by John Barth
Do I have your attention, son? You are not the half-orphan you have believed yourself these many years to be. I know who, I know where, your mother is. When you shall have represented yourself to me, when we are at one with each other and with the Second Revolution, I will bring you and her together. She has awaited that reunion for 29 years! For a certain reason (call it the Anniversary View of History) I propose we keep her waiting until November 5 next, your 30th birthday—and no longer.
Thus my plan. But events have accelerated and changed that original schedule. Lady Amherst’s defection (and that earlier-mentioned novelist’s lack of interest) obliged me to transcribe and attempt to send you Andrew IV’s “posthumous” letters, you having somehow acquired “on your own” some version of the “prenatals.” And Jane wants us married three weeks hence, at September’s end, instead of in the New Year. Andrew Burlingame Cook VI has therefore but a few days more to live. On our drama’s larger stage, the death of Ho Chi Minh, and Nixon’s announcement of further troop withdrawals from South Viet Nam and Thailand, signal that the war in Southeast Asia is grinding down to some appropriately ignominious dénouement, and with it the mainspring of our First 7-Year Plan.
On then to the Second! No more mass demonstrations, riots on the campuses, disruptions, “trashings,” “Fanonizings”; no more assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings, heavy drugs. All these will live their desperate half life into the 1970’s, as the 18th Century half-lives into the 19th, the 19th into the 20th—but they will not be Us. Our century has one “Saturnian revolution” to go. Its first fetched us out of the 19th Century, through the cataclysms of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the explosion of hard technology and totalitarian ideology, to the beginning of the end of the Industrial Revolution, of nationalism, of Modernism, of ideology itself. Our First 7-Year Plan marked, in effect (not to boast that it itself effected), our transition from the second to the third third of the century: the revolutionary flowering, scarcely begun, of microelectronics; the age of software, soft drugs, smart weapons, and the soft sell; of subtle but enormous changes in Where the Power Is; of subtle enormities in general: large atrocities in small places and small print.
This morning’s three headline stories reflect and portend these things: VIET CEASE-FIRE ENDS: U.S. “MAY RESPOND” TO DE-ESCALATION. ISRAELI PLANES RESUME ATTACK ON EGYPT. NIXON YIELDS TO CONSERVATIONISTS, NIXES EVERGLADES JETPORT. Note especially that second: it wants no prophet, Henry, to foresee that one day soon the nations of Islam will employ their oil production as an international diplomatic weapon. Just as the arrival of the sultan’s seneschals in Constantinople on a certain afternoon in 1453 may be said conveniently to mark the end of the Middle Ages, so that day just predicted will mark the beginning of the end of the 20th Century, and of many another thing.
What exploitable convulsions lie ahead, forecast on every hand but attended seriously by few save Us! Fossil-fuel reserves exhausted before alternatives can be brought on line; the wealthy nations poorer and desperate, certain poorer nations suddenly wealthy; doomsday weaponry everywhere (Drew Mack speaks of dynamiting certain towers and monuments; but you and I could build a nuclear bomb ourselves); intemperate new weather patterns in the temperate zones; the death of the Dollar, a greater bereavement than the death of God; old alliances foundered and abandoned, surprising new ones formed! The American 1950’s and 1960’s, that McCarthy-Nixon horror show, will seem in retrospect a paradise lost. The 1980’s and 90’s will be called the New Ice Age—and who can say what will be crystallized therein?
Why, we can, Henry.
I had been going to review for you in this letter my own history. There is not time, except for barest outline. You know already—from your copy of my letter to that novelist back in June—the circumstances of my birth and early youth. (I leave it to your mother to retail for you the circumstances of your own, and why it was necessary to raise you as if orphaned.) Though I understood by 1939 that my father was not a bona fide revolutionary, but an agent of the U.S. and Canadian secret services—whose infiltration of “subversive” groups was to the end of thwarting their own infiltration of, for example, U.S. Naval Intelligence at Pearl Harbor and the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos—I loved the man dearly and continued to work “with” him until his death (for which, my son, I was not responsible, though I acknowledge that its echo of his father’s death at the Welland Canal on September 26, 1917, seems incriminating), gently frustrating his aims to the best of my ability. Therefore, for example, Pearl Harbor was virtually undefended on that Sunday morning in December 1941, and although the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (by when dear Dad was dead), the balance of terror was soon after restored.
Not until 1953, my 36th year, did I realize my error: i.e., the year of Mother’s death, when I discovered at Castines Hundred les cinq lettres posthumes of A.B.C. IV, cracked “Captain Kidd’s code,” understood what our ancestor had come to understand, fell asleep in mid-meditation on a summer afternoon on Bloodsworth Island, awoke half tranced—and changed the course of my life, Q.E.D. My later discovery of the “prenatal” letters only clarified and revalidated my conversion. I became your Uncle Andrew Burlingame Cook VI, called myself poet laureate of Maryland, established myself on Chautaugua Road and in Barataria Lodge, befriended Harrison Mack and John Schott, Senators McCarthy and Goldwater, and Maryland Governors George Mahoney and Spiro Agnew. I recruited and then ruined (in order to rerecruit to our actual cause) such vulnerables as the late Mr. Morgan. I created the image of myself as a faintly enigmatic but intensely regional flag-waving buffoon, while orchestrating on the national level a systematic campaign, gratifyingly successful, to organize and transform almost without their knowing it the political revolutionism of the “New Left” into something transcending mere politics. (We did not engineer the assassination of the Brothers K. and of M. L. King. To imagine that our organization for the Second Revolution is the only such effective covert group, or even that our aims and the others’ always coincide—not to mention our means—would be paranoiac.)
Thus the first 7-Year Plan, for which the civil-rights and antiwar movements were as handy a catalyst and focus as were Napoleon’s second abdication and exile to A.B.C. IV. That grand, protracted opus of Action Historiography—call it the 1960’s!—if it did not quite fulfill its author in chief, both gratified and exhausted him. Time now, Henry, for your coauthorship! Rather (for I am tired), time for me to pass on to you the pen of History, the palm of (secret) Fame.
More immediately and less grandly, it is time to do certain dark deeds by the rockets’ red glare, etc. Our principal action is scheduled for Saturday the 13th. I shall be commuting from here to McHenry daily through the Sunday, when Napoleon took Moscow and the British abandoned their Chesapeake campaign. I shall be “playing” Andrew Cook VI’s formidable namesake, to a similar but more final dénouement, after which I shall come forth as Baron Castine and, in time, claim my bride. You whom so proudly I hail, Henry: can I, by the early light of one of those dawns, from one of those ramparts, hope to see you?
Au revoir!
Your loving father
M: A. B. Cook VI to his son and/or prospective grandchild. With a postscript to the Author from H. C. Burlingame VII. Each explaining A. B. Cook VI’s absence from the yacht Baratarian.
Barataria Lodge
Bloodsworth Island, Md.
Wednesday, Sept. 17, 1969
Dear Henry Burlingame and/or A. (Andrew? Andrée?) B. Cook VII,
McHenry (or M’Henry, as F. S. Key spelled it in the title of his song Defense of Fort M’Henry) means—I needn’t remind a polylinguist like yourself—“son of Henry.” But in honor of brave Henrietta Cook Burlingame V and that courageous line of Andrée Castines, let us translate it as “child of Henry”: the child or children I warmly wish you despite the Burlingamish shortfall (you B’s know how to overcome); the grandchild or -children I fondly wish myself, to carry on my name, our work.
You did, then, afte
r all, receive my letters—so comes the word from Castines Hundred. And by when you read this we shall have been reunited, briefly and fatefully, between Twilight’s Last Gleaming and Dawn’s Early Light. A. B. Cook VI will have regrettably met his end in the Diversion sequence. The Destruction of Barataria will have been successfully reenacted, and Baratarian will be embarked—like Jean Lafhte’s Pride from Galveston in 1821—upon her momentous voyage: the initiation of Year 1 of our 7-Year Plan. At sunrise a week from Friday—American Indian Day and anniversary of our 1917 Welland Canal Plot—there will occur another kind of Diversion sequence at Marshyhope State University: the Algonquins’ Revenge, let us say, for the desecration of their ancient burial ground on Redmans Neck. Drew Mack’s last project, I conceive, and the “ascension” of Jerome Bonaparte Bray to his ancestors.
All this we watch, you and I, from our certain separate distances. It is no longer our affair.
You wonder why, having so diligently searched you out and laboriously urged you mewards, I am not aboardship with you, en route to the Yucatàn. You were promised your father, and anon your mother; you find, instead, yet another letter! Was it not A. B. Cook alone who was to die? Was not Baron André Castine to marry Jane Mack and divert her enterprises to ours? As our forefather Ebenezer Cooke, late in his laureateship, produced a Sot-Weed Redivivus, were we not to make this first trial run together, you and I, in pursuit of another sort of sot-weed?
Yes. And—now that we shall have remet, respoken, been reunited—no. I remind you, again and finally, of A.B.C. IV’s futile effort, on behalf of his unborn child, to undo the first half of his program in the second—an effort more successfully reenacted on your behalf by myself. I shall say only that I died at Fort McHenry. That this morning, three days later, I woke, as it were, half tranced on a point of dry ground between two creeklets, in the steaming shade of loblolly pines, realizing where I was but not, at once, why I was there. As in a dream I reached for my watchpocket, to fetch forth and wind my ancestors’ watch… and, as if vouchsafed a vision, I understood that I must not nor need not reappear publicly in any guise.
You, Henry, if my letters have done their work, are henceforth my disguise. You have the Plan; you have the means (and shall have more: Harrison Mack’s estate is not done with us; claimants thought dead and/or disposed of—also certain missing, shall we say secreted, items—may yet turn up, be heard from, nosed). Even should you “betray” me… but you will not. You must imagine me present in my absence, not dead and gone but merely withdrawn like my ancestor to that aforementioned certain distance: watching from some Castines Hundred or Bloodsworth Island of the imagination, with some “Consuelo del Consulado” of my own to console my latter years and check my perspective. We look on; we nod approval or tisk our tongues. What we see, at the end of these seven years to come, we shall not say: only that should you falter, flounder, fail us, we shall not despair, but look beyond you, to your heirs.
For if your father has not broken the Pattern for you, the Pattern will surely break you for
Your father,
A.B.C. VI
P.S. to J.B. from H.B. VII: The foregoing was not written by A. B. Cook at Barataria Lodge on Wednesday, 17 Sept. 1969: I am adding this postscript to it on Monday, 15 Sept., from that same place, about to reembark aboard Baratarian before the film company return to shoot the “Destruction of Barataria.”
At Fort McHenry, Saturday last, during the “Wedding Scene,” which I attended in sufficient disguise, I heard “my father” mention that the document representing the “Francis Scott Key Letter” was in fact a letter in progress from himself to his son. Cook so declared it, of course, for my benefit, assuming or hoping that I was within earshot (I could have passed for the mayor, the best man, the groom himself if I’d needed to—even as the “father of the bride”). Not long thereafter, to let Cook know I was on hand, I retrieved that letter, without otherwise revealing myself to him.
It was—in cipher—his Second Seven-Year Plan for the Second Revolution: i.e., a perfectly accurate prospectus (meant precisely therefore, like Cook IV’s warning letter to President Madison, for me to disbelieve it) of the plan he secretly intended to thwart, and now will not. Among other things, it instructed me to rendezvous with him here at Barataria Lodge early tomorrow morning: another deathtrap, as was (I recognised clearly back in February, our last meeting) his whole project to lead me to him.
Having verified sometime later that same night that his Key letter had been “delivered,” Cook quickly drafted the postdated one above, also in cipher. I was meant to receive it (that is, to find it aboard Baratarian) after I believed him accidentally killed at Fort McHenry: proof that, like his ancestor, he was in fact still alive and remotely monitoring my execution of “our” plan. Instead, I took the letter off his dead body in Baratarian’s tender (Surprize) during the so-called Diversion sequence, just before seeing to the destruction of both that body and that tender.
In short, except that it is now genuinely posthumous, this letter, like its author, is a fraud.
So too are the “lettres posthumes” of A. B. Cook IV: forgeries by his eponymous descendant. (A few details will suffice to discredit “Legrand’s cipher” as “Captain Kidd’s code”: Kidd himself used only numbers; Edgar Poe added 19th-century printer’s marks nonexistent in Kidd’s time; “A.B.C. IV” added further symbols—W and S, for example—not to be found in “Legrand’s cipher.” And the procedure in serious encoding, as even Poe realised, is to make the deciphered message as enigmatic as the ciphered, intelligible only to the initiate: “A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat,” etc.) Cook IV’s “prenatal” letters are perhaps authentic, but disingenuous: an appeal to his unborn child to break the Pattern so that that child—i.e., the twins Henry and Henrietta Cook Burlingame V—would in fact embrace it, rebel against what they took to be their father’s cause, and thereby (since he has altogether misrepresented that cause) effectively carry on his work. Cook VI’s own exhortations to me—indeed that whole elaborate charade of discovered and deciphered letters, the very notion of a Pattern of generational rebellion and reciprocal cancellation—is similarly, though more complexly, disingenuous.
The man who called himself Andrew Burlingame Cook VI listed, for example, “for my edification” (in the letter you will not receive), what he called “the vertiginous possibilities available to the skeptic” vis-à-vis his own motives, by way of inducing me to simple faith. They are in fact the simple permutation of a few variables: his true wish concerning the Second Revolution (its success or failure), his true conception of himself (a “winner” or a “loser”), his true conception of me (ditto), and his prediction of my inclination with respect to him (whether I shall or shall not define myself against him). Which variables generate (given his public reactionism on the one hand and, on the other, the open secret of his connexion with various radical groups) such equally reasonable-appearing conjectures as the following:
1. He wishes the Revolution to succeed and hopes that I shall support it, since he believes me a “winner”; therefore
a. he works for it himself, because he considers himself also a “winner” and does not believe that I shall rebel against him; or
b. he works against it, because he regards himself (as he regarded his namesakes) as a “loser,” and/or because he believes that I shall work against him.
2. He wishes the Revolution to succeed and hopes that I shall oppose it, since he believes me a loser; therefore
a. he works for it himself, considering himself a winner and trusting me to rebel against him; or
b. he works against it, believing himself a loser and trusting me not to rebel against him.
3. He opposes the Revolution and wishes me to do likewise, inasmuch as he considers me a winner; therefore
a. he works against it, believing that he is a winner and that I shall not rebel against him; or
b. he works for it, thinking himself a loser and that I shall rebel agains
t him.
4. He opposes the Revolution but wants me to support it, believing me to be a loser; therefore
a. he works against it, thinking himself a winner and that I shall rebel against him; or
b. he works for it, thinking himself a loser and that I shall not rebel against him.
Et cetera. Such displays confuse only the naive. To Cook, as to me, the actual state of affairs is as easily sorted out as the ABC’s, no more finally equivocal than the authorship of this letter, or its postscript.
In the pocket of “Francis Scott Key’s” jacket, together with Cook’s letter to me, was yours to the newlywed Mr and Mrs Ambrose Mensch, which you must excuse my opening to see whether it was another of Cook’s stratagems. I took the additional liberty (I was hurried) of tearing off your return address, then replaced the letter, unaltered, in its envelope, the envelope in the pocket. For reasons of my own I subsequently decided to send you a deciphered copy not only of the foregoing but of those “posthumous letters of A. B. Cook IV,” as well as of “my father’s” to me of 10 September last, urging me to join him at McHenry. Inasmuch as you do not know my address, you cannot return them as you returned Cook’s offerings of June. Whether or not you “use” them, I am confident that you will read and be used by them.
The man who died at Fort McHenry was not my father.
I know who my mother is; have long, if not always, known. And she knows who my true father is, as I know (what A. B. Cook little suspected) who and where my twin children, and their mother, are.