Letters

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.