Letters (22 page)

Then it too trickled away into the void. Across a measureless distance the Doctor said: “I have no razor. But I will cheerfully crotch you if you do not Wake Up.”

Okay.

“Okay. Your Friend Saint Joseph has the right idea, whether he and the former Joe Morgan are the same or not.”

“They’re the same.”

The Doctor shrugged his eyebrows. “Heraclitus’s dictum cuts two ways: even if the river had not flowed, the You would have. I am remembering how Morgan
sent his wife back to you
when he could not assimilate her first infidelity. As if a replay might clarify it…”

The Doctor slid his chair away, stood, relit his long-dead cigar. The interview was apparently over.

“An impressive chap, your Friend. But this
Wiederträumerei
is a dangerous business. You set about to kill two birds with one stone, and sometimes you wipe out the whole flock. So. Forget what we decided earlier about you and Pocahontas, at least until Saint Joseph makes his choice. You and I must go back to weekly P-and-A’s, as in the old days.” He frowned. “Reenactment. But if there is no Freshman English requirement on the campuses nowadays, surely there is no Prescriptive Grammar. And you Ought to Stay Residential. How will you Teach?”

2 April 1812

My Dearest Henrietta or Henry,

Read, dear child, when you shall have been born & begun to be educated, a great tiresome epical poem call’d
Columbiad,
by Joel Barlow of Connecticut & Paris, wherein the dying & despondent Columbus, in a dream or trance, is fetcht to the Mount of Vision by Hesper, Spirit of the Western World: thence like Aeneas in Hades he beholds panoramically the future history (up to 1807, the date of the poem’s appearance) of the empire for whose initiation he is responsible. This vision, stout Barlow assures us—of white Americans pushing ever westward, clearing the forests, draining the marshes, harvesting the fish & game, building canals & roads & cities from coast to coast—cheers Columbus & reconciles him to his obscure death.

The conceit is admirable. The poem itself is a bore because, unlike the
Aeneid,
its concerns do not range much beyond sentimental patriotism, and because, unlike Virgil, its author is a merely educated, sensible fellow with an amateur’s gift for making verses. Joel Barlow was one of the self-styled “Hartford Wits”; another was your grandfather, Henry Burlingame IV, who befriended Barlow at Yale College just before the American Revolution and suggested both
The Vision of Columbus
(the poet’s 1st & briefer version of
Columbiad)
& a passable satire of Daniel Shays’ rebellion call’d
The Anarchiad,
of which more anon. The Cooke-Burlingame line is given neither to
longueurs
nor to longevity: my father is said to have died in 1785 at the age of 39, before either of the poems that covertly memorialize him was publisht.

As for Barlow: that gentleman survives as U.S. Minister to France, whence he will have reported by now to President Madison that “Le Comte Édouard de Crillon”—who lately sold Secretary Monroe the notorious John Henry Letters for $50,000 and then exacted from Madison’s operatives another $21,000 (half of which Andrée & I have safely bank’d for you in Switzerland)—does not exist. The late actual Duc de Crillon was a Spanish grandee, conqueror of Minorca, attacker of Gibraltar, & member of the French Assembly, who in 1788 tried unsuccessfully to seduce my mother at a diplomatic
soirée
in London. The current Duke, his only son, lives in Paris, smarting at the £1,200 he was lately swindled out of by one “Jean Blanque,” and doubtless enraged at the scandal now attaching to the family name. Father & son are both acquaintances of Barlow, to whom my father introduced them years ago. Thus the Minister will have immediately guess’d, as I want him to, that Madison has been duped. What he will
not
guess is that I did both the duping & the unduping, to lead the U. States closer to war and so promote the schism betwixt New England & the rest of that nation. That I chose the name Édouard de Crillon precisely to excite his suspicion (as well as to settle a little score for Mother), and the name Jean Blanque to echo Barlow’s own & provide him a
blank
to fill.

Rather, to provide such a blank to History, since the Hartford Wits, for all their wit, are short on the finer ironies. There is more to it: I chose the name Édouard for my imposture of the Count, for example, because it was Mother’s descent from Le Comte Cécile Édouard of Castle Haven in Maryland that had aroused the late Duke’s lecherous interest. If the fellow currently posing as Aaron Burr in Paris is in fact my father, he will recognize in that touch the family trademark, & understand that I understand that he is alive.

Thus the messages we Cooks & Burlingames amuse one another by sending with our left hands, as we play the Game of Governments with our right and undo, as far as is in us possible, the Vision of good Joel Barlow!

So then, dear child in the making: the fat is fairly in the fire since my letter of last month. Whilst you have been growing hair & toenails, and opening your eyes (What do you see, little Burlingame? That most of the world’s eyes are closed?), Wee Jamie Madison has sent the Henry Letters to Congress—that is, my fair paraphrase of the fourteen cipher’d originals, plus John Henry’s nattering
Proposal for the Final Reunion of His Majesty’s Dominion in North America with the States of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York.
Now Henry Clay & the War Hawks are making the most of them to embarrass the New England Federalists, to justify their own Anglophobia, & to push gentle Jamie ever closer to a “Second War of Independence”—their pretext for snatching the Canadas & the Floridas.

More anon, more anon, of

when I come to my own & your mother’s histories.
This
is to apprise you of your great-grandfather’s, the 3rd Andrew Cooke’s, whereto your genealogy had got when I closed my last. I pray you, review the chart of it, overleaf.

There are, all over this tree, other fruits, to be sure: brothers, sisters, by-blows on nearly every branch & twig. With a few exceptions, I have enter’d only those in the main line of your descent. And the wives of all those Barons Castine are not really nameless, but (always excepting Madocawanda) they made vocations of being their husbands’ wives, and are of no individual interest here. That fellow in the box, my grandfather, was, you recall, sired out of wedlock on the “Maryland Laureate’s” twin sister by the 3rd Henry Burlingame, who then disappear’d into the Dorset marshes with the avow’d intention of thwarting the “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of escaped African slaves & displaced Indians. To cover the scandal, Grandfather was given the surname Cooke and raised as the son of the poet Ebenezer, whose wife had died still-bearing their own child.

A.B.C. III thus never knew his father, tho thro his childhood he was retail’d stories by Eben Cooke of the mysterious “Uncle Henry” who, for aught they knew, might dwell among them incognito, looking after the welfare of his “favorite nephew.” How else explain the anonymous gifts of money & goods that from time to time appear’d as from Heaven, addrest either to Anna Cooke or to the boy?

So far did the aging poet fall into this folly, in 1730 he composed a sequel to his major work,
The Sot-Weed Factor,
call’d
Sot-Weed Redivivus, or, the Planter’s Looking-Glass,
which, in the guise of an economic tract in verse, incorporates to the knowledgeable eye broad signals to Henry Burlingame III, of the “Édouard de Crillon” variety. The opening words of Cooke’s preface, for example—

—allude to the once-popular belief that Cecil Calvert, the 2nd Lord Baltimore & 1st Lord Proprietary of Maryland, had struck a bargain with Pope Urban VIII to make Maryland into a Jesuit colony in return for posthumous sainthood. Cooke 1st learnt of this presumable slander from Burlingame, who of course had also, as his childhood tutor, “invented the Horn-Book” for his little charges. Similarly, a few lines farther on—

—we are reminded that Burlingame was ever Cooke’s severest literary critic. That his political intrigues led him into mirror-like reversals & duplications (he also posed as Baltimore’s enemy John Coode, & cet., & cet.). That Cooke’s “inventor of the Horn-Book” was also his instructor in geometry & astronomy. In the poem itself, such allusions swarm like bees (themselves a reduplicated image, punning on Burlingame’s initial): the most obvious is the poet’s not only re-meeting but
re-sleeping with
a tobacco-planter (“cockerouse” in the argot of the time, & a naughty pun too) with whom he had dealings in the original
Sot-Weed Factor,
& who was Burlingame “much disguis’d”:

The horse-couplet is a quotation from the earlier poem; the original Roan had inspired a trial of rhyming betwixt Cooke & Burlingame-disguised-as-“Cockerouse”; Ebenezer & his sister had indeed been “left in the lurch,” and Andrew III born therefore outside “the Church.”

More subtle is the reference to his guide as “the Spurious Offspring of some Tawny-Moor” (Ebenezer’s prostitute-wife, Joan Toast, was once ravisht by the Moorish pirate Boabdil, and Burlingame’s ancestry, like yours & mine, was racially mixt). “… to glut the Market with a poisonous Drug” refers of course to the overproduction of “sot-weed” in the colony, the poem’s explicit theme; but it alludes covertly to the opium traffic in which Burlingame involved Ebenezer Cooke in the 1690’s.

and

overtly refer to the “one that pass’d for Chamber-Maid” at the inn where this encounter takes place (note that she too is suspected of being other than she seems), whilst they secretly remind Burlingame of the poet’s near-martyrdom at the stake in 1694 by that conspiracy of escaped slaves & Ahatchwhoop Indians on Bloodsworth Island, which Burlingame had gone ostensibly to “put to rest.”

Most interesting of all is Cooke’s prediction that his fellow Marylanders

That is, literally, within three generations, when the land will have been deforested & the soil exhausted by one-crop tobacco farming. But the “three revolutions” (Saturn’s period is 29½ years), reckon’d roughly from the date of Cooke’s composing
Sot-Weed Redivivus,
echo a prediction by Henry Burlingame III of three “revolutionary” upheavals: 1st, the Seven Years War betwixt Britain & France, which by 1759 would have reacht the fall of Fort Niagara to the British & the consequent shift of Indian allegiances from the losing to the winning side, paving the way for the surrender of the Canadas to Lord Jeffrey Amherst & for “Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” as shall be shown; 2nd, the American & French Revolutions
(i.e.,
about 1789, when George Washington was elected, the Tennis Court Oath sworn, the Bastille taken); 3rd, what we now approach: the decline & fall of Napoleon’s Empire & the commencement of America’s 2nd Revolution. “Rise,
Oroonoko,
rise …” Cooke urges his disguised mentor at the beginning of Canto III, which in cunning emblem of eternal recurrence, or revolution without end, he ends with the exhortation “Begin…” and the invocation of time’s Stream

Anna Cooke indulged this folly, if folly it was, but resisted the temptation to
folie à deux.
Upon her brother’s death in 1732, she confided to her “nephew” Andrew (by then a successful lawyer in Annapolis) that his “Uncle Henry” had been her common-law husband; she declared moreover her private conviction that he had
not,
as Ebenezer believed, gone over to the side of the conspirators whose ally he had pretended to be: had he done so, she was firmly convinced, the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy would have succeeded, and Maryland at least, if not all thirteen of the English colonies, would no longer exist. It was Anna’s belief that H.B. III had successfully divided & thwarted the designs of the Indians & Negroes, then been discover’d & kill’d by them; otherwise he would have rejoin’d & officially married her long since. As for the anonymous donations, they were in her opinion the compensation traditionally provided
sub rosa
by governments to the widows of secret operatives lost in the line of duty, whose supreme sacrifices must perforce & alas go as officially unacknowledged as her brief “marriage.”