Letters

A dozen years and one miscarriage later, in 1961, upon our second visit to the States, the Macks chastely returned our hospitality. Jane had already, after her fashion, entirely repressed her romance with Jeffrey, not because (as with him) it was of no importance, but rather because it was too uncharacteristic of her to be agreeably recalled. I had by this time published my more serious articles on Constant, Gibbon, Rousseau, Schlegel, and Byron — their connexion with Mme de Staël — and brought out my edition of her letters (which had served as my entrée to Katia and Thomas Mann upon their removing from California to Switzerland during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Huxley had tried unsuccessfully to introduce us in 1947… but on this subject, too, I shall not speak). I was acquiring a small reputation as a scholar of the French Revolutionary period. Then Harrison Mack put me in touch with your Joseph Morgan of the Maryland Historical Society, on whom he already had his eye as a likely president for his college-in-the-works; and my conversation with that knowledgeable young man — so I had come to think of anyone my age! — led to my subsequent essays on de Staël and the Americans: Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, Gouverneur Morris.

In the fall of that year, marvellous to relate, I also made the acquaintance — may he not remember it! — of a literary figure of an altogether different order. Morgan had fortuitously recollected, from some transactions between his office and its counterpart in the state of Delaware, that Germaine de Staël was among the original investors in E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co. in the first decade of the 19th Century. She had of course known Éleuthère Irénée’s father, Pierre Samuel Du Pont, before the Revolution: the “Rousseau” in her sympathised with the romantic economics of Du Pont père, Turgot, and the other physiocrats, while the “Jane Mack” in her — would that I’d inherited a touch of it! — recognised that munitions were a golden investment no matter whose cannons carried the day. Morgan himself arranged to have the microfilm records of those stock transactions, and her letters of enquiry about them after her father’s death in 1804, sent down from Wilmington to Baltimore for my examination. As I perused them with the society’s projector, the only other visitor in the place — a heavyset, not unhandsome gentleman in his latter forties, with curly thick pepper-and-salt hair and suit to match — began making a fuss to the young woman on desk-duty because his books, of which he’d presented autographed copies to the society, were to be found neither on display nor among the shelves of Maryland poets.

He grew louder. It was a thinly disguised political reprisal, he declared; Morgan and his ilk could expect to hear from the governor’s office. Too long had the society been a haven and sinecure for left-wing iconoclasts, self-styled intellectuals, outside agitators with no respect for the red, white, and blue, much less the red, white, black, and orange of “The Old Line State, long may she wave / O’er her detractors’ wretched grave,” et cetera.

I thought the man drunk, or mad. The desk clerk was intimidated, almost in tears. As I moved to defend her, Morgan appeared from his office, rolled his eyes, and levelly explained, when he could get a word in between tetrameters, that inasmuch as the books in question had been duly catalogued (among Miscellaneous Marylandia), their absence from the shelves must be testament of their popularity. The library was noncirculating, but given the small staff his budget permitted, some attrition by theft was inevitable. As they were none of them in print, perhaps Mr Cook would spare another set of copies from his apparently inexhaustible supply? In any case, he must cease his disturbance at once or leave the premises; others were at work.

The two clearly knew each other; their contretemps had the air of a reenactment. At Morgan’s last remark the fellow seemed to notice me for the first time: elaborately he begged my pardon (he had better begged the clerk’s) and insisted that “Joseph”—“a flaming Commie, don’t you know, but an able chap all the same”—introduce us. Even as Morgan dryly did so, the man pressed upon me broadsides and flyers from his inside pockets, advertising himself and his poetical effusions. Morgan withdrew with a sigh — it seemed they were long-standing acquaintances; the outburst had been half a joke — and I was left with Mr A. B. Cook, self-designated Poet Laureate of “Maryland! Faerie-Land! / Tidal estuary-land!”—as odd a mixture of boorishness and cultivation as I’d encountered.