the general rout. General Ross looks astonished: the battle has not yet properly commenced, and the Americans run, run, run for their lives. Some will not stop till they reach Virginia, or western Maryland. Everyone runs!

Almost everyone. For who are these rolling in like an alexandrine at the canto’s end, kedging forward against the shameful tide? Jérôme Bonaparte’s old comrade Joshua Barney, with his stranded flotillamen and the 12- and 18-pounders from their scuttled ships! All morning they have ransacked the navy yard for mules and ammunition; the sailors themselves are harnessed to the guns, which they hurriedly place now across the turnpike almost at the District of Columbia line. They know how to aim (no deck so steady as terra firma); they know how to stand and fire (no place to retreat to on a boat, till your officers decide to turn the thing around). Now whole companies of British die, who had survived the horrors Goya drew. Ross’s advance is stopped; Barney’s marines even mount a brief but successful charge against the King’s Own Regiment, driving them back with bayonets and cutlasses and cries of “Board ’em, boys!”—but there is no President’s Own behind them to follow up with a counterattack.

The flotillamen withdraw to their guns, hold on aggressively yet awhile against the regrouping, readvancing, reencircling British. They begin to die now in numbers themselves; they cling to their line for yet another salvo and another, even when their ammunition wagons (driven by scared civilians under contract) desert them. Under Winder’s orders then, reinforced at last by Barney’s own, they spike their guns and go, leaderless. For (also at his own orders) they must leave their wounded commodore behind. Barney has taken a musket ball in the hip, and concealed the wound till he falls. He will die of it after the war, en route to settle in Kentucky like Odysseus wandering inland from the sea. Now he is discovered by his old adversary Admiral Cockburn, who has suspected all along where such accurate resistance came from. “I knew it was the flotillamen!” he cries to Ross. The general pays his respects and forthwith paroles his wounded enemy. The two old sailors congratulate each other on the most effective fighting of the day (those rockets were Cockburn’s idea); the admiral orders the commodore fetched back to Bladensburg for medical care and release, then rejoins Ross to pursue the battle.

But the battle is done. British casualties, most of them from Barney’s naval gunnery, are twice those of the Americans, who are not present to be killed. Catching up with them is out of the question; it is an oven of an afternoon. “The victors were too weary,” Cockburn reports later, “the vanquished too swift,” for evening out the casualties. The redcoats rest. As the sun goes down a fresh party is brought forward to enter the city, which Ross expects to be better defended by a regrouped American army.

But the invaders march down Maryland Avenue unopposed toward the Capitol. Not only have the defenders fled; they have looted as they flew: had Dolley Madison not seen to it that George Washington’s portrait was evacuated from the President’s House, it would as likely have fallen to American looters as to British, as did Madison’s dueling pistols. The President’s butler has packed a few last valuables, left the front-door key at the Russian ministry, and gone in search of his employers. Save for one volley from Robert Sewall’s house on Maryland Avenue and 2nd Street N.E., there is no resistance whatever. Sewall’s house is quickly fired with rockets. A few blacks stand about to watch; there are no other Washingtonians in evidence. In vain, as the building burns, Ross orders drumrolls to call for a parley; he is still more inclined to indemnify than to burn. There is no one to reply. No interim authority has been delegated, no orders have been given, no provisions made. Admiral Cockburn is delighted: nothing for it now but to proceed with their business!

But, Muse, before you sing the sack of Washington, say: Can you see, from the heights of Helicon, where is our ancestor all this while, my son’s and mine? For this Marylandiad is no history book, but the epic of Andrew Cook at the midpoint of his life. He was up all night: has he slept through the day’s most epical set piece? Was he lost in the confusion of battle like Stendhal’s Fabrizio at Waterloo? It is past eight; that glare in the east is the Washington Navy Yard, fired by its retreating commandant; those explosions are the fort at Greenleaf Point, ditto. Now it is nine: British demolition teams have broken into the Capitol, chopped its woodwork into kindling, piled up chairs and tables in the Senate and the House, added buckets of rocket powder; Cockburn has seated himself in the place of the Speaker of the House, gaveled for order, and put the mocking question to his men: Shall this harbor of Yankee democracy be burned?

Where is A. B. Cook IV?

Why, Henry, there he is, there in the doorway, just entered from the lobby, his throat so full of a heartfelt, self-surprising nay that he can scarcely keep it in! Like Madison, whose near-blundering into British hands he has earlier observed from across the lines of battle, Andrew has been a mere spectator of the Bladensburg debacle. He has not been impressed with Ross’s generalship: after so much prodding and vacillation, the man in Andrew’s opinion made a foolish and bloody decision to attack frontally across that bridge (no doubt in his surprise to find it intact). He could as easily have forded the river upstream and fallen on the Americans’ flank while Cockburn fired his Congreves into their front; British casualties needn’t have been so high. Nevertheless, Andrew has felt personal shame at the panic and rout of the American militia, and contrariwise such admiration for Josh Barney’s resistance that with Cockburn’s permission he has accompanied the wounded commodore back to the Bladensburg tavern pressed into service as a field hospital. It is Andrew who, when Barney complains that Ross’s soldiers don’t know how to bear a stretcher properly, finds four willing sailors from the rocket squad to relieve them, and suggests they soothe their patient en route with fo’c’sle chanteys.

It is not simply Barney’s physical courage that Andrew is moved by, but his particular brand of patriotism: complex, at times self-interested (it was Barney’s vanity, piqued by the promotions of others before himself, that led him earlier to resign his commission in the U.S. Navy for one in the French), but strong and unambiguous where it matters — by contrast, say, with the contemptible soullessness of Secretary Armstrong, or his own confusions, equivocations, blunderings. In this, Barney seems to Andrew a rougher-cast version of Joel Barlow; indeed, they could pass for brothers both in appearance and under the skin. When the commodore thanks him for his attentions and asks whether he hasn’t seen him somewhere before — perhaps in William Patterson’s house a dozen years ago? — Andrew fakes a cockney accent and denies it.

The old man seen to, Andrew makes his way back into Washington, wishing as fervently as ever in his life that he could spit out “this Father business” once and for all and be… himself! By the blaze of Robert Sewall’s house he rides down Maryland Avenue to the Capitol, its windows shot out, its great doors battered open. He contemplates the imminent destruction, not merely of Corinthian columns and marble walls, but of the infant Library of Congress upstairs and the Supreme Court’s law library below; of the records, the files, the archives of the young republic. He passes through the lobby to the House chamber, his head full of the slogans of the American and French revolutions, together with the ideals of the Magna Carta, of English Common Law and parliamentary procedure. Why are these destroying these? Futile as the gesture would have been, when he sees Admiral Cockburn in the Speaker’s chair and hears him call to his rocket-wielding troopers for the question, the nay comes near to bursting from him…

But then it strikes Andrew that the official incumbent of that chair is the man perhaps most singly responsible for the war: Henry Clay, the archhawk of Kentucky, at that moment in Ghent with the peace commissioners to make sure that no Indian Free State is let into the treaty, and brandishing in token of his belligerence a razor-strop made from the skin of Tecumseh. “Aye!” our forefather shouts before the rest, who chorus affirmation. It is exactly ten o’clock. The motion carries; Cockburn raps the gavel; rockets are fired into the piled-up combustibles; the party retires from the blaze and moves down Pennsylvania Avenue to the President’s House and the Treasury Building. Over his shoulder, as he moves on with them, Andrew sees the Capitol of the United States in flames.

Now the men are weary. All but the indefatigable Cockburn complete the night’s work methodically, with little horseplay. If Ross has been less than resolute or brilliant as an attacker, he is an admirable executor of this occupation, for which he has no taste. There are no rapes, no molestations of civilians, no systematic pillaging of private property. Even the looting of the public buildings he keeps to the souvenir level, and he frowningly detaches himself from Cockburn’s high jinks. At the President’s House they find dinner laid out for forty: as Cockburn’s men fall upon the cold meats and Madeira, and the admiral toasts the health of “Jemmy Madison and the prince regent,” and steals “Jemmy’s love letters” from a desk drawer and a cushion from Mrs. Madison’s chair to remind him “of Dolley’s sweet arse,” Ross quietly gives orders to fire the place and move on. The officers retire to Mrs. Suter’s tavern on 15th Street for a late supper; Ross’s frown darkens when the admiral rides roaring in upon the white mule he has been pleased to bestride all day. Such displays Ross regards as dangerous to good discipline and unbefitting the dignity of such events as the destruction of capital cities.

Andrew agrees, though in the contrast of humors between the general and the admiral he sees a paradigm of his own mixed feelings, and he is mindful of the resolve and bold imagination that entitle Cockburn to his present entertainment. Since the firing of the Capitol, Andrew’s heart is still. He quotes here an ironic editorial comment from a British newspaper printed weeks later, when the news reaches London:

There will be great joy in the United States on account of the destruction of all their public and national records, as the people may now invent a fabulous origin…

The destruction itself, reports Andrew, from the moment of that gavel rap in Cockburn’s congress, has seemed to him to move from the historical plane to the fabulous. Like one “whose father’s certain death releases one at last to love him,” Andrew feels the stirrings of a strange new emotion.

But first one must see that father truly and completely buried, and so he not only follows Ross and Cockburn through the balance of the night’s destruction, and the next day’s, but finds finally “a fit chiaroscuro” in the contrast of their manners, “apt as Don Quixote and his ribald squire.” It is getting on to midnight. From Mrs. Suter’s tavern the trio ride to their final errand of the evening, another of Cockburn’s inspirations, which Ross reluctantly assents to: private property or not, the Admiral vows he will not sleep until he burns the offices of the National Intelligencer, which for two years has been abusing him in its columns. The general goes along to make sure that no other private buildings are damaged or further mischief made; Andrew to see “the funeral rites” through to the end and confirm his sense of the increasing fabulousness of the occasion.

They locate Joe Gales’s Intelligencer building between 6th and 7th streets on Pennsylvania Avenue, and by the light of the still-blazing Capitol read the lead story of its morning edition, fetched out by the soldiers who break down the door: The city is safe; there is no danger from the British. Just at midnight another thunderstorm breaks theatrically upon them. Cockburn yields to the entreaties of two neighbor ladies not to burn the building, lest their houses catch fire as well. It is too wet now for burning anyhow; he will wreck the place in the morning. He commandeers a red tunic and musket from one of the 3rd Brigade troopers, bids Andrew take them, and orders him to stand watch at the Intelligencer till they return at dawn. Cook has been witness long enough; time to earn his pay.

The officers retire then for the night: the 3rd Brigade to Capitol Hill, the others to encampments outside the District. For the next several hours, Henry — till Cockburn eagerly goes to’t again at 5:30 next morning — Andrew Burlingame Cook IV is in sole charge of the capital of the United States!

When not pacing his beat, he employs the time to begin drafting the record of these events thus far, which will not be redrafted, dated, and posted till nearly a year later. His sence of “fabulosity” does not diminish, even though (perhaps because) he verges on exhaustion. As in a dream he watches Cockburn’s men destroy the newspaper office, piing the type into Pennsylvania Avenue and wrecking the presses. The admiral himself, with Andrew’s help, destroys all the uppercase C’s, “so that Gales can defame me no further,” and thenceforth calls himself “the Scourge of the C’s.” While fresh troops from the 1st Brigade reignite the Treasury Building (extinguished by last night’s storm) and burn the State, War, and Navy Department Building, Cook and Cockburn make a tour of the ruined navy yard: confronting there the allegorical Tripoli Monument (to American naval victories off the Barbary Coast), Andrew is dispatched to snatch the bronze pen from the hand of History and the palm from the hand of Fame. Back in the city he hears General Ross declare that he would not have burned the President’s House if Mrs. Madison had taken sanctuary there, nor the Capitol building had he known it to have housed the Congressional Library: “No, sir,” Ross declares emphatically: “I make war against neither letters nor ladies.”

The post office is scheduled to go next, but inasmuch as the superintendent of patents argues that the building also houses the patent models, which are private property, and Andrew adds ironically that by the same reasoning all the letters in the post office are private too, the burning is postponed till the officer in charge can get a ruling from Cockburn, still enjoying himself down at the Intelligencer. Meanwhile he and his squad have another mission: to destroy the powder magazine at Greenleaf Point, which the Yankees have forgot. Since that officer and his men will never return, the P.O. is spared: most of the letters are eventually delivered (Andrew wished he had got this one posted in time), and the Congress, upon its return in September, has one building large enough to enable it to sit in Washington rather than in Lancaster, Pa. (the second choice), where once established it would very possibly have stayed.

And the reason for those men’s not returning begins the end of Andrew’s “fable.” This Thursday the 25th is another poaching tidewater August day: stifling heat, enervating humidity, dull haze and angry thunderheads piling up already by noon to westward, where Ross imagines Madison to have regrouped his government and army to drive the invaders out. The demolition party goes to Greenleaf Point, the confluence of the Potomac’s east and west branches; they decide to drown the 150 powder barrels in a well shaft there, not realizing that the water is low; they dump the barrels in; someone adds a cigar, or a torch (it cannot be Andrew; he is back at the post office, writing this letter). The explosion is seismic: the whole city trembles, blocks of buildings are unroofed, windows shatter everywhere; the concussion sickens everyone for half a mile around. Greenleaf Point itself virtually disappears, the demolition squad with it; no one even knows how many men die — one dozen, three. Debris lands on the post office, a mile away. And as the mangled casualties are collected, nature follows with another blow: no mere terrific thundersquall, but a bona fide tornado, a 2 P.M. twister that unroofs the post office after all, sends letters flying, blows men out of the saddle and cannon off their carriages, picks up trees and throws them, tears the masts out of ships — all this with an astonishing deluge of rain, lightning bolts, and thunderclaps that make the Battle of Bladensburg a Guy Fawkes Day picnic. Unprecedented even in the experience of seasoned Marylanders, it quite demoralizes the redcoats still assembling their dead and wounded: they cling to fences, flatten themselves in the lee of the burned-out Capitol, wish themselves in Hell rather than in America.

Andrew is stunned by the first explosion; the second seems to awake him from the daze in which by his own acknowledgment he has witnessed and participated in this “funeral service for his fatherland.” The storm is as brief as it is tremendous: “wash’d clean, blown clean, shaken clean” by it, he quietly advises Ross (not Cockburn) to bluff and stall the surrender delegations from Alexandria and Georgetown, who expect him to negotiate indemnities. American reinforcements must be massing already on the northwest heights of the Potomac; units from Baltimore could still fairly easily cut off their retreat. It is time to go.

Ross is of the same mind. Even Cockburn is weary, his adventure successful beyond his most histrionic imaginings. The officers feign interest in negotiation; they decide in fact, privately, to let Captain Gordon’s Potomac squadron continue up to Alexandria and ransom the town; they impose an 8 P.M. curfew and order campfires lit as usual to signal their continuing presence — and then they march the army by night back out Maryland Avenue, back through Bladensburg (where more wounded are entrusted to Commodore Barney against further exchange of prisoners). With only brief rest stops they march for 48 hours, back through Upper Marlboro and Nottingham, to Benedict and the waiting fleet. Though scores of exhausted stragglers, and not a few deserters taken by the possibilities of life in America, will wander about southern Maryland for days to come — a number of them to be arrested for foraging by Ross and Cockburn’s former host Dr. Beanes, with momentous consequences — the expedition against Washington is over: seven days since they stepped ashore, General Ross and Admiral Cockburn are back on Sir Alexander Cochrane’s flagship, toasting their success. Cockburn wears President Madison’s hat and sits on Dolley’s pillow; Ross frowns and tallies up the casualties; Cochrane considers how quickly they can get back down the Patuxent, and where to go next, and what to do for an encore.

So does our progenitor. His letter, Henry, is shorter by half than this, which is meant for less knowledgeable eyes as well as your own. Andrew merely mentions, for Andrée, what I have rehearsed more amply here. What is to come he treats even more summarily, an anticlimax in his letters as it is in the history of 1814, though it cost him his “life”: the bombardment of Fort McHenry and the abortive attack on Baltimore. (As for the Battle of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent, further anticlimaxes, they are relegated, the former to a postscript, the latter to a parenthesis within that postscript, at the foot of this posthumous letter.)

In his epistle, I remind you, the burning of Washington is but the apocalyptic mise en scène for the final burying of Andrew’s inconsistent and equivocal, but prevailing, animus against the American line of his own descent, an animus that peaked at Tecumseh’s death. After that explosion and tornado on August 25, his head is clear but neutral: the odd emotion of patriotism is still there, but still nascent and tempered; he would not now snatch from the U.S. Navy History’s pen and Fame’s palm (he has conveniently “mislaid” them, to Cockburn’s chagrin; they are in my cottage on Bloodsworth Island; one day they shall be yours), but he would not yet restore them, either.

He has encouraged General Ross to withdraw. Guessing Cockburn’s eagerness to follow up the Washington triumph with a quick and wholesale attack on Baltimore, he casts about now for ways to forestall that move; he is not yet ready to arrange for British defeats, but he is prepared to do what he can to counter further victories. He anticipates, correctly, that when news of the Washington expedition reaches London and Ghent (in early October) the U.S. peace commissioners will incline to accept the British ultimatum that the Indians be restored at least to their prewar boundaries, nullifying Harrison’s defeat of Tecumseh; indeed, they will be relieved that the British are not insisting that the Indians themselves send commissioners to the Hotel des Pays-Bas. As Andrew puts it, he has interred his father; time now to tend the grave and look to a fit memorial, not to drive a stake through the old man’s heart.

He is relieved therefore to find that Cochrane and Ross are already of a mind to leave the Chesapeake for the present. As the fleet works its way down the Patuxent (old Dr. Beanes has been seized and put in irons on the Tonnant for arresting those British stragglers), Cochrane announces that while he has every intention not only to attack but to destroy “that nest of pirates… that most democratic town and… the richest in the union,” whose fleet of privateers has sunk or captured no fewer than 500 British ships since 1812, he will not do it until midautumn, when “the sickly season” in the Chesapeake is past. They will rendezvous off Tangier Island with Captain Parker’s Menelaus and Captain Gordon’s task force from the Potomac; reprovisioned, they will dispatch Admiral Cockburn and the prize tobacco to Bermuda and take the army on up to Rhode Island. Newport once captured, they will rest and wait for reinforcements. Then, when the Americans will have frantically dispersed their forces to defend New York and New England, they will sweep back to destroy Baltimore, maybe Charleston too, and end their campaign at New Orleans. That should wind up the war, even without further successes on the Niagara Frontier.

Andrew is delighted. The trip north will give him time to make his own plans; from Newport it should be easy to slip away to Castines Hundred; perhaps by late October a treaty will be signed. Ross agrees with Cochrane; Admiral Cockburn cannot prevail against them. On September 4 the orders are given: thirteen ships to remain on patrol in the Chesapeake; the main body of warships and transports to re-rendezvous off Rhode Island; Cockburn to join them there after his errand in Bermuda — all this as soon as they are provisioned at Tangier Island. There the fleet anchors, on the 6th. A dispatch boat is sent off to London with Cochrane’s reports of the Washington victory and his plan to move north. Gordon’s ships are still working down the Potomac with their prizes from Alexandria; the Menelaus arrives from up the Bay with Sir Peter Parker in a box, shot by an Eastern Shore militiaman during a diversionary raid. (In London, Byron will merrily set about composing his Elegy.) The army disembarks for the night to camp on a Methodist meeting ground presided over by Joshua Thomas, the “Parson of the Islands.” Next morning early, Admiral Cockburn grumblingly weighs anchor and points the Albion south toward the Virginia Capes.

And then, Henry, at midmorning the whole fleet makes sail, not for Block Island and Newport, but back up the Bay, toward Baltimore!

Andrew declares himself as baffled by this sudden change of plan as all chroniclers of the period have been since. It cannot have been Cockburn’s doing: he and the Albion must be sent after and signaled to return. Some have speculated, faute de mieux, that the Menelaus fetched back, along with her dead young captain, irresistible intelligence of the city’s vulnerability and accurate soundings of the Patapsco River up to Baltimore Harbor. Others, that Joshua Thomas’s famous sermon to the troops on the morning of September 7, warning them that their attack on Baltimore was destined to fail, actually reinterested Ross and Cochrane in that project! We have seen how cautious a general Ross is, how fickle an admiral Cochrane: one can even suppose that the very dispatching of their withdrawal plans to London, and of Cockburn to Bermuda, inclined them afterwards to do what they’d just decided not to do.

And there is another explanation, which Andrew ventures but, in the nature of the case, cannot be sure of. It is that the three commanding officers had secretly agreed from the first, upon their return to the fleet after burning Washington, to move directly upon Baltimore, and that the unusually elaborate feint down the Bay was calculated to deceive not only the defenders of that city but spies aboard the fleet itself. No one is named by name; no one is clapped into irons to join Dr. Beanes in the Tonnant’s brig or hanged from the yardarms. But it is as if (writes Andrew) his alteration of heart has writ itself upon his brow. He finds himself politely excluded from strategy discussions. To his remark that Cockburn will be particularly chagrined to miss the show if the dispatch boat fails to overtake him, the officers only smile — and by noon the Albion is back in view.

That same afternoon the Tonnant is met by the frigate Hebrus carrying a truce party of Marylanders come to negotiate for the release of Dr. Beanes: the U.S. prisoner-exchange agent John Skinner and that lawyer whom we last saw at the Bladensburg Races, Francis Scott Key. They are given immediate audience with Ross and Cochrane, the more cordial because they’ve brought letters from the British wounded left under Joshua Barney’s supervision; they are told at once that though Beanes will be released to them in reward for the kind treatment of those wounded, the three Americans must remain with the fleet until after the attack on Baltimore, lest they spoil the surprise. The Tonnant being overcrowded with senior officers, Key and Skinner are then transferred, as a civilized joke, to the frigate Surprize, and Andrew Cook (without explanation) is transferred with them. Indeed it is from Key, whom he quickly befriends on the basis of a common admiration for Joel Barlow’s non-epical verse, that Andrew learns for certain that their target is not Annapolis or Alexandria — whence Captain Gordon’s task force has yet to return — but Baltimore.

Our forefather’s words here are at once candid and equivocal. I described myself, he writes, as an American agent who, to remain useful to my country and avoid being hang’d, had on occasion to be useful to the British as well. Whose pretence to Cochrane & Co. was necessarily just the reverse. Whose true feelings about the war were mixt enough to have carry’d off this role successfully for a time; but who now was fallen into the distrust, not only of “John Bull” & “Brother Jonathan,” but of myself. Key rather shares these sentiments: he regards the war as an atrocious mistake, Baltimore as a particularly barbarous town; he is disposed to admire the British officers as gentlemen of culture. But with a few exceptions he has found them as offensively ignorant and scornful of Americans as the Americans are of them; the scores of desertions from the British rank and file — desertions from the “winning” to the “losing” side! — have shown him the appealing face of democracy’s vulgar coin; and the destruction of Washington touched chords of patriotism he has not felt since 1805, when he was moved to write a song in honor of Stephen Decatur’s naval triumphs at Tripoli. The defacing of the navy’s monument to that occasion has particularly incensed him: did Andrew know that the invaders went so far as to snatch the pen from History’s hand, the palm from Fame’s?

There was a vandal with a poet’s heart, Andrew uncomfortably replies, to whom the fit response might be another patriotic ode, one that will stir the indignation even of New Englanders. Pen has a natural rhyme in men, for example, does it not, and palm in balm. Shall they give it a go?

Their camaraderie remains on this level, for Key is either ignorant of the actual defense preparations of Baltimore (which information Andrew solicits in the hope of both restoring his credit with Ross and Cochrane and misleading them) or distrustful of his new companion. The combination of pens and statuary suggests to Andrew that graven is a more promising rhyme for Barlow’s raven than the one Lord Byron came up with: he volunteers it to Key and resolves to send it on to Byron as well, for consideration in some future elegy to Sir Peter Parker.

When the fleet turns off the Bay and up into the Potomac on the 8th, they wonder whether they have been yet again deliberately misled; whether a follow-up attack on Washington is the real, at least the first, objective. But on the 9th they meet Captain Gordon’s flotilla returning from Alexandria; the diversion has been a standby for rescuing Gordon if necessary. The combined forces stand back downriver, anchor overnight at the mouth of the Patuxent, and on the 10th run north past frantic Annapolis. They sail through the night and by afternoon on Sunday the 11th begin assembling at anchor off North Point, at the mouth of the Patapsco, within sight of Fort McHenry eight miles upriver. “The Americans”—so Admiral Cochrane now refers to them, without a glance at Andrew — are transferred from the Surprize back to the flag-of-truce sloop they’d arrived on, still monitored by a British junior officer: Dr. Beanes is paroled to join them, and Andrew is included in their party without comment. He sees his erstwhile companion Admiral Cockburn rowed over from the Albion to the shallower-draft Fairy to confer with Ross about their landing strategy (they are to take the army and marines overland from North Point to fall on Baltimore from the east, while Cochrane moves a force of frigates, bomb ships, and rocket launchers upriver to reduce Fort McHenry and move on the city from below). He sees Admiral Cochrane transferred from the heavy Tonnant to the lighter Surprize in preparation for that maneuver — wherefore “the Americans” have been shifted. Andrew waves tentatively, still hopeful; but if Cochrane, Ross, and Cockburn see him, they make no sign.

Say now, Muse, for Henry’s sake, what Key can’t see, nor John Skinner nor Dr. Beanes nor Andrew Cook, from where they languish for the next three days. Speak of General Sam Smith’s determination that the Bladensburg Races shall not be rerun: his mustering and deployment of 16,000 defenders, including the remnants of Barney’s flotillamen, behind earthworks to the east of town and fortifications around the harbor; his dispatching of an attack force at once to meet the enemy at North Point when he’s certain they’ll land there. Declare what Major Armistead at Fort McHenry knows, and no one else: that the fort’s powder magazine is not, as everyone assumes it to be, bombproof; that one direct hit will send his fort, himself, and his thousand-man garrison to kingdom come and leave the harbor virtually undefended. Tell my son of the new letter that now arrives by dispatch boat from Governor-General Prevost in Canada to Admiral Cochrane, reporting further American atrocities on the Niagara Frontier and urging the admiral again to retaliate, not with indemnifications, but with fire. The British and even the American newspapers are praising Ross for his restraint in Washington: his firing only of public buildings, his care not to harm noncombatants; such solicitude is not what Prevost wants, and Cochrane is determined this time that Ross shall be hard, that the governor-general shall get what he wants. Say too, Muse, what Ross and Cochrane themselves can’t see: that even as this letter arrives, its author, at the head of an invasion force of 14,000 British veterans in upstate New York, is suffering a double defeat. His naval forces on Lake Champlain are destroyed before his eyes that same Sunday morning, and just as he commences a land attack on Plattsburgh in concert with it, he intercepts a letter from Colonel Fosset of Vermont to the defending American General Macomb, advising him of massive reinforcements en route to his aid. That very night, as Ross’s army lands for the second time in Maryland, Prevost panics and orders a retreat back to Canada.

The letter from Prevost to Cochrane is authentic; the one Prevost intercepts from Fosset to Macomb is false. Those 10,000 reinforcements do not exist. The U.S. Secret Service has forged the letter and entrusted its delivery to “an Irishwoman of Cumberland Head” whom they know to be a double agent; as they hope, she dutifully betrays them and delivers it to Prevost instead of to Macomb. Was it you, my darling (Andrew wonders at Rochefort a year later, from the deck of Bellerophon), who forged that letter for the Secret Service, or who posed as that Irishwoman? Were you reversing the little trick we play’d on General Hull at Detroit? May I believe that you too think it time to end the British dallying at Ghent and conclude a treaty, now that our Indian Nation seem’d assured?

Andrée does not reply. He will never know, nor we.

Say on then, Muse, for Henry, what you saw and Andrew didn’t at the Battle of Baltimore, which like the Battle of Plattsburgh never quite took place. It is Monday, September 12th, still warm in Maryland and threatening rain. Ross and Cockburn begin their overland advance, pause for breakfast at a convenient farmhouse, and decline the owner’s cautious invitation to return for dinner: he will dine that evening, Ross declares, “in Baltimore or in Hell.” A few hours later, on Cockburn’s advice, he rides back a bit to hurry a light brigade along in support of his advance party, who have got too far ahead of the rest and are meeting the first desultory American fire. As Ross trots down the North Point Road, the anonymous, invisible Americans fire again from their concealment in a grove of oaks. One bullet strikes him in the arm and chest: he falls, he speaks of his wife, he dies. The invasion will go forward, that day and the next, under Ross’s successor and Admiral Cockburn, who commands only his own small band of marines. The American advance line will retreat, but in less disorder than at Bladensburg; they will regroup with the main force of militia at Sam Smith’s earthworks to await the real assault. On Tuesday the 13th Colonel Brooke (the new British commander, even more cautious than his predecessor) and Admiral Cockburn will position their forces before those earthworks and wait for news of Cochrane’s success at Fort McHenry before mounting their attack. And for all of Cockburn’s exasperated urgings, that attack will never be mounted, because that news will never come.

Can you see, Muse, through the rain of that sodden Tuesday, the letters going back and forth between Brooke and Cochrane, army and navy? Cochrane has written Ross on the Monday afternoon that, as best he can see from the river, the flank of Sam Smith’s earthworks may be turned without a frontal assault. His letter comes back that evening unopened, together with the news of Ross’s death. Unperturbed, perhaps relieved, Cochrane orders the body preserved in a cask of Jamaican rum and dashes off encouragement to Colonel Brooke: Prevost says burn, burn; I will take Fort McHenry (the harbor, alas, is blocked with scuttled privateers); you take the city. On Tuesday morning his bomb and rocket ships open fire, out of range of the guns of the fort. Three hours later he is already wavering; another letter goes down the river and up the North Point Road, this one to Brooke via Admiral Cockburn: It appears we cannot help you; the city is too far away, the fort too strong; consider reconsidering whether Brooke should attack at all. But he sustains the one-way bombardment into the afternoon, and the garrison at McHenry must take their punishment without reply. Even Cochrane cannot see the one bombshell out of hundreds and hundreds that lands directly on the powder magazine, goes through its roof with fuse still sputtering and, like the one bullet that felled General Ross, might have rewrit this chapter of history had not a nimble nameless fellow leaped to douse it. Cochrane moves his ships in closer; the Americans at last and jubilantly return the barrage; he moves back out of range. Nothing is working. Here’s a letter from Brooke, fifteen hours late: he will be in Baltimore by noon! But it’s past three, and there’s no sign of action at the earthworks. Cochrane can’t see what you can, Muse: that Brooke has got his letter, explored the enemy’s flanks and found them defended, and agreed with Cockburn that a night attack is the best strategy. As Cochrane reads this letter, Brooke is writing him another: the army and marines will attack at 2:00 A.M.; will the navy please stage a diversion on the farther side of Fort McHenry, as if moving up to threaten Baltimore from the west?

Letters! This second of Brooke’s received, unhappy Cochrane replies (to Cockburn) that the plan is folly: the navy can do nothing; McHenry will not fall; New Orleans is a richer city anyroad; retreat. It is Tuesday evening, rain coming down hard now. Cockburn scoffs at this letter — Washington all over again! — and urges Brooke to ignore it: Attack, attack. Brooke’s junior officers are of the same mind; retreats do not earn promotions. But command is heavy: if the army takes the city but the navy cannot take the fort to load prizes, there will be nothing but an expensive bonfire to show for possibly very high losses. If the army fails and the navy succeeds (as seems unlikely), the fall of Fort McHenry will mean nothing. The officers — not including disgusted Cockburn — argue till midnight, when Brooke wearily pens his last to Cochrane: We are following your advice; as the navy cannot take the fort, we shall retreat to North Point and reembark.

But on that same midnight (you can see and say, Muse, what they cannot) — suspecting that Cockburn might persuade Brooke to ignore these letters and attack — Cochrane dispatches after all, reluctantly, the diversionary force Brooke has requested but no longer wants. And here, Henry, our ancestor comes back into the tale. You have seen him, all this while, fretting through the bombardment with Key & Co. back at the main fleet anchorage. He is truly saddened, as you saw, by the news of Ross’s death: the man was overcautious, perhaps, but brave and not bloodthirsty, an officer and gentleman. You have seen Andrew fear for the fate of Baltimore if — as seems likely from Prevost’s letter and Cochrane’s first to Colonel Brooke — Cockburn has his way with the city. Rumors abound like Chesapeake mosquitoes; every dispatch boat leaves its message like a wake behind. Old Dr. Beanes complains he can’t see a thing; Andrew borrows a spyglass from the British lieutenant in charge of them and confirms through the day that Armistead has not yet struck his colors at McHenry. There is a bad moment towards late afternoon, just after the one heavy exchange of fire from the fort, when they lose sight of it, the big 30-by-42-foot Stars and Stripes, in the smoke and rain, and wonder whether after all the fort has died. But John Skinner recollects that there is a second flag there, a smaller “storm flag” for squally weather; he optimistically proposes that the renewed silence means only that the bomb ships have retired back out of range, and that Major Armistead may be using the lull to hoist a banner more appropriate to the wretched weather. Key is unconvinced. Dr. Beanes fears the worst.

Andrew volunteers to find out. He has seen how fretful is their young warden to be upriver with the action. Without much difficulty Andrew has insinuated that his own status is different from that of “the Americans,” some sort of special agency. When the message sails through that Brooke plans a night assault and wants diversionary action west of Fort McHenry, in the “Ferry Branch” of the Patapsco, he declares to the lieutenant that he knows those waters like the back of his hand (he has in fact crossed once on the ferry, in 1803, en route to Joshua Barney’s hotel and Jérôme Bonaparte’s wedding) and pleads to be fetched to Cochrane as a guide. Whether or not the lieutenant believes him, he sees a chance here to move his own career upstream, and so delegates his wardenly duties to a midshipman and fetches Andrew in a gig to the Surprize.

The Americans are indignant; Key in particular feels himself imposed upon, though he has never quite taken our forefather at face value, and though Andrew has done his hasty best to intimate that this present defection is another ruse. When Andrew presses on him a hurriedly penned note “in case we see each other no more,” Key at first will have none of it. But there is a winking look in the fellow’s eye… At last he stuffs the letter into his waistcoat and turns his back; Skinner and Beanes shake their fists at the departing gig.

Colonel Brooke’s final message, that he is withdrawing, has yet to be written, much less delivered. It seems likely to Andrew that Cockburn may prevail and the attack succeed, especially with the help of this new tactic; he is resolved therefore to do what he can to divert the diversion. What with the firing ceased and the rain still falling, the night is dead black. There is no need even to make his case to Admiral Cochrane: their gig is taken at once for one of the little flotilla assembling about the Surprize under general command of Captain Napier, and the lieutenant stays mum, recognizing the opportunity. Twenty small boats with muffled oars and light artillery, about fifteen men to a vessel, they head out at midnight in a quiet file. Andrew’s boat is ninth in line: a single tap on the lieutenant’s shoulder (even whispered conversation is forbidden) is enough to turn them and the eleven boats behind them up the wrong river-branch almost at once, into the line of scuttled ships across the harbor mouth. The lieutenant presently sees their peril — they are right under the guns of the fort! — but cannot proclaim it or denounce its cause; he gets the boats somehow turned about and headed back towards the Surprize.

Having assumed the lead, now they are in the rear of the line. Once out of earshot of the fort, and before the lieutenant can say anything, Andrew whispers angrily that his signal was misread. The other boats are clearly glad to abandon the mission; their crews are already scrambling home. The lieutenant must turn at once into the west, the left, the port, the Ferry Branch, and catch up with Napier, who in that darkness cannot even know that he now has nine boats instead of twenty. No time to argue: it’s that or explain to Admiral Cochrane what they’re doing there in the first place. They go — west, left, port — past looming dark McHenry and opposite the smaller forts Babcock and Covington. In their haste they make a bit of noise. No matter: it’s 1:00 A.M. now on Wednesday the 14th, and Cochrane recommences, per plan, his bombardment of Fort McHenry. Under cover of that tremendous racket and guided by bombshell light, they actually locate and join Napier’s reduced flotilla at anchor.

By that same light the captain is just now seeing what’s what and clapping his brow. The shore gunners see too, from the ramparts of Babcock and Covington, and open fire. Napier gives the signal to do what they’re there for; the nine boats let go with all they’ve got. Fort McHenry responds; the bomb and rocket ships intensify their barrage. For an hour the din and fireworks are beyond belief; if Brooke’s army needs a diversion, they’ve got it!

And the Ferry Branch is no place to be. Andrew sits in the gig’s stern sheets, stunned by the barrage. 18-pounders roar past to send up geysers all around; they will all die any moment. He has hoped the diversion would include a landing, so that (his credibility with Cochrane gone) he might slip away in the dark and commence the long trek back to Castines Hundred; now he considers whether swimming to shore is more dangerous than staying where he is. At 3:00 A.M., by some miracle, Napier has yet to lose a boat or a man. But their position is suicidal, and there is no sign of Brooke’s expected attack over beyond the city: those earthworks are deathly quiet. The captain cannot see that three miles away Brooke’s sleeping army has been bugled up and fallen in, not to assault the city but — to their own astonishment and the chagrin of their officers — to begin their two-day withdrawal to North Point, minus three dozen prisoners and 200 deserters. Napier has done all he can. He gives the signal (by hooded lantern) to retire.

They proceed back down the Ferry Branch as they came, along the farther shore from McHenry, whose gunners now lose them in the darkness and cease their fire. It looks as though Captain Napier, against all probability, will complete his assignment without casualties. Andrew tests the water with his hand: very warm in the cool night air. “We must signal the fleet we’re coming,” he whispers to the lieutenant, “or they’ll take us for Yankees,” and without asking permission he snatches up the launcher and fires a rocket to the Surprize. As he intends, it is seen at once by the Fort McHenry gunners as well as by the fleet. The lieutenant wrestles him down; the world explodes; the boat beside them goes up in shouts and splinters. All the batteries of Fort McHenry let loose, and flights of British rockets and bombshells respond. Andrew gets to his knees in the bilges among the straining, swearing oarsmen. His last sights are of the lieutenant scrambling for a pistol to shoot him with; of Major Armistead’s cannon-riddled storm flag — sodden and limp, but lit by the shellbursts over the McHenry ramparts — and of a misaimed Congreve whizzing their way, some piece of which (or of oar, or of gunwale) strikes him smartly abaft the right temple, just over the ear, as he dives into the bath-warm river.

He will wake half tranced some days or hours later, knowing neither where he is nor how he came there (Marvelous to relate, by a series of bonnes chances he is in the house of none other than the merchant William Patterson. Betsy’s elsewhere, avoiding Baltimore and making ready to return with nine-year-old Jérôme Junior to Europe, now that war’s done. Her father, after making a tour of his beloved city on the morning of the 15th, has volunteered his house to shelter the wounded defenders, for one of whom, by reason of his civilian clothes, Andrew was mistaken by the Fort McHenry garrison when they found him on the shore that same dull dawn). As he can neither say nor see now what he will piece together in the days to come, you sing it, Muse, if you can reach that high: how F. S. Key, that leaden A.M., has glassed Mary Pickersgill’s 17-by-25-foot $168.54 auxiliary stars and bars, standing out now in a rising easterly, and has shared the good news with his companions. How their joy increases through the morning at the retirement of the bomb ships and frigates downriver to the main anchorage, and at the obvious preparations on North Point for the army’s return. How in his elevation Key hums the English drinking tune he’d used for his ode to the Tripoli chaps, and searches vainly for something stirring to rhyme with stripes—or for that matter with flag, McHenry, Armistead, or Sam Smith. Not Cook’s graven/raven, certainly: he will entertain that word no more. He slaps about his person for paper to make a list on, and fishes forth the turncoat’s letter; is at first repelled by the notion of employing such compromised foolscap to so patriotic a purpose, stars wars bars, fight night sight, but comes soon to savor the paradox, Baltimore evermore nevermore? Dum dee dum dum dum dum: anapestic tetrameters actually, one quatrain and a pair of couplets, abab cc dd, feminine endings on the b lines, plus an internal rhyme to perk up the fifth line, he unfolds the sheet to see what the rascal wrote after all and reads

O Francis Scott Key,

Turn the bolt on our plight! Open wide Music’s door; see her treasure there gleaming! Golden notes bar on bar — which some more gifted wight than Yours Truly must coin into national meaning. For the United States of America’s fate hitherto’s to have been, in the arts, 2nd-rate. We’ve an army & a navy; we’re a country (right or wrong): but we’ve yet to find our voice in some national song!

ABC

Surprised to find it an apparently earnest, unironic exhortation (he has thought only to write some local sort of ode, for the Baltimore press perhaps), Key rereads the letter, Anacreon dum-dee-dumming in his head—et voilà. By the time Andrew is enough himself to leave Baltimore, the lyrics of Defense of Fort M’Henry have been run off in handbill form, rerun by the Baltimore Patriot & Evening Advertiser, re-rerun by presses in other towns, taken up by the tavern crowd; by the time he reaches New Orleans, Americans from Castine (Maine) to Barataria are straining their high registers for the rockets’ red glare and the la-and of the free, and have given Key’s anthem a different title.

Andrew goes, then, after all, not home to Castines Hundred, but to Louisiana. The reason he gives, here at the end of this second posthumous letter, is that, his patriotism having been both excited and gratified by the McHenry episode, he hopes to forestall the battle he knows is to come. That New Orleans will be Admiral Cochrane’s next objective he is certain, and that to atone for the inglorious retreat from Baltimore — as well as for Prevost’s retreat from Plattsburgh — the British will commit their forces to a major assault. But it is the opinion of William Patterson, whose judgment our ancestor respects, that the British economy, drained by the long campaign against Napoleon, cannot sustain the war into 1815. Patterson believes, and Andrew concurs, that when the news of Baltimore and Plattsburgh reaches London, the prince regent’s cabinet will settle a treaty at Ghent before the year ends, with or without their Indian buffer state and Mississippi navigation rights. Andrew fears that a decisive victory by either side at this point will upset the stalemate he and Andrée have been working for, and which despite his new feeling for the U.S.A. he still believes to be in the Indians’ best interest. Inasmuch as the Niagara Frontier is quiet (on Guy Fawkes Day 1814 General Izard will blow up Fort Erie and withdraw across the river to Buffalo, the last military action in the north), and Andrew Jackson has been authorized by Secretary Monroe to raise and command another army for defense of the Gulf Coast, the danger is clearly from that quarter.

But we do not forget, Henry, that our ancestor, no homebody at best, has been struck a severe blow to the head (the lieutenant of that gig has happily reported him killed; John Skinner and Dr. Beanes are not sorry to hear it; but Francis Key, less certain that the fellow was a turncoat, dutifully reports the news to “Mrs. Cook, Castines Hundred, Canada,” and somehow the letter reaches her despite the war and the vague address). Even as he closes this letter, two years later, Andrew is subject to spells of giddiness, occasional blackouts, from each of which he awakes momentarily believing himself to be on Bloodsworth Island, 36 years old, and the War of 1812 not yet begun. Though he never loses sight of his larger end—“the rectification, in [his] life’s 2nd cycle, of its 1st”—his conception of means, never very consistent, grows more and more attenuated. We remind ourselves that he is completing this letter in France, from Bellerophon, Napoleon a prisoner on board, himself about to set out on an urgent errand in that connection, and yet nowhere in these pages explains how he got there, and what business it is of his to get the fallen emperor a passport to America! No wonder Andrée was skeptical, if she read these lettres posthumes at all.

There was also talk at Mr. Patterson’s of the Baratarians [Andrew concludes his letter glibly], a band of freebooters led by the brothers Lafitte, of whom the younger, Jean, had been a captain with Napoleon. When the British in the Gulf solicited their services against New Orleans, Jean Lafitte sent their letters to his friend (and mine) Jean Blanque in the Louisiana legislature, hoping to raise his stock in New Orleans, where his brother Pierre had been jail’d as a pirate. But the Governor’s Council declared the letters forgeries, sent a Navy force to destroy Barataria, and jail’d Lafitte’s band. Thot I: Here is a man after my own heart, who might serve as a go-between to mislead both Admiral Cochrane & General Jackson into avoiding a disastrous battle. Thus I determin’d to seek out this Jean Lafitte at once, and solicit him to this end, before rejoining you & our children.

Incredibly, Henry, here his letter ends!

But for its postscript. In this mission [he writes under his signature], I both succeeded and fail’d. I did not prevent the bloodiest battle of the war (fought after the Peace had been sign’d in December) & the most decisive of American victories on land. But in Jean Lafitte, I who have never known a father found a true brother, with whom I fought on the American side in that battle, and whom one day I hope to include in the happiest of all reunions, yours & mine!

Defeated again, Admiral Cochrane seizes Fort Bowyer in Mobile Bay as a sort of consolation prize, and Andrew (inexplicably back with the fleet again) mails his first “posthumous letter.” Cochrane is still hopeful of a fresh expedition in the Chesapeake come spring, to destroy Baltimore, perhaps Washington again as well. He and Admiral Cockburn (who, operating off Georgia for the winter, has been spared the New Orleans fiasco) will mend their differences, go on to greater glory! News of the peace treaty thwarts that plan. Leaving Rear Admiral Malcolm the disagreeable chore of disposing of the blacks and Indians recruited to their cause, Cochrane retires to England to litigate with Cockburn over prize money.

The Ghent Treaty is bad news for Indians. Sobered by their losses at Baltimore and Plattsburgh, by rising marine insurance rates and falling export trade, by the uncertain peace in Europe and the rallying even of dissident New Englanders to Key’s new national song, the British have abandoned, on no less grave advice than Wellington’s own, their demand for the Great Lakes, half of Maine, and the rest — including the Indian state. There seems nothing now to prevent American expansion right across the Mississippi to the Pacific!

Unless (here the postscript closes)…

He it was [Jean Lafitte] who re-excited my interest in Napoleon, many of whose followers had fled to Louisiana after his 1st abdication. As Emperor of the French, Bonaparte was the curse of Europe. But suppose (as Jean was fond of supposing, whose loyalty was less to America than to France & freebootery) a new Napoleon were to govern a French-American territory from the Mississippi to the Rio Grande? Lafitte wisht to rescue the man from Elba & fetch him to New Orleans or Galvez-Town. I scoft at that idea — till Napoleon himself show’d me in March of 1815 it could be done, by escaping from that island & returning to France for his 100 Days. The news reacht us at sea, where (with other activities) Jean was planning a reconnaissance of Elba. He shrugg’d & return’d to Galvez-Town to try a 2nd Barataria, as his hero was trying a 2nd Empire in Europe. But I went on, by another vessel, with another plan in mind, the likelihood of which, events have conspired extraordinarily to advance. But that, dear wife, must await another letter!

As, dear son, it must likewise with us. A week has passed since this commenced! Americans on the moon! Senator Kennedy disgraced! Where are you?

Your father

ABC/ss

cc: JB

A: Jerome Bray to the Author. The Gadfly Illuminations.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

7/8/69

“John Barth,” “Author”

Dept. English, Annex 2

State Univ. of N.Y. at Buffalo

Buffalo, N.Y. 14214

“Dear” “Sir”:

Aha ha REStop You have taken the bait stepped into our parlor; there’s punctuation for you: your letter to us of 7/6 received! Hee RESET Gotcha! Hum!

Mars stationary in Right Ascension. Moon and Saturn in conjunction. Stock market hit by heavy losses. 1st U.S. troops head home from Viet Nam. Astromonkey dies after retrieval.

“Sir”: (Oh that’s good, LILYVAC, a hit, a palpable RESET Your letter of July 6, 6th Sunday after Pentecost, 555 die in weekend traffic accidents — same # as height in feet of Washington Monument, Washington, 4.3. Oh that’s sly LILYVAC thats RESET Dont forget punctuation. ¶Right. Resume.

In the lull between the end of our Spring Work Period (and of Year 3, a.k.a. T, a.k.a. V of our 5-Year Plan) and the Mating Season which will commence Year 4 (a.k.a. E etc.); in the afterglow of the “Gadfly (whoops) Illuminations” of July 4; in the pause at the Phi-point 6 1 8 (e.g. ⅗ths, ⅝ths, 54/88ths) — your letter reaches us proposing that we participate in your fiction! Oh ha phi on you! (Tell him, LIL.)

Had that missive hit but a week before, when in despair at our scrambled NOTES we wandered like downed Bellerophon devouring our own soul food hee it might have done its fatal work, last knife in bleeding Caesar. Keyless in the presence of our enemies, we could not unlock the leafy anagram; betrayed by Margana y Flea whoops advised by Bea Golden to booger off, we wondered why our parents never gave us a buzz, and whether LILYVAC had their signals crossed. But ha you missed, good old P.O., your letter finds us flying like a butterfloat, being like a sting (O LIL); in a word we’ve been reset. Repeat. We said in a word we’ve been RESET Gotcha Hum.

In reply to yours of the 6th. (Show him, LIL.)

Let’s get things straight. Attacomputer. We did indeed spend the 1st ½ of 1969 (enough) believing that you and yours had swatted us for keeps; that you had somehow wooed Merope Bernstein into the anti-Bonaparty (stop). Even that LILYVAC’s 1st trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES must be either a monstrous ciphered anagram beyond anyone’s unscrabbling or a mere dumb jumble of numbers. We had thought M.B. to be our destined mate, right repository of our seed; had expected this season to preserve our line in her like a blank in amber, forever, stop. Then we reckoned her our betrayer: no Bea she, not even a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, play that on your acrostical Notarikon, but our devourer!

In desperation next we fancied B.G. our proper queen, pursued as she was already by two drones so to speak. Her several rejections did not deter us; it was not yet flight time; queens do not yield themselves till the peak; let her “mate” as she will with Prinz and Mensch (who think themselves adversaries, not having met the foe who will ally them), they cannot fertilize her; our hour would come, so we believed: 8:23 PM EDST 8/15/69, as the sun sets into Lake Erie on the evening of our 36th. Undeed that may be our ultimate mission still: the Gadblank Illuminations leave this point obscure: whether so to speak we need only a toe or must go whole frog.

What they illumine is the true nature of LILYVAC’s printout; the true revolutionary character of what we had naively called 1st NOVEL and then NOTES — and our immediate task not only in the Fall Work Period but in this mating season: a task not you nor all your swarm of hommes de lettres can prevent our accomplishing. (Go, LIL.)

O Ma! O Da! We see now you sent M.B. to us by way of initial prophecy, J. Baptist heralding the 1 Who Shall Come After. Her “betrayal” of us was but the Godflaw’s sting, your message that Merope was mere means, not end; you bid her take the role of Margana Le Fay and lead us into vain decipherment of LILYVAC’s numbers, in order to purge us of our last illusion about RN: that it was to be a revolutionary work of literature (and, ipso facto, no more than a literary work of revolution). Thanks! R.S.V.P.

The hardest truths to see, with howsoever many eyes, are those right under our proboscises. We were raised in the Backwater Marshes, source of life; we ourself programmed LILYVAC to make no mention of, always to say blank or blank instead of blank. Yet there we were on 7/4 aboard the renamed Blank III, a.k.a. O.F.T. II (a substitute for our dear Blank III no more resembling the original than Chesapeake Bay resembles Chautauqua Lake), pursuing Bea Golden in our error as skyrockets scuttled and spread like Crab Nebulae over the river; jealously wondering what revolutionary sort of letter A.M. was wooing her with, there in the bow, and Bea discarding leaf by leaf like daisy petals or shucked carapaces as she read and R. Prinz gnashed his puny mandibles. The female we’d remarked at the Farm because she was miscalled Pocahontas (no Indian blood in her), and whose presence aboard “Blank III” we had re-remarked but paid no heed to, drew an utter blank when she muttered into our ear: “There’s a pair I’d like to do a number on. My name’s Marsha. What’s yours?” Not till we’d told her and numbly mumbled Marsha Who did Truth scuttle and RESET Like the supernova 1st observed by Chinese astronomers on July 4, 1054.

Marvelous to enumerate! True 13 2, of whom M.B. I was but the initial RESET No honeybear she, but as splendidly venomous a blank as ever stung twice! The question, Ma, is whether you sent her to be our queen as well as the number of our enemies, please advise, it’s that time of year, she’ll wake up any day now. Sprung in fact from the marshes whence all life RESET From a swampy mons veneris called Golden Hill, never mind, not far from dear Backwater, she was early mismated with A.M. and thirsts for retribution as in our error once did we: Marsha Blank!

She repeated her name and wish, this time as a proposition: if we would help her do a number on her ex, she’d help us do a number on Bea. We did not know that slang expression: nothing foreign is human to us. She explained its meaning (to trick, cheat, exploit, or take advantage of, LIL, including sexually), but we could scarcely attend her, such a chain of insights — what we have since termed the “Blank Illuminations”—was triggered by that key, like a metaphor.

NUMBERS!

You cannot touch us now, “sir”; we are as far beyond your grasp as was Bellerophon past Chimera’s when he flew on mighty Pegasus to his rendezvous with the Godblank. How had we not seen that if the media are to revolutionize Revolution, to their number must be added a revolutionary medium? What had we been doing with our Gematria, our Notarikon, our Themura, but attempting to betray LILYVAC’s radical numbers into the very seeds of Literature’s limitations, i.e., letters?

You think to make us a character in yet another piece of literature! You, “sir”—now we have your number programmed into LILYVAC — will be a character in our 18 14 (a.k.a. R.N.): the world’s 1st work of Numerature!

Ourself innumerate, like most literati, we have yet to learn our 1 2 3’s; everything must be reviewed, revised in this new light! How we itch to spring, after the Flight, into the Fall Work Period! When, 1st of the numerati, our new Queen royal-jellied, we readdress that mighty printout! Ha RESET

“Yours” truly,

JBB

P.S.: Hum. We conceive, as a parting shot at the exhausted medium you practice, a little classical story-in-letters to be located at the Phi-point of our story-in-numbers:.618 RESET The Greek mythic figure Bellerophon, having killed the Chimera and turned Pegasus out to pasture in his life’s 1st Cycle, wonders at the Phi-point what to do with the remaining.382 of his allotted span. Though he has imitated perfectly the program of mythic heroism, he has not achieved immortality. His days are numbered. Can he, in the final quadrant of the heroic cycle, reset his program and ascend to the company of 1st-magnitude stars? Yonder rises cloud-capped Olympus; yonder grazes lulled Pegasus, who can fly anywhere quicker than LILYVAC adds 2 + 2… Eat your heart out, writer!

P.P.S.: Our last to you. An end to letters! ZZZZZZZ!

C: Ambrose Mensch to Yours Truly. A lull on Bloodsworth Island.

Barataria

Bloodsworth Island

July 7, 1969

FROM:

A.M., in early P.M.

TO:

Y.T.

RE:

Your message to me of May 12, 1940

Truly, Yours,

Cancer is the reigning sign; petrifaction the prevailing state. A lull’s laid on like that that descends on novels in their third quarter: everything’s suspended, held, arrested, as if Time had declared time out.

I write you on a steaming, breathless just-past-noon: siesta-time in barren Barataria. Slick calm yonder in Hooper Straits, where when the tide turns I’ll post this in a crabber’s Clorox-bottle buoy. Turkey buzzards hang overhead as if still-photo’d; blue herons stand like lawn ornaments in the shallows where yesterday Bea and I went wading after soft-shell crabs — and netted only hard.

Dorchester County’s shaped like a pelvis: Blackwater and Transquaking rivers are its fallopian tubes; Fishing Bay is its busy womb. Three days ago Bea and I came down through its southmost marshes here to Bloodsworth Island, which hangs under it on the map like a thing discharged.

Now Bea’s gone, after this A.M.‘s little flurry. Our wake-up fuck, one of the few (Too bad, she told me yesterday, your Medusa couldn’t’ve petrified just that part), was interrupted by Casteene’s phone call from Fort Erie: Doctor missing since July 4th storm; presumed drowned in Lake Erie, where he’d been whitefishing. Remobilization Farm at a standstill. Memorial service tonight; perhaps Mlle Bibi should return for it?

Phone and phallus are that woman’s natural instruments. Ever less firmly pegged atop me, she set the former on my chest for ease of dialing and never let the latter slip (nor paused in her special slide-and-squeeze) even after I was long come, till she’d checked flights, made air reservations from Washington to Buffalo, arranged for Morgan to meet her plane and fetch her thence to Fort Erie and the Farm, dispatched a cab to drive the thirty miles from Cambridge down to Bishops Head (just across the straits, Y.T., at the county’s labia, whither I would ferry her in A. B. Cook’s runabout) and the hundred more back to Washington National, relayed instructions to me from Casteene for closing up Cook’s cottage (kindly proffered her for our half-assed tryst)—and brought herself to perfectly malicious orgasm smack in the middle of apprising Reg Prinz in New York of all the foregoing plus her intention to be back on location for the next shooting plus exactly where and with whom she was as she spoke and exactly what doing: i.e., Ay! Eee! Ai! Oh! Ooo!

Reggie would have her ass for that, she chirped after, hanging up and swinging off me in one easy motion. But she couldn’t resist; anyhow, when one came one came. Come on, said I: you’re here because he let me have one inning, to justify his retaliation. It’s my ass he’s after; yours he’s got. It’s a dandy, Jeannine.

You think so? she said, apropos of I don’t know which assertion. She was throwing things into a suitcase, smoking and smiling all at once, livelier than she’d been in three days. What she’d meant, she said, was calling him collect; he hated that. But it was Cook’s phone; she had run up the bill enough already. Anyhow, she’d liked what I’d written her there on the boat, right at the peak of the party. We really had given old Reggie a jolt. I was wrong: he didn’t own her, not any part of her; she’d loved being with me again after so many years — especially the soft-crabbing, even if we hadn’t got any! And so what if I hadn’t come on like a sex machine? There were enough of those in the world. Would I be a doll and make coffee now and come back and close up the place when she’d left? The connections were tight, but she really owed it to Casteene and the Doctor to give it a try.

Bea’s breasts were bare, and tanned from three days of toplessness; as she chattered she slipped into her slacks with a tomboyish snap and snug I’d forgotten since I’d last seen her do it twenty years ago. I was smitten by time and tenderness; had to bestir myself kitchenwards, not to let her see my eyes run. Once at nineteen I’d stood bone-hard for her five times in a single night (it remains my record); but entering our lives’ third quarter she’d been bored stiff with me, and I bored limp with her, by the end of our first Baratarian day. We’d stayed on — I don’t know why: to purge entirely our curiosity, perhaps; to play through some subscene in The Script. To complete my mistreatment of Germaine. Or out of mere inertia, in a place and weather where even lotus-eating is too much effort.

What relief she’s gone! Cook’s cottage is tidied, stowed, secured; I’m to return his boat to Bishops Head, forward his keys back to M. Casteene-from-whom-they-oddly-came (a key in itself, that, no doubt, but not to any door I pine to pass through), and return myself through the sluggish marsh to the paused world and my exasperated Lady. But there’s no rush, no rush. Petrifaction’s too hard a term: Time’s congealed; things are stuck hereabout like shrimps in aspic.

I make these sentences, Y.T., in default of the ones I want. My Perseus is stuck in his spiral temple like Andromeda to the cliff, because his author is not Perseus enough to rescue him. Language fails me like my phallus: shall I simply send you the diagrams? Magda’s not menstruated since that anniversary coupling of May 12, two months and two letters since: no other signs of pregnancy, thank God, and she’d been off and on for a year before she pulled that fast one. Refuses, of course, to check it out medically; wants to savor the improbable possibility while she can… Has she told Peter, one wonders? On whose obdurate mind something heavy surely is, over and above Mensch Masonry’s final bust-up, which scarcely now seems to bother him, and Mother’s long dying, which decidedly does. There truly, Truly, is your cancer petrified, more so than in our hard crabs’ case: Death itself dozes off; Terminality takes siesta.

Magda, my Medusa, femme fataliste: Zeus make this pause your menopause! And Germaine…

No doubt it is the lull before some further storm. No doubt Mother’s terminality will recommence, the Tower of Truth resume our ruin, Magda’s womb (for one) do this or that, the Perseus story sink or swim, and Reg’s return unfreeze our frame, re-move the unmoving Movie. Meanwhile, in Suspense’s welcome lieu, this strange suspension.

Tide’s turning: the Hooper Straits buoys begin to lean towards Sharkfin Shoal; time to bottle this and begone. Henry Burlingame III, we are told, was launched in his infancy from this island, to which in middle manhood he returned for better or worse. Do you likewise, letter, if return you must; not to the sender, who, something tells him, shan’t.

L: The Author to Jerome Bray. Admonition and invitation.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14212

July 6, 1969

Jerome B. Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, New York 14752

Mr. Bray:

Let’s get things straight.

I did indeed spend the first half of the 1960’s writing a long novel which was published in August 1966, under the title Giles Goat-Boy. It is the story of a child sired by an advanced computer upon a virgin lady and raised by kindly goats on the experimental livestock farms of a nameless university which encompasses and replicates the world. In young “manhood” my goat-boy learns from his tutor that the extraordinary circumstances of his birth and youth correspond to those of the wandering heroes of myth. With this actuarial pattern as his map and script, he adventures to the heart and through the bowels of the campus, twice fails at the accomplishment of certain ambiguous labors, and the third time succeeds — though in a fashion equivocal as the tasks themselves — to the status of “Grand Tutor.”

It was my further pleasure to reorchestrate the venerable conceit, old as the genre of the novel, that the fiction is not a fiction: G.G.B. pretends to be a computer-edited and — printed, perhaps computer-authored, transcript of tapes recorded by the goat-boy and — under the title R.N.S.: The Revised New Syllabus, etc. — laid on the Author by Giles’s son for further editing and publication.

I have before me your letters of March 2 and April 1. Their imputation of plagiarism, their allegation that I somehow pirated an extraterrestrial scripture from you and published a distorted version of it as fiction, their ominous demands for reparation, and the rest, I take in the spirit of that lengthy satire. Like those book reviewers who choose to mimic (and attempt to surpass) the author under review, you have seen fit to address me in the manner of my novel, as though you were one of its characters nursing a grievance against your author.

Such mimicries and allegations are best left unacknowledged: Claw a churl by the breech, an Elizabethan proverb warns, and get a handful of shite. But your passing invocations of Napoleon, George III, Mme de Staël, Bellerophon and the Gadfly — these echo provocatively, not to say uncannily, some concerns of my work in progress; and I am intrigued by your distinction between the fiction of science and the science of fiction. Finally, it interests me that the world may actually contain a person who raises goats and devises “revolutionary” computer programs to analyze, imitate, revolutionize, and perfect the form of the Novel — or is it the form of Revolution?

Inasmuch as my current, nowise revolutionary story includes a character rather like that person (derived from the putative editor of Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus), I am curious to hear more from you on the subject of your LILYVAC 5-Year Plan, for example. In exchange, if you’re interested, I offer what I’ve learned since the publication of G.G.B. about actual computer applications in such areas as literary structural analysis and the generation of, say, hypothetical plots: information laid on me by workers in the field of artificial intelligence who happen to have read or heard of my novel.

To be sure, none of what I’ve learned may be news to you; or you may not care to share your investigations with me. But if you’re willing, please address me at my university office, which reliably forwards my mail. And do let’s keep the letters “straight”: the 700-plus pages of Giles Goat-Boy have surfeited their author with that particular vein of “transcendent parody” and (literally, of course) sophomoric allegory.

Cordially,

F: The Author to Jacob Horner. Accepting the latter’s declining of his invitation of May 11 and thanking him for several contributions to the current project.

Chautauqua, New York, July 13:

Bedford Forrest Day in Tennessee,

Boxer Rebellion quelled in Tientsin,

Civil War draft riots in N.Y.C.,

Marat stabbed by Charlotte Corday, etc.

Dear Jacob Horner,

Fact or fiction, your letter to me of May 15—vigorously declining my invitation to you to play a role, as it were, in another fiction of mine — I accept with sympathy and respect. You will hear no more from me; nor shall I otherwise attempt, though I’m mighty curious, to learn how goes Der Wiedertraum.

For that notion, at least, and the Anniversary View of History, and the principle of Alphabetical Priority (I mean the priority of that principle, which I ought to have listed first), I thank you. I presume that they are not copyrighted, and that you will not object to my making use of them with this acknowledgment of their source.

Best wishes,

A: The Author to A. B. Cook. Expressing dismay at the latter’s presumption and withdrawing the invitation of June 15.

Chautauqua, New York

July 20, 1969

A. B. Cook VI

Chautaugua Road, Maryland

Dear Mr. Cook,

Actually, I am as dismayed as gratified by your long letter to me of a month ago and its even lengthier enclosures. Gratified of course by your ready response to my inquiry concerning your ancestors; by your providing me with copies of those remarkable letters from Andrew Cook IV to his unborn child; by your diverting account of the subsequent genealogy down to yourself; by your supererogatory offer — nay, resolve — to enrich me yet further with the materials of your abortive Marylandiad: the posthumous adventures, as it were, of A.B.C. IV. But dismayed, sir, by your misconstruction of my letter and by your breathtaking assertion that we collaborated on my Sot-Weed Factor novel — indeed, that we have had any prior connection whatever!

Paper is patient, observes the Jewish proverb, and verily: elsewise that sheaf of 75 % rag 32c 16 lb. 8½ x 11’s on which your secretary transcribed your telephoned-Dictaphoned account of our “meeting,” our “conversation,” our “collaboration,” would have rebelled against the pica’d propositions Royaled themupon. We are not acquainted, sir! Until you answered my letter, I was not even certain of your factual existence — which, given the several transsubstantiations of your reply between “Barataria” and me, remains still more than usually inferential. We have never met, never heretofore conversed, much less collaborated on anything! The “actual” poet laureate of Maryland I understand to be a colorful fellow named Mr. Vincent Godfrey Burns, who I imagine must be less than delighted by your pretension to his office. And — ahem, sir! — my invitation to you was not to play the role of Author in my novel-in-letters; merely to be a model, one way or another and perhaps, for one of its seven several correspondents: an epistolary echo of Ebenezer Cooke the sot-weed factor, no more.

That invitation, at risk of offending you, I believe I had really better withdraw. I return with thanks the enclosures of yours of 18 June and earnestly request that you not favor me with their sequelae (or anything else) in future. For the suggestion that I take as my ground theme the notion of First and Second Revolutions, in whatever sense, I here thank you, even though it was not exactly news. Also for your plausible relation of Chautauqua and Chautaugua: there are other, homelier etymologies, I have learned since—“fish-place,” for example — but the principle nonetheless applies.

Do please let that proximate place-name be the one bridge between us henceforward, as it has in fact been hitherto. Let us both turn now from letters to TV: to watch the images of men first stepping upon the moon; to ponder the strange tale piece-by-piecing from Chappaquiddick of Senator Kennedy, a drowned young woman, a bridge more dark and ominous than mine and

Yours,

4 encl

C: The Author to Jerome Bray. Some afterthoughts on numbers, letters, and the myth of Bellerophon and the Chimera.

Department of English, Annex B

State University of New York at Buffalo

Buffalo, New York 14214

July 27, 1969, 7 Sleepers’ Day

Jerome B. Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, New York 14752

Dear Mr. Bray:

Can you perhaps make use, in your NUMBERS project, of, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition III 18b of that term (“Metrical periods or feet; hence lines, verses”)? Or the Kabbalistic tradition that the Torah was a septateuch before it became a pentateuch, one of its original books having gone the way of the 10 lost tribes, another shrunk to 2 verses in the Book of Numbers? Or the consideration (which occurred to me on receipt of your letter of July 8) that NUMBERS is a 7-letter word arranged symmetrically about your initial; that its 5th letter, or Phi-point, is also the 5th of the alphabet; that even more things in the world come in 7’s than come in 5’s; that by perfectly imitating the pattern of mythic heroism one may become not a mythic hero but merely a perfect imitation; that one might cunningly aspire neither to perfect nor to revolutionize the flawed genre of the Novel, say, but to imitate perfectly its flaws? (There is a bug in the unicorn caterpillar family, I believe, which mimics the appearance of a leaf partially eaten by unicorn caterpillars.)

I hope you can, because while I accept your declining of an invitation I didn’t quite make — to “be a character” in my story in progress — your letters have suggested a number of things to me possibly useful in that work — e.g., that the word letters is a 7-letter word with properties of its own; that every text implies a countertext; that a “navel-tale” within the main tale ought to be located not centrally but eccentrically — at a point, say, five- or six-sevenths of the way through; that such a tale might appropriately concern itself with the classical wish to transcend one’s past accomplishments and achieve literal or figurative immortality; that such a tale might therefore appropriately take as its central figure one of the classical mythic heroes. Et cetera. Thanks.

Cordially,

P.S.: I recollect that Bellerophon does not get to heaven. His mount Pegasus does, stung by Zeus’s gadfly, who apparently already dwelt there: the same insect whom Hera earlier dispatched to torment poor Io, and after whom Socrates was nicknamed. Perhaps that gadfly is your actual hero?

P.P.S.: Finally, I recall that the sort of letters Hamlet bid Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry from Denmark to England, which, unknown to them consigned the bearer to death, are called “Bellerophontic letters after the ones your man innocently delivered from the king of Tiryns to the king of Lycia. Be my guest: but N.R.P.S.V.P.