Letters

by John Barth

  The baron advises them to demand an interview at Castines Hundred, but the twins seem as attracted by the prospect of travel as by the possibility that the letter is authentic. They insist; their guardian shrugs his shoulders and returns to his bucolic pursuits. They set out for Baltimore—and there they live, in obscure circumstances and with much travel intermixed, until the Civil War.

  Of the fate of “Ebenezer Burling” and their connection with him, there is no record (the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad opened on Andrew IV’s birthday in 1828, horse-drawn); the source of their income is unknown. From references in later letters—exchanged during the twins’ separation by the Civil War—one infers that there was much coming and going between Baltimore and Washington, Baltimore and Boston, Baltimore and Buffalo. They remember having encouraged “E.B.‘s” young poet-friend, during his own residency in their city (1831-35), to give up alcohol and poetry for short prose tales readable at a single sitting, and not to hesitate to marry his 13-year-old cousin. On the other hand, having read the young novelist Walt Whitman’s maiden effort (Franklin Evans, or, the Inebriate), they urged its author to switch to verse. Perhaps presumptuously, they take credit for passing on to Whitman Henry Burlingame III’s “cosmophilism”; Henry V opines, however, that the scandalous pansexualism of Leaves of Grass is entirely rhetorical, the author being in fact virtually celibate. With Longfellow they could do nothing, beyond suggesting that Edgar charge him with plagiarism; no more could they with Mrs. Stowe. With Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson they were content, except as the latter two strayed into verse. None could be persuaded to make literature out of their father’s Algerian adventure or their mother’s reenactment, in reverse, of the story of her ancestor Madocawanda the Tarratine. (They did not live to groan at Longfellow’s versification of it in 1871 as “The Student’s Second Tale” in Part Second of his tiresome Tales of a Wayside Inn:

  …a fatal letter wings its way

  Across the sea, like a bird of prey…

  Lo! The young Baron of St. Castine,

  Swift as the wind is, and as wild,

  Has married a dusky Tarratine,

  Has married Madocawando’s child!

  et cetera.)

  On October 24, 1861, when the first transcontinental telegraph message links sea to shining sea and replaces the Pony Express, Henrietta Burlingame, 49, gives birth to my grandfather, Andrew Burlingame Cook V. The father is unknown: it is not necessarily Henrietta’s brother. The perfectly ambiguous facts are that just nine months earlier the twins had either quarreled or pretended to quarrel seriously for the first time in their lives—not, ostensibly, over some transgression of the former limits of their intimacy or the election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the Southern states, but over the merits of Karl Marx’s thesis (in his essay The 18th Brumaire and the Court of Louis Napoleon) that great events and personages in history tend to occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce—and separated. Henry (who agreed with the second proposition but not the first, given the multiple repetitions in their own genealogy) moved to Washington; Henrietta (who believed that the recurrences were as often tragic as the originals, e.g., Tecumseh’s reenactment of Pontiac’s conspiracy) to the Eastern Shore, where in April—as Baltimoreans reenacted in 1861 their bloody riots of 1812—she found herself unambiguously three months pregnant, and remained in seclusion until her child was born.

  Once the separation is effected, their letters become entirely fond, insofar as one can decipher their private coinages and allusions and sort out reciprocal ironies. In addition to the literary reminiscences already mentioned, they chaffingly criticize each other’s positions vis-à-vis the war so long ago predicted in Joel Barlow’s Columbiad; also vis-à-vis their father’s prenatal letters to them. Neither twin has anything to do with the fighting. Henry declares or pretends to declare for the Union, Henrietta for the Confederacy. Henry’s reading of their father’s letters is that they were disingenuous: that Andrew IV exhorted them not to rebel against him exactly in order to provoke their rebellion—i.e., to lead them to work against the sort of stalemate he “pretended to hope for in the 1812 War” and for “the Manifest Destiny he actually believed in.” Henrietta in her turn maintains that their father’s exhortation was perfectly sincere.

  Of course it is quite possible that the twins were secretly in league. They are together in New York City at the time of the great draft riots of July 1863, in which 100 people are killed; they are together in Ford’s Theater in April 1865, when Lincoln is assassinated by the erratic son of their old friends the Booths of Baltimore. The Union is preserved, however sorely; the slaves are emancipated, if not exactly free. The Dominion of Canada is about to be established; the first U.S. postcard will soon be issued. Where are Henry and Henrietta?

  Why, they are once more in their true womb, Castines Hundred. There the new baron and baroness have been killed in an unfortunate carriage accident, leaving a baby son named Henri Castine IV (they have their own Pattern, of no concern to us here). The twins sell their Baltimore property and die to the world; not even literature much engages them now. They raise the young cousins with benign indifference. Andrew V displays a precocious interest in the family history; they neither foster nor discourage it. He is shown the “1812 letters” of his grandsire and namesake, the other documents of the family, his great-grandfather’s pocketwatch; but his insistent questions—especially concerning his parents’ own activities (he does not shy from referring to the twins thus)—are answered with a smile, a shrug, an equivocation.

  The boy decides, for example, that their obscure movements during the war were a cover for certain exploits in the Great Lakes region: the establishment (and/or exposure) of the Cleveland-Cincinnati relay of the Confederacy’s Copperhead espionage system; the institution (and/or disruption) of a white Underground Railroad to Canada for Confederate agents and escapees from Union prison camps. Whose scheme was it, if not theirs, to ship bales of Canadian wool contaminated with yellow-fever bacilli to all U.S. Great Lakes ports, by way of avenging the bacteriological warfare waged against Pontiac’s Indians a century before? And who masterminded the Fenian invasion of Fort Erie by New York Irish “bog trotters” in 1866, he wanted to know, just a year after the Burlingames’ official return to Castines Hundred? The Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood’s objective might have been to seize and hold the Welland Canal until Britain granted independence to Ireland; but was it not the twins’ idea to provoke another U.S.-Canadian war (which of course the British and the ruined Confederacy would welcome) while the wounds of the Civil War were still open? Or contrariwise (what actually happened) to bind the reluctant Canadian provinces, as disinclined to confederation as were Tecumseh’s Indians, into a Dominion of Canada united against U.S. aggression?

  “You are more Burlingame than we are,” his parents contentedly reply. They live into their eighties, the first Cooks or Burlingames to achieve longevity. By the time of their death in 1898, the son of their middle age will be nearing the classical midpoint of his own life (well past its actual midpoint in his case); he will have married an educated Tuscarora Indian from Buffalo, sired children of his own—first among them my father, Henry Burlingame VI—and already cut his revolutionary teeth in the Canadian Northwest Rebellion of ’85, the Chicago Haymarket Riot, and the Carnegie and Pullman labor-union battles.

  Unlike his parents, Andrew V is overtly and intensely political, by his own declaration first a socialist and then (when the analogy between strikebreaking robber barons and imperialist industrial nation-states persuades him that a “rearrangement of markets” by cataclysmic war is in the offing) an anarchist, the first in the family since his grandfather’s French-Revolutionary youth. He decides that the whole family tree, Cooks and Burlingames alike, has been as it were attending to the wrong dog’s bark: it is not this or that government that is the enemy, except to this or that other government: it is government—on any scale larger than tribal, with any po
wers or functions beyond the most modest defensive and regulatory. More regressive than Henry and Henrietta together, he takes as his heroes Julian the Apostate, Philip II, the Luddite loom-breakers—all those who would undo the weave of history. Especially he admires Tecumseh and Pontiac, driven to confederate in the cause of anticonfederation. He applauds the Cuban revolutions against Spain, the war of the Boer republics against Britain, the Philippine insurgency, the Russian, Mexican, and Chinese revolutions, the Boxer Rebellion—anything that either resists enlargement or divides what is by his lights too large already; redistributes more equitably, decentralizes, or promises to do so.

  Of his 20th-century activities—other than quarreling with Eugene Debs and defending Leon Czolgosz (the assassin of President McKinley in Buffalo)—little is known until the “rearrangement of markets” occurred in 1914-18. He seems to have been involved in the fast-growing electrical communications industry and to have had little interest in literature: “Marconi’s transmission of the letter S across the Atlantic by wireless today,” he told his wife on December 12, 1901, “is more important than Henry James’s publication of The Sacred Fount.” (My grandmother agreed; she preferred H.J.‘s short stories.) He was a friend of Alexander Bell from nearby Brantford (named after the Mohawk Joseph Brant), and though he agreed with Mark Twain that the telephone is an instrument of Satan, he explored the possibilities of its misuse, along with the wireless’s, in “the coming war.”

  Uncharacteristically for our line, he was no great traveler: to my knowledge he never visited Maryland, much less Europe; indeed, after the birth of my father during the Spanish-American War, Andrew V seems to have left Ontario only once, for Vera Cruz in the spring of 1914, in the mistaken hope that enough false messages might connect Pancho Villa’s and Zapata’s resistance in Mexico with Sun Yat-sen’s revolution against the Manchu dynasty and the wars in the Balkan States, and bring about general political chaos in time for the Second International scheduled for Brussels in July. The mission failed; the general wish, of course and alas, was realized, just a month or two late.

  Of his posture vis-à-vis the family, on the other hand, we know more, and of his end, if we accept provisionally my father’s account. Distressing to report, Andrew V exercised his “liberation” from the Pattern by regressing, almost absolutely, to the vain ancestral dialectic! Like the Andrews and Henrys prior to 1812, the more he considers the family archives—especially the Letters of 1812 and those exchanged between the twins during the Civil War—the more he comes to believe that his parents were after all deplorably successful secret agents for the Union, pretending to be Copperheads. It is not only the ignorant of history, it seems, who are doomed to reenact it!

  Indeed, the quick end to my grandfather’s story, shortly thereafter, is itself a reenactment. Back at Castines Hundred in 1917 (when the U.S. and Canada become allies for the first time in their stormy history, though the old Yankee-Loyalist enmity is not dead, only sleeping, even today), he notes the anger of Ontario’s Fenians at the execution of Patrick Pearse and Sir Roger Casement after the abortive Irish rising of the year before; he is thereby reminded of the I.R.B.‘s attempt on the Welland Canal in 1866. Like the Fenians, but for different reasons, he declares himself indifferent to the World War, which has in his opinion nothing to do with ideology; he is much more interested in the revolution against the czar, and, in the (somewhat self-contradictory) name of International Anarchy, he associates himself with a Bolshevik plot to blow up the Welland Canal. It is the only ship channel around Niagara Falls, and is thus indispensable to the movement of materiél and manufactures from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic; its obstruction will gravely hamper the supply of the American and Canadian Expeditionary Forces in Europe. But lest the blame be placed on (or credit claimed by) German saboteurs, as was the case in the Black Tom explosion in Jersey City, he will broadcast by wireless from the ruined locks his solidarity with the bombers of the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade on July 22, 1916, and call for a Second Revolution in North America, against economic royalism.

  There, the phrase is uttered: a Second American Revolution, quite a different matter from the “Second War of Independence” in 1812. Uttering it was to be my grandfather’s chief accomplishment. His associates were fellow anarchists and Bolsheviks from both Canada and the U.S., together with assorted Fenians, Quebec Librists, and sympathetic Germans from Wisconsin and western Ontario: two dozen in all, plus—significantly for that date—a precocious young Iroquois nationalist from the Tuscarora reservation on Grand Island, Andrew’s wife Kyuhaha’s militant brother (Kyuhaha is approximate Iroquoian for “unfinished business”). This fellow’s name was Gadfly Junior; he claimed to the son of a Tuscarora chief named Gadfly Bray and the brother-in-law of Charles Joseph Bonaparte (Betsy Patterson’s grandson and, briefly, Teddy Roosevelt’s Indian commissioner). Like many of his Mohawk brothers, this Gadfly Junior was a specialist in high steelwork; on the strength of this experience (and a stint in the Wyoming Valley anthracite mines, and a general feistiness), he appointed himself chief of demolition.

  The old canal had 25 lift locks: the plan was to dynamite them in quick succession with wireless detonators fashioned by my grandfather. Twenty-five bundles of dynamite were assembled, each fitted with a small wireless receiver tuned to ignite a blasting cap upon receipt of the international Morse code signal for a particular letter of the alphabet; an alternative signal, common to all, could be used to detonate them simultaneously if time was short. No ideological slogan known to the conspirators was alphabetically various enough to do the job; their programmes were anyhow too heterogeneous for agreement: they settled on the standard typewriter-testing sentence, stripped of its redundant characters—THE QUICK BROWN FX JMPD V LAZY G—and reserved as the common signal the only letter missing there from, the one hallowed by Marconi seventeen years before and by James Joyce as the first in the scandalous novel he’d just begun serializing in The Little Review. On the night of September 26 (American Indian Day, Gadfly Junior would have been gratified to know, though it’s also the anniversary of General McArthur’s recapture of Detroit from Tecumseh’s warriors in 1813) the saboteurs in two trucks and a car rendezvoused at the little town of Port Robinson, the midpoint of the canal, and spread out along the 25 miles of its length from Port Colborne on Lake Erie to St. Catherines on Lake Ontario, each to his assigned lock with his charge of explosives. All were to be in place by sunrise, when—just as the British army was breaking the Hindenburg line in the final offensive of the war—my grandfather would transmit on his wireless key the fateful sentence.

  I believe that I have neglected to mention that I myself had been born that year, out of wedlock, to my precocious parents: my father, 19, had “supped ere the priest said grace” with the current flower of the Castines, his cousine Andrée III. In this return nearly to the center of the family gene-pool—which A.C. V had commendably eschewed for the health of the line, given the particular consanguinity of his own parents—Henry Cook Burlingame VI betrays (I had better say affirms; he made no secret of it) his affinity for his namesakes Henry and Henrietta. He does not despise his father (who, we remember, apparently put by all revolutionary activities between 1898 and 1918 to raise him, except for the Vera Cruz expedition of 1914); indeed he admires him… as a cunning double agent dedicated to subverting the cause he officially espouses!

  In short, we are back to the Pattern, with a vengeance, and the more distressingly in that my father was not a student of the family archives (it was Andrée, rather more of a scholar, who taught him how to overcome the genital shortfall of the Burlingames; I was conceived in their virgin seminar on that subject in 1916). Altogether unaware that he is reviving the classical interpretation of Cooks by Burlingames, Burlingames by Cooks, my father maintains—at the time to my mother, later to me—that Andrew Cook V was all along a closet patriot, an operative of the Canadian Secret Service who infiltrated the saboteurs in order to thwart their designs on the Welland Canal, and
succeeded at the expense of both his brother-in-law’s life (Gadfly’s) and his own.

  “Your grandfather was an expert in wireless telegraphy,” Dad once explained to me (I was 13; it was during our stint in the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge here in Dorchester County, where “Ranger Burlingame’s” current cover was supervising CCC work during the depression): “It’s suspicious enough that he altered the test sentence”—in which, as everyone knows, THE QUICK BROWN FX JMPS V LAZY DG, touching all 26 alphabetical bases in the process—“and it’s unthinkable that he would reserve as the common detonator the first letter of the international wireless marine distress signal, especially to blow up a ship canal, and choose for its transmission the frequency of 125 kilocycles—the only frequency shared by both naval and merchant vessels at that time.”

  My father’s Uncle Gadfly Junior had been his hero and closest friend; at the time of the canal plot Henry was old enough to be included in it, and had begged to share with Gadfly the riskiest assignment: mining the entrance locks at either end of the canal, where security was heaviest. Gadfly had the G at St. Catherines; my father wanted the Port Colborne T. But my grandfather forbade him, as a brand-new father himself, to place any of the explosives, and only reluctantly permitted him to stand watch over the transmitter at Port Robinson while he himself mined Lock N nearby, at the center of the canal.

  Andrew’s target being closest at hand, he thought to reach it, plant his charge, and rejoin his son within an hour to await the dawn at the transmitter while the others were still being dropped off at one-mile intervals in both directions. Thirty minutes after their parting salute—“To the Second Revolution!” which meant different things to the several bombers—and before even my grandfather had slipped past the watchman and lockmaster at Port Robinson, all 25 charges went off together.