Letters

by John Barth

  Mother heard no more from Joseph Whaland after the Treaty of Paris was sign’d in the autumn of ’83. In lower Dorchester, the watermen still report hearing screams & gibbers across the wastes, and to this day attribute them to Whaland, gone mad in his solitary hideaway, wandering the marsh like Homer’s Bellerophon, “far from the paths of men, devouring his own soul.” We return’d to Castines Hundred. Thousands of dispossest Loyalists, refugee Iroquois, & escaped or manumitted Negroes were swarming across the river from New York into Canada to avoid reprisals by the “Americans,” amongst them Joseph & Molly Brant and “Queen Esther” Montour; “Upper Canada” was founded as their temporary homeland until the new Union of States fell apart & they could safely return. Against that happy day, Governor Haldimand declined to surrender Britain’s Great Lakes forts (he call’d them Canada’s Great Lakes forts) to the Americans, as stipulated by the Treaty of Paris. The Baron’s estate was a refugee campground, his house a waystation, where Mother hoped in vain my father might turn up. Burr (now a state assemblyman in New York) was sympathetic, but had no news. Arnold, idle & brooding in London, was not answering his mail. Barlow, by this time an establisht “Hartford Wit,” was preening on the subscription list for his still-unfinished Vision: King Louis, 25 copies; General Washington, 20; M. Lafayette, 10; B. Franklin, 6; A. Burr, 3; & cet. The Union of States was unfinisht, too, tho already a convention in Annapolis was calling for a larger one in Philadelphia to write a constitution & select a national President. White settlers freely crost the Appalachians and prest toward the Mississippi: the Joseph Brant who stopt at Castines Hundred was not my father, but a white man’s Indian playing peacemaker for the Six Nations by urging them to sign away most of their homeland to the Americans, who occupied it anyhow. Not even my mother could imagine that he was her husband. In 1785 she told me that my father must surely be dead, and herself donn’d widow’s weeds.

  We linger’d here thro that winter. Then in ’86, having just begun to reconcile herself to her bereavement, Mother received from London a remarkable love-letter from the man she mourn’d! To be sure, the letter was sign’d B, not H.B. IV, and declared itself to be from “Joseph Brant,” in England officially to raise money for the erection of an Episcopal chapel in Upper Canada. But it was so “unmistakably” my father’s epistle—his early handwriting, his pet names for her, allusions to their brief time together, inquiries after me—that we set out at once for London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Your loving Father,

  Andrew Cooke IV

  P.S.: But there is a curious, painful postscript to that letter, the last I ever had “from him.” Back in his tutoring days at Yale (so he confest to Mother, who recorded the anecdote in her diary), Father had briefly courted & made verses with an intelligent young woman named Elizabeth Whitman, and had stopt short of matrimony only on account of the same infirmity that had made him so shy in Church Creek. Miss Whitman subsequently was courted by Joel Barlow, who however prefer’d & eventually married Ruth Baldwin, & by yet another tutor at Yale, who too saw fit not to wed her. She withdrew from New Haven to Hartford to live with her mother & to languish on the margin of the Hartford Wits. Early in 1788 she found herself pregnant, and in June of that year, under the assumed name of Mrs. Walker, she left town to have the baby. In July the child was stillborn, like my sister; like my mother, Betsy Whitman died a few days later of childbed fever. She left only a letter, addrest to “B,” the lover who had abandon’d her: “Must I die alone? Why did you leave me in such distress?” & cet.

  It could have been Joel Barlow: he was in Hartford at the time, studying for his bar examination, involving himself in the Scioto swindle, & satirizing with his fellow wits, in the Anarchiad, Daniel Shays’ admirable rebellion. It could have been Joseph Buckminister, the other Yale tutor amongst Betsy’s former beaux. But the town to which she fled to hide the scandal was Danvers, Massachusetts; and the hostelry in which “Mrs. Walker” & her baby died was the Bell Tavern—where, she declared to the end, her husband would be joining her promptly…

  Inspired by that fateful letter (and by the success in America of Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa), a relative of Betsy Whitman’s named Hannah Foster turn’d her story into a romance on the wages of sin call’d The Coquette (1797): the 1st American epistolary novel. Inspired by that later epistle from the Bell Tavern, your father stay’d in Paris to join in the Terror & to applaud the guillotining of the whole paternal class. But that is matter for another day, sweet child, another letter.

  A.B.C.

  R: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews. Reviewing Year O and anticipating LILYVAC II’s first trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES. With an enclosure to the Author.

  Jerome Bonaparte Bray

  General Delivery

  Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

  April 1, 1969

  Mr. Todd Andrews

  c/o Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

  Court Lane

  Cambridge, Md. 21613

  Dear Mr. Andrews:

  RESET Beg pardon. Among the carryovers of our original program into LILYVAC II is a tendency to repetition in the printouts, imperfectly corrected by a reset function. Especially on the anniversaries of significant earlier printouts, the computer inclines as it were to mimic itself: e.g., every Bastille Day since 1966 it has rewritten our 1st letter to “Harrison Mack II” (Enclosure #1 of Enclosure #1 of our letter to you of March 4, q.v.).

  To which last we are distressed to have had no reply, whether because it never reached you (we know the P.O. to be infested with anti-Bonapartists, in high places as well as low: vide the “American Indian” Commemorative of Nov. 4 last, which not ingenuously passed over the noble nations of the Iroquois in favor of the Nez Percé, an idle swarm of dope-smoking savages) or because the Mensch-Prinz cabal have persuaded you against us. A prompt response from you in the matter of our proposed action is imperative, since the statute of limitations will run on August 5, and he must RESET Meanwhile, given our uncertainty both of your position and of the confidentiality of our correspondence, we are torn between our wish neither to repeat ourselves nor to divulge promiscuously details of the status of the NOVEL project, and on the other hand our concern to get on with the neutralization of our enemies and to keep our benefactors apprised of the fruits of their patronage. We are therefore attaching a copy of our latest ultimatum to the Defendant, and will summarize in only the most general way the results of our recent work periods, which summary we trust you will pass on to Mr. Drew Mack and the Tidewater Foundation.

  Our objective for the 2nd year (1967/68: Year O) of LILYVAC’s 5-Year Plan was to modify and extend the capacities of LILYVAC I with the aid of a renewed Foundation grant; then to reprogram LILYVAC II with data for the Complete & Final Fiction, to the end of producing an abstract model of the perfect narrative, refined from such poisoned entrails and crude prototypes as are now RESET Pursuant to this objective, in the late spring of 1968 (we were, you remember, still recuperating through the fall ’67 work period from the attempted assassination of Ms. Bernstein and ourself in May of that year), Merope and we supplied LILYVAC II with all the entries in Professor Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, together with such reference works as Masterplots and Monarch Notes; also the complete holdings in fiction of Lily Dale’s Marion Skidmore Library and the collected letters of the Fox sisters (true visionaries, unlike those wrongly commemorated Pierced Noses), certain rare but standard treatises on the Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Series, and a list of everything in the world that comes in 5’s. By the 5th day of the 5th month of that year (the anniversary, by no coincidence, of the Emperor’s pretended death on St. Helena), LILYVAC generated its 1st trial model, a simple schema for the rise and fall of conventional dramatic action, sometimes called Freitag’s Triangle—

  —in which AB represents the “exposition” of the conflict, BC the “rising action,” or complication, of the conflict, CD the climax and dénouement, DE the “wrap-up” of the dramatic resolution. You can supply for yourself the revolutionary “allegory” at the heart of these ostensibly literary concerns. By May 18, the Emperor’s coronation day, we had already progressed to a “Right-Triangular Freitag”—

  —and by George III’s birthday to a “Golden-Triangular Freitag”—

  —which prescribed exactly the ideal relative proportions of exposition, rising action, et cetera, the precise location and pitch of complications and climaxes, the RESET By June 18, the last week of the spring work period, we had our perfected model, which of course we cannot entrust to the mails.

  Finally, we secured per program a toad that under cold stone days and nights had 31 RESET We then betook ourselves to rest, leaving to faithful Merope the simple if exacting task of working out with LILYVAC the historical-political analogues of our progress thus far. It was during this period that LILYVAC’s aforementioned tendency to self-mimicry was
most vexingly displayed: e.g. RESET Which nigger in the ointment we have countered provisionally with an “editorial” program-amendment to recognize and RESET Just as we have programmed it to avoid or scrupulously delete any reference whatever to

  The fall work period of Year V was devoted to preparations for the 1st trial printouts (scheduled for tonight through Friday) and their analysis. On its final day, the winter solstice—anniversary (on the Gregorian calendar) of the Pilgrims’ landing on Plymouth Rock, of young Werther’s letter to Charlotte apprising her of his intended suicide, of our misguided posting to the Wetlands Press, in all good faith, the priceless edited typescript of the Revised New Syllabus they shall RESET While we swam against the full ebb tide of nature as it were to keep our eyes open long enough to make out the precious letters, LILYVAC vouchsafed to us the title of the text-to-come. It gave us an N; it gave us an O. Cheered by this 1st tangible hatch of our ardent, arduous labors, Merope and we looked into each other’s eyes with that relief and weary exultation which only true revolutionary lovers know. But then ensued, not V, not E, not L, no: but NOT, then NOTE, then NOTES!

  It was dismay now in our eyes, sir, and the dark unspoken fear that our grubby foes had somehow wormed their way into LILYVAC! What NOTES? But we could forestall our rest no longer, not even to impart to frantic Merope the possibility (which occurred to us even as our eyes were closing) that here was no setback but a RESET That LILYVAC in its “wisdom”—which is to say, our parents and noble forebears in theirs: Father, Mother, Grandpa, Granama!—was once again transcending our limited conception of project and program, as when Concordance was superseded by NOVEL; that it was trying so to speak to tell us something.