by John Barth
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 h
is 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 Madis
on 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.