Letters

On July 10^th, 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.).