Letters

The movement woke me further: I recognized that before consulting my wristwatch I’d felt for a pocketwatch — a silver Breguet with “barleycorn” engine-turning on the case, steel moon hands, and a white enameled face with the seconds dial offset at the VII, the maker’s name engraved in secret cursive under the XII, and my father’s monogram, HB, similarly scribed before the appropriate Roman numeral IV — a watch which I did not possess, had never possessed, which could not with that monogram be my father’s, which did not so far as I know exist! Reached for it (in the watch pocket of the vest I didn’t wear, didn’t own) with more reflexive a motion than then turned my left wrist. I’d perspired in my sleep, whereinto I’d fallen (whence such locutions in — what year was it?) in midst… in midst of revisiting the Maryland marshes at the midpoint of my life; perspired the more now, more awake, at feeling one foot still in distant time or dreams.

I knew “myself,” come briefly down under Mason and Dixon’s to visit certain cattailed, blue-crabbed, oystered haunts of — aye, there was the rub: I had been going to say “my youth,” but what that term referred to, like dim stars and ghost crabs, I could not resolve when I looked straight at it. And when I looked away — at a periwinkle, say, self-encapsulated on a nearby reed — from my mind’s eye-corner I could just perceive, not one, but several “youths,” all leading — but by different paths, in different ages! — to this point of high ground between two creeklets where I lay, stiff as if I’d slept for twenty decades or centuries instead of minutes. There was the neutral, sleep-wrapped, most familiar youth, neither happy nor unhappy, begun in Gemini 1930, raised up in sunny ignorance through Great Depression, Second War, and small-town Southern public schools. I knew that chap, all right: dreamer of sub-sea-level dreams from the shores of high transmontane lakes; his was the history most contiguous with the hour I’d waked to.

But beside it, like a still-sleeping leg that its wakened twin can recognize, was another history, a prior youth, to whom that pocket-watch and vest and a brave biography belonged. They shared one name’s initial: bee-beta-beth, the Kabbalist’s letter of Creation, whence derived, like life itself from the marsh primordial, both the alphabet and the universe it described by its recombinations. Beyond that, and their confluence in the onstreaming Now, they had little in common, for this youth’s youth was all bravura, intrigue and derring-do, sophistication and disguise. Coeval of the nation in whose founding his father had played a certain role, he had grown up between its two wars of independence, come to disbelieve in both father and fatherland, striven to disunite the but slightly united states — and then (a lurid memory here of bomb burst, rocket glare: not the clearest of illuminations) at the midpoint of his wayward life had seen a different pattern in the past, changed heart again, retreated from fatherland to Mother Marsh in vast perplexity to sort things out, dozed off for a moment in the resinous shade…

Then what was this third, faint-bumbling B, most shadowy of all, but obscured more by mythic leagues of time than by self-effacement or disguise? And not retreated to the midday marsh, but fallen into it as though from heaven, become a blind, lame, vatic figure afloat on the tepid tide, reciting a suspect version of his history, dozing off in midexposition…?

I woke half tranced, understanding where I was but not at once why I was there. Then the dream came clear. It’s Sunday afternoon, March 9, ’69, 157th anniversary of President Madison’s disclosure of the notorious “Henry Letters” to Congress in 1811, cool and cloudy in Buffalo, New York. I have breakfasted early, read through the Sunday Times, taken a restless midafternoon nap — and dreamed once again of waking in the Maryland marshes.

No doubt the dream, above recorded, had been prompted by a recent invitation to visit that state in June for my maiden honorary degree. Its content was clear: my ancient wish to write the comic epic that Ebenezer Cooke, 17th-Century Laureate of Maryland, put aside to write his Sot-Weed Factor, and which I myself put aside for the novel LETTERS: a Marylandiad. Its hero would live the first half of his life in the first three dozen years of the republic (say, 1776–1812) and the second half in its “last” (say, 1940–1976), with a 128-year nap between, during which — unlike Rip Winkle’s case — the country ages but the sleeper doesn’t. Enjoying the celebrated midlife crisis, he wanders alone at midday (make it 21 June 1812 or thereabouts) into the marshes, “devouring his own soul,” etc., dozes off, and wakes as it seems to him a very short while later. Begin perhaps with his waking, half tranced, with that odd sense of an additional past, a double history, one contiguous to “now” and one Revolutionary.