Letters

“Okay. Your Friend Saint Joseph has the right idea, whether he and the former Joe Morgan are the same or not.”

“They’re the same.”

The Doctor shrugged his eyebrows. “Heraclitus’s dictum cuts two ways: even if the river had not flowed, the You would have. I am remembering how Morgan sent his wife back to you when he could not assimilate her first infidelity. As if a replay might clarify it…”

The Doctor slid his chair away, stood, relit his long-dead cigar. The interview was apparently over.

“An impressive chap, your Friend. But this Wiederträumerei is a dangerous business. You set about to kill two birds with one stone, and sometimes you wipe out the whole flock. So. Forget what we decided earlier about you and Pocahontas, at least until Saint Joseph makes his choice. You and I must go back to weekly P-and-A’s, as in the old days.” He frowned. “Reenactment. But if there is no Freshman English requirement on the campuses nowadays, surely there is no Prescriptive Grammar. And you Ought to Stay Residential. How will you Teach?”

~ ~ ~

R: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The history of A. B. Cooke III: Pontiac’s conspiracy.

At Castines Hundred

Niagara, Upper Canada

2 April 1812

My Dearest Henrietta or Henry,

Read, dear child, when you shall have been born & begun to be educated, a great tiresome epical poem call’d Columbiad, by Joel Barlow of Connecticut & Paris, wherein the dying & despondent Columbus, in a dream or trance, is fetcht to the Mount of Vision by Hesper, Spirit of the Western World: thence like Aeneas in Hades he beholds panoramically the future history (up to 1807, the date of the poem’s appearance) of the empire for whose initiation he is responsible. This vision, stout Barlow assures us — of white Americans pushing ever westward, clearing the forests, draining the marshes, harvesting the fish & game, building canals & roads & cities from coast to coast — cheers Columbus & reconciles him to his obscure death.

The conceit is admirable. The poem itself is a bore because, unlike the Aeneid, its concerns do not range much beyond sentimental patriotism, and because, unlike Virgil, its author is a merely educated, sensible fellow with an amateur’s gift for making verses. Joel Barlow was one of the self-styled “Hartford Wits”; another was your grandfather, Henry Burlingame IV, who befriended Barlow at Yale College just before the American Revolution and suggested both The Vision of Columbus (the poet’s 1st & briefer version of Columbiad) & a passable satire of Daniel Shays’ rebellion call’d The Anarchiad, of which more anon. The Cooke-Burlingame line is given neither to longueurs nor to longevity: my father is said to have died in 1785 at the age of 39, before either of the poems that covertly memorialize him was publisht.

As for Barlow: that gentleman survives as U.S. Minister to France, whence he will have reported by now to President Madison that “Le Comte Édouard de Crillon”—who lately sold Secretary Monroe the notorious John Henry Letters for $50,000 and then exacted from Madison’s operatives another $21,000 (half of which Andrée & I have safely bank’d for you in Switzerland) — does not exist. The late actual Duc de Crillon was a Spanish grandee, conqueror of Minorca, attacker of Gibraltar, & member of the French Assembly, who in 1788 tried unsuccessfully to seduce my mother at a diplomatic soirée in London. The current Duke, his only son, lives in Paris, smarting at the £1,200 he was lately swindled out of by one “Jean Blanque,” and doubtless enraged at the scandal now attaching to the family name. Father & son are both acquaintances of Barlow, to whom my father introduced them years ago. Thus the Minister will have immediately guess’d, as I want him to, that Madison has been duped. What he will not guess is that I did both the duping & the unduping, to lead the U. States closer to war and so promote the schism betwixt New England & the rest of that nation. That I chose the name Édouard de Crillon precisely to excite his suspicion (as well as to settle a little score for Mother), and the name Jean Blanque to echo Barlow’s own & provide him a blank to fill.

Rather, to provide such a blank to History, since the Hartford Wits, for all their wit, are short on the finer ironies. There is more to it: I chose the name Édouard for my imposture of the Count, for example, because it was Mother’s descent from Le Comte Cécile Édouard of Castle Haven in Maryland that had aroused the late Duke’s lecherous interest. If the fellow currently posing as Aaron Burr in Paris is in fact my father, he will recognize in that touch the family trademark, & understand that I understand that he is alive.