Thus they were involved in attempts to sabotage the Manhattan Project, which they also opposed on general humanitarian grounds. Indeed, Deponent testifieth that his father was vaporised at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on the morning of 16 July 1945, in a last-ditch effort to thwart the detonation of the first atomic bomb: a martyrdom unknown to this day to any but “wife” and son, and now me, and now you. Thereafter, Casteene claims to have been involved in the supply of “atomic secrets” to the Soviet Union in the latter 1940’s and, in the early 1950’s, with the supply of compromising data to Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunters (to the end of “purging the C.P. of leftover liberals from the thirties” in preparation for its “new and different rôle in the sixties,” so declareth etc.). In 1953, a pivotal year, he comes to believe that his father’s beloved project has been misconceived; that political revolutions as such are not to be expected or even especially wished for in the overdeveloped countries at this hour of the world; that Stalinism is as deplorable as Hitlerism; etc. The 2nd Revolution, he decides, in American anyroad, will be a social and cultural revolution in the decade to come (i.e., the 1960’s); the radical transformation of political and economic institutions will either follow it in the 1970’s or become irrelevant. M. Casteene’s personal target date for the whole business, I simply report, is 1976.
Still listening, John? Well: about that same time — I mean the middle 1950’s, while dear old Mann is telling yours truly in dear old Switzerland about the liberating aspect of utter disgrace — Deponent moveth to Maryland and setteth up as an arch right-winger named Andrew Burlingame Cook VI, which name is in fact as officially his from his father as is the name André Castine from his mother. He modifies his appearance (He can do it almost before one’s eyes, but never quite perfectly; then when he “returns” like Proteus to his “true” appearance, that’s never quite what it was before, either!); he pretends to be a blustering patriotic poetaster of independent means; he befriends Harrison Mack, claims distant cousinship to Jane Mack. He ingratiates himself with right-wing political figures in Annapolis, in Washington; he goes so far as to call himself the Laureate of the Old Line State — and is threatened with lawsuit, to no avail, by the actual holder of that post. He affiliates himself in various ways with Mr Hoover’s F.B.I, and Mr Allen Dulles’s C.I.A. That portion of the general public aware of his existence (and both his visibility and his audibility are as high as he can manage) take him for a more or less pompous, more or less buffoonish reactionary. A few — Todd Andrews, for example — believe that underneath the flag-waving high jinks is a serious if not sinister cryptofascist. And a very few—e.g., Joe Morgan, as I believe I reported some six or seven Saturdays past — suspect that in fact his reactionary pose is a cover for more or less radical left-wing activities. But only his son, Henri C. Burlingame VII — and now myself, whom alas he has had to keep too long and painfully in the dark — know that “A. B. Cook” and “André Castine” are, under contrary aspects, the same Second-Revolutionist.
We are not done.
In his latter thirties, Monsieur Castine/Cook researches the history of his forebears — those Cooks and Burlingames alternating back through time to the original poet laureate of Maryland and beyond — and prepares to draft a mock epic called Marylandiad, after the manner of Ebenezer Cooke’s Sot-Weed Factor poem. His motives are three: to reinforce his public cover; to gratify his genuine interest in that chain of spectacular filial rebellions; and to introduce “our” son properly to his paternal lineage. His researches are mainly on location at Castines Hundred, and inasmuch as he divides his time, with his identity, between there and the province of the Barons Baltimore, he avails himself also of the Maryland Historical Society — where, we remember, yours truly was first by A. B. Cook dismayed in 1961—and thus becomes acquainted with its then officials, one of whom he will subsequently recommend to Harrison Mack for the presidency of Tidewater Tech and later yet connive with John Schott to unseat from Marshyhope.
