by John Barth
But (she could not help adding, out of self-confest habit) it would not much delay me to return to her by way of London, where “our coney J[ohn] H[enry] was ripe for catching.” That was a trap too shrewdly set to go unsprung, & should provide our baby with a handsome & much-needed nest egg.
I was alarm’d as she. To settle that certain old family score with the late Duc de Crillon which I explain’d in my 2nd letter, I had assumed the name “Jean Blanque” & had imposed upon his son for a loan of £1,200 against a pledge to help restore him to Napoleon’s good graces, which he did not currently enjoy, via my friend the American minister, who did. Given time (and Barlow’s increasing popularity in the court of St. Cloud) the man would have been good for another thousand: but I cut short my mining of that vein as well as my futile intriguing against dear Joel. I’d not had time to make real headway on that front, but then, none seem’d especially call’d for, inasmuch as I’d learnt from aides of the Duc de Bassano what Joel himself was beginning to understand: that Napoleon’s policy, like mine, was to forestall England’s lifting her Orders in Council until war with the U. States was inevitable. I bade my friend farewell.
So relieved was Barlow to see me go, all his natural affection came to the fore. He was old enough now, he declared (nearing 60), & the times parlous enough, that he could not bid a friend good-bye without wondering whether they would meet again. He misst Toot Fulton & Benjamin West, Tom Paine & Jefferson, Jim Monroe & Dolley Madison; he even misst that old Yale fossil Noah Webster, who’d been so unkind to the Columbiad; aye, & Joseph Bacri, & my father, of whom I was now the very spit & image. And he would miss me, tho not my work against his peaceable aims, which he could excuse only because so many of his countrymen shared my belligerence. It was a snowy forenoon, one of 1811’s last. Barlow was reminded of his earliest satirical verses, written for my father even as I was being conceived: “And Jove descends in magazines of snow.”
Using my Canadian credentials in London, I learnt that British elements opposed to a 2nd American war had gone so far as to plot the assassination of Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch defender of the Orders in Council, knowing that Lord Castlereagh, his likely successor, was inclined to revoke them. Also that the King was in strait-waistcoat, pissing the bed & fancying that England was sunk & drown’d, himself shut up in Noah’s Ark with his Lady Pembroke (a Regency bill was expected momently). Also that the Foreign Office had rejected John Henry’s claim for £32,000 and a good American consulship in reward for his espionage, on the grounds that his reports were valueless: they referr’d him for emolument to his employer, the Canadian Governor-General’s office. But Sir James Craig was by then gone to his own reward, & Sir George Prevost was not inclined to honor his predecessor’s secret debts. Embitter’d & out of funds, Henry had left London to return to farming in Vermont.
I overtook him at Southampton and (in the guise of le Comte Édouard de Crillon) won his sympathy on shipboard by declaring myself to be a former French secret agent temporarily out of favor with Napoleon by reason of the machinations of my jealous rivals. When Henry confided his own ungrateful treatment by the British, & prepared to post into the North Atlantic those copies of his letters which “a friend” had advised him to make, I suggested he permit me to do the two of us a service by engaging to sell them to the Americans via the French minister Sérurier & Secretary of State Monroe, both of whom would be pleased to present to the Congress such clear evidence of British intriguing with the New England Federalists. There should be $100,000 in it for Henry, I maintain’d, & for myself the chance to regain the Emperor’s favor. Delighted, Henry entrusted the letters & negotiations to me. I was at first dismay’d that his “copies” were but rough summaries in an unimpressive notebook, & that he’d neither named the New England separatist leaders by name nor invoked such useful embarrassments as the Essex Junto of 1804, which had plotted with Burr to lead New England’s secession if he won the New York governorship that year. I consider’d dictating to Henry a fuller & more compromising text, but decided it were better not to reveal overmuch knowledge of such details. The holograph letters from Lord Liverpool & Robert Peel were enough to implicate Britain & serve our purpose; relieved not to be directly incriminated, the Federalists could retaliate against Madison by declaring Henry’s notebook a forgery, and we could have it both ways, promoting war & disunity at once.
All went smoothly. My apprehensions were that M. Sérurier would hesitate to vouch for me before making inquiries of the Duc de Bassano, or Madison to buy the letters before making inquiries of Joel Barlow (whose Washington house Sérurier was renting); also that Monroe might see thro my disguise. But I was enough alter’d by nature & by art since my last interview with Monroe, and enough conversant in the gossip of St. Cloud & the family affairs of the Ducs de Crillon, and they eager enough to put the letters before Congress as a prelude to Madison’s appealing for a declaration of war, that the only hitch was financial: I ask’d $125,000, hoping for $100,000; Monroe agreed, but Albert Gallatin declared that the Treasury’s whole budget for secret-service payments of this kind was but $50,000. Fearing Henry might renege, I threw in for my part the (forged) title to an (imaginary) estate of mine at “St. Martial” & an additional $10,500 worth of (counterfeit) notes & securities negotiable in Paris, thus further demonstrating my good faith to Sérurier & Monroe. By February the deal was closed: Henry gave me $17,500 of his $50,000 & set out for Paris, as Eben Cooke had once done for Maryland, to claim his estate. I then successfully coaxt another $21,000 from the Secretary of State, & might have got as much again from the French ministry had I not fear’d discovery of my imposture & yearn’d above all else to rejoin your mother (before she should become your mother) at Castines Hundred, to put right if I could our great disservice to Tecumseh, to watch over your wombing, & to learn what my beloved might have learnt.
Et voici! Tecumseh, Andrée tearfully reported, would have none of us. Publicly he deprecated the loss at Tippecanoe as a mere imprudency by rash young warriors indignant at Harrison’s trespass, but he was in fact enraged; had seized his brother by the hair & banisht him from his sight. He was constrain’d from making a treaty with Madison (in order to gain time to reunite the scatter’d tribes) only by Harrison’s insulting stipulation that he go to Washington alone instead of with the 300 young warriors he wanted to comprise an effective retinue. Now he was off to Fort Malden & Amherstburg, at the farther end of Lake Erie, overseeing General Brock’s re-arming of the confederacy & directing minor raids against American settlements to restore his authority & the Indians’ morale. He rejected angrily Andrée’s suggestion that the Tippecanoe fiasco had, after all, purged his camp of some of its less reliable members. He had not accused us outright of treachery, only of being “our grandparents’ grandchildren.”
Which was enough. For (having re-married me in the Christian tribal ceremony to appease her parents) Andrée review’d for me, & enlisted my aid in the completion of her inquiry into, what in these three months & four letters I have set forth to you, & can now conclude: the history & pattern of our family error. Halfway thro life’s journey & about to become a father, I can now no longer properly despise my own, whoever he was, whyever his neglect of me. I wish only he had vouchsafed me some account—of his motives, his confusions, false starts, illuminations, mixt feelings, successes, failures, final aims, net values—that I might have understood & believed when my mind was ready, however much I had spurn’d it in my younger cynicism. We have tried to help Tecumseh, & fear we have undone him (we shall try again); surely our grandparents did not intend to be Pontiac’s undoing, as my father declared. Whence then my confidence that H.B. IV workt with Little Turtle to undo him, or my grandfather’s confidence that H.B. III workt with the Bloodsworth Island conspirators to undo them? Oh, for an accounting! We have misspent, misspent our powers, Cookes & Burlingames canceling each other out. May we live, Andrée & I, to be the 1st of our line to cancel out ourselves, to the end that you (guided by these letters, which must be y
our scripture if aught should take us from you) may be the 1st to be spared the necessity!
To sum up: We no longer believe (what my grandparents taught) that Henry Burlingame III was a British agent out to divide the Bloodsworth Islanders (his Ahatchwhoop brother “Bill-o’-the-Goose” and the rest): we believe he meant in good faith to unite them, & fail’d. We do not believe (what my father taught) that my grandparents were British agents out to subvert Pontiac’s conspiracy; we believe they meant to abet it, & fail’d. We no longer believe (what your parents would have taught, this time last year) that Henry Burlingame IV was (is?) an American agent bent on dividing first the Iroquois League & then Little Turtle’s; we believe he workt for their best interests, & fail’d. So we pray you will not believe us to have been in the employ of William Henry Harrison or James Madison against noble Tecumseh: we wisht to aid him, & have so far fail’d.
Father, I forgive you. My life’s 1st half is done: it too I forgive, & the Andrew Cook who lived it, who now must set about its rectification so that you (my Henry, Henrietta), when in years to come you shall have read this long accounting, will have nothing to forgive or be forgiven for.
Envoi. I commenced this letter on 14 May; ’tis now a dozen days since, & still you linger! Andrée is huge, predicts a Gargantua—or, as the sun is now into Gemini…
You will be born into a war: I think no one can now prevent it. I must hope (& try with my life) that no one will “win” it, or all is lost. Andrée & I are pledged now neither to the British nor to the “Americans”—nor, finally, to the Indians—but to division of the large & strong who would exploit the less large, less strong. Thus we are anti-Bonapartists, but not pro-Bourbon; thus, for the nonce, pro-British, but no longer anti-“American.” No hope or point now in destroying the United States; but they must be checkt, contain’d, divided, lest like Gargantua’s their mad growth do the destroying. May this be your work too, when your time comes. Farewell. Do not restart that old reciprocating engine, our history; do not rebel against the me who am rebelling against myself: the father of
Your new-born father,
Andrew Cook IV
S: Jerome Bray to Drew Mack. LILYVAC’s LEAFY ANAGRAM.
Jerome Bonaparte Bray
General Delivery
Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752
May 13, 1969
Andrews F. Mack
c/o Tidewater Foundation
Marshyhope State University
Redmans Neck, Md. 21612
Comrade:
St. Elret, patron of cipherers, be with you as with yours truly. Death to Jacobins, usurpers, anti-Bonapartists. The King is dead; long live the 2nd Revolution. Beware Todd Andrews, agent of the pesticide cartel. Excuse our longhand. May we together RESET
Our spring work period here at Lily Dale is at its peak. LILYVAC II is on-line and programmed to capacity. Ditto our comrade associate Ms. Le Fay a.k.a. Merope Bernstein see below at our new base in Chautauqua. Things are buzzing buzzing. We must scratch out this report by hand no time for epistolary printouts but you would be surprised what LILYVAC can RESET
We last met in February at the funeral of H.R.H. your father H.M. II G. III R.I.P. when you questioned us closely as to the practicality not to say the authenticity of LILYVAC’s Novel Revolutionary program RN for which you had twice loyally arranged support from the Tidewater Foundation. At one point you even declared straight out your suspicion that it and we were pure humbird. We do not doubt that you were distracted by your grief we ourself are an orphan have never known our dear parents were raised in the Backwater Wildlife Refuge and RESET
As for us we could scarcely have responded properly to your unexpected though perfectly justified interrogation. It was the last-but-one and deepest month of our winter rest period. Snug as a bag in a rug off-line and dreaming of the revolutionary title NOTES read out by LILYVAC at the midpoint of Year V a.k.a. T a.k.a. 12/21/68 vide infra we could have been roused at all by nothing less momentous than the death of your father the most trusted the most RESET
This letter is to allay your skepticism to report to you personally as we can no longer trust the Tidewater Foundation per se the setbacks and successes of our spring work period and to warn you against the aforementioned T.F. Executive Director T.A. He shall RESET
On Tuesday March 4 Feast of Purim Full Worm Moon we authorized said A to institute certain plagiarism proceedings as part of our general campaign to neutralize anti-Bonapartist counterrevolutionaries. No reply. On April 1 St. Elret’s Day on the eve of LILYVAC’s 1st trial printout of the Revolutionary Novel NOTES we took time to write him again confiding the results of our fall work period and our hopes for the spring e.g. our initial concern at LILYVAC’s entitling the project not NOVEL but NOTES our wondering whether therefore we were in Year T rather than Year V see RESET
In the same letter we urged him to reply to ours of 3/4 and move against B whom also we rewarned to make reparation by Doomsday i.e. 6:13 PM PST 4/4 or RESET No RESET We are going to have to reprogram LILYVAC not to RESET
That same Tuesday 4/1 overcast and chilly here in west NY rain in the PM ☾ on Equator ☌♃☾‧☌☾ U.S. to reduce B-52 raids Gas explosions seal Mexican coal mines 145 feared dead Eisenhower funeral train goes to Abilene China convenes 9th National Congress Mao in complete charge Cultural Revolution accomplished 2nd Revolution waiting to be RESET Full of that weary exultation which only true revolutionary lovers can RESET We toasted the moment with cordials of apricot nectar and pushed the Printout button for the 1st trial draft of the RN NOTES a 1 and a 2 give us an N give us an O No no whats this a 1 and a 14 and a 1 and a 7 and an 18 and a 1 and a 13 12 5 1 6 25 et cet exclamation point
I.e., no NOVEL no NOTES but a swarm of numbers exclamation point Merope and we looked into each other’s RESET On and on 13 1 187 1 1256 1 25 then a string of 55’s and 49’s alternating page after page after RESET Not got all the chinks out of the ointment 17 rules for the comma et cet push PUNCT Point No Stop No
.? Yes. Check: ,;!()? OK, OK.
Words cannot describe our dismay, sir, faithful Merope’s and ours. Numbers! Scrambled integers, not even binary! We were still weak: last summer’s gassing, the interruptions of our winter’s rest. The printout went on, reams and quires of single and double digits. We stood by numb, rudderless, like a man-of-war whose T has been crossed. At midnight LILYVAC tapped out a string of 26’s and fell silent. Dialogue. Maybe Doomsday’s early this year, said Merope, and led us to bed.
That was Tuesday. Thursday 4/3 was Maundy Thursday, also Nisan 15 and 1st night of Passover. Description. The sky cleared over Lake Cassadaga; the air was mild along the Niagara Frontier. As we took our constitutional about the grounds of Lily Dale, where a few early spiritualists raked their yards and spruced their cottages for the coming season, we could see clearly atop the hills on the farther shore the low buildings of the Pope John XXIII Retreat. At Merope’s direction, and to distract us from our gloom (the great pile of printout lay still untouched at LILYVAC’s feet), we vowed to put all numbers out of our minds until the Friday, just as LILYVAC avoids all references to , whether by deletion or by artful substitution, e.g. bean for bean. We had searched and destroyed on the Wednesday night all leavened bread in our cottage against the 7 days to come. Now toward sunset she arranged on the Seder tray the 7 symbols: matzo, baked egg, lamb’s bone, haroseth, karpas, hazereth, and fillet of a fenny snake. She lit the 2 candles, filled the 2 wine cups, and bid me begin the 15 stages of the service. We drank our 4 cups of wine, asked and answered the 4 Questions, recited the story of the 70-year bondage of the Israelites, discussed the 10 Plagues and Rabbi Judah’s coding them by their initials; BFL, BMB, HLDF (Blood Frogs Larks, Beasts Murrain Boils, Hail Lilies Darkness 1st-Born-Slaying); we sang the 14 verses of Dayenu and the 10 of An Only Kid; we remarked upon the reckoning of climacteric years in the Hebrew calendar
also its designation of sabbatical and jubilee years, the 7 days of Levitical purifications and of 2 of the 3 major Jewish feast
s, the 7 weeks between the 1st and 2nd of the latter, and the 7 years of Nebuchadnezzar’s beasthood and of Jacob’s service with each of his wives; we were reminded of the Hebrew tradition that the 7th son of a 7th son has a special destiny; that God is called by 7 names and created Creation in 7 days; that Solomon had 700 wives and 7 seals, and his temple 7 pillars; that Balaam would have 7 bullocks and 7 rams sacrificed upon his 7 altars; that Naaman was commanded to dip 7 times into the Jordan; that 7 priests with 7 trumpets marched daily for 7 days around the walls of Jericho, and 7 times on the 7th day; that Pharaoh dreamed of 7 kine and 7 ears of corn; that Samson’s wedding feast lasted 7 days, on the 7th of which he told Delilah the secret of his strength, whereupon she bound him with 7 withes and shore him of 7 locks of hair; that Salome danced with 7 veils. That Mary Magdalene was exorcised of 7 devils. Dialogue. Never mind the goyishe stuff, Merope protested, before I could mention the 7 deadly sins and cardinal virtues and gifts of the Holy Ghost and Champions of Christendom and years of their ordeals and joys of Mary and sorrows of RESET Sayings on the cross holy angels churches of Asia parts of the Lord’s Prayer, also the candlesticks stars trumpets spirits horns vials plagues monster-heads and lamb-eyes in the Book of Revelations. Back to the Hebes, then: that their very verb to swear means to come under the influence of 7 things; and that the Torah itself, according to one Kabbalistical tradition, had been a heptateuch before it was a pentateuch, 1 of its books having disappeared entirely and another shrunk to 2 verses (#35 and #36) in the 10th chapter of the Book of Numbers.
Dialogue. Next year in Jerusalem! You know, said Merope, that reminds me of LILYVAC’s printout. Oh? All those numbers. Ah. Remember back in Year O, she went on, 1967/68, when we programmed LILYVAC II with Thompson’s Motif-Index to Folk-Literature plus the fiction stacks of Lily Dale’s Marion Skidmore Library plus Masterplots plus Monarch Notes and like that? Yes. Plus everything we could think of that comes in 5’s, such as the fingers, toes, senses, and wits of Homo sapiens, the feet of pentametric verse and Dr. Eliot’s shelf of classics, the tones of pentatonic music, the great books and blessings of China, the bloods of Ireland, the (original) Nations of the (noble) Iroquois, the divisions of the British Empire, the books of the Pentateuch, the weekdays of the week, the vowels of the alphabet, the ages of man, the months of Odysseus’s last voyage as retold by Dante, the stories framed by Scheherazade’s Tales of the Porter and the 3 Ladies of Baghdad, and a few non-serial odds and ends such as quincunx, pentagon, quintile, pentacle, quinquennium, quintuplet, and E-string, inasmuch as NOVEL is a 5-letter word and our plan is a 5-year plan? Yes. Well: remember back there in all that fiction a tale by E. A. Poe called The Gold Bird 1843 in which William Legrand finds a message spelled out in numbers and deciphers it from the hypothesis that if the numbers stand for letters and the coded message is in English then the most frequently recurring number probably stands for the 5th letter of our alphabet E et cetera and he drops the bird through the eye of a skull that he finds on the 7th limb of a tree I forget why and it leads him to Captain Kidd’s treasure I forget how? Gee whiz, Merope, are you suggesting dot dot dot? Yes, well, we Jews, you see, are Hebrew? And our alphabet, like the Greek, served in olden times for counting as well as for spelling out words? So when an old-time Jew looked at words on a page he also saw a string of numbers? So it’s not surprising that among the mystical traditions associated with the books of the Kabbalah, a Hebrew word meaning “tradition,” is the tradition of Gematria, the manipulation of the numerical equivalents of the letters? Et cetera. Hum, we expostulated, by gosh Merope, we believe that you have found the hidden matzo, the Afikomen in the ointment, the nigger in the woodpile that is the key to the treasure. Grace. Hallel. Accepted.