Letters полностью

You have Counted and Recounted. Sure enough, the original drama was of some hundred days’ duration: July 19-October 26 inclusive, from your Arrival in Wicomico at the Doctor’s prescription to Seek Employment as a Teacher of Prescriptive Grammar, through the death and burial of Rennie Morgan and your Departure, with the Doctor, from everything. In fact it comes to 99 or 101 days, depending; but you are Not Inclined to Quibble with Morgan’s history. The real redramatization, then, has not begun, after all: until Day One, next month, it dozes like a copperhead coiled upon a sunny rock. You Are still in the prologue to the dream. You Are still on Elba, at the turn of History’s palindrome.

And like Stendhal in that other Hundred Days, you Postpone Suicide now out of Almost Selfless Curiosity. Nor have you, thus Distracted, Reexperienced reparalysis since your Relapse of April 2. What on earth, you Wonder, is Morgan up to? What in the world will happen next?

L: A. B. Cook VI to the Author. Eagerly accepting the Author’s invitation. The Cook/Burlingame lineage between Andrew Cook IV and himself. The Welland Canal Plot.

A. B. Cook VI

“Barataria”

Bloodsworth Island, Md.

6/18/69

Dear Professor:

Letters? A novel-in-letters, you say? Six several stories intertwining to make a seventh? A capital notion, sir!

My secretary read me yours of the 15th over the telephone this morning when I called in from my lodge here on Bloodsworth Island (temporarily rechristened “Barataria” by the film company to whom I’ve lent the place, who are shooting a story involving Jean Lafitte). I hasten to accept, with pleasure, your invitation to play the role of the Author who solicits and organizes communications from and between his characters, and embroils himself in their imbroglios! To reorchestrate in some such fashion, in the late afternoon of our century if not of our civilization, the preoccupations at once of the early Modernists and of the 18th-Century inventors of the noble English novel — that strikes me as a project worthy of the authors of The Sot-Weed Factor, and I shall be as happy to be your collaborator in this project as I was in that.

How is it, sir, your letter does not acknowledge that so fruitful collaboration? I must and shall attribute your omission (but how so, in correspondence between ourselves?) to my one stipulation, now as in the 1950’s: that you keep my identity (and my aid) confidential and allegedly fictional. “Pseudo-anonymity,” I don’t have to tell you, is prerequisite to the work for which my laureateship is the agreeable “cover,” and which — as the enclosed documents will amply demonstrate — I come by honestly. But enough: By way of immediate response to your inquiry concerning the history of the Cooks and Burlingames between the time of Lord Baltimore’s Laureate of Maryland and myself, I attach copies of four long letters written in 1812 by my great-great-grandfather and namesake to his unborn child. But before I enlarge upon their mass, let me speak to another point in your letter:

From Lady Amherst, you say (whom I also am honored to be acquainted with, and who I understand will publish these enclosures in some history journal), you have the general conception of the “letters” project: an old-time epistolary novel, etc. From Todd Andrews of Cambridge, another old acquaintance of mine, you are borrowing “the tragic view of history”—and welcome to it, sir, for I respect but most decidedly do not share it! And one Jacob Horner (whom I’m happy to know only at second hand, through the gentleman he once so unconscionably victimized: the former director of the Maryland Historical Society and ex-president of Marshyhope State College) has suggested to you certain possibilities of letters in the alphabetical sense, as well as what you call “the anniversary view of history.” (Whatever might that mean? Today, for example, is the anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo by Wellington and Blücher in 1815; also of our Congress’s declaration of the War of 1812. Moreover, my morning newspaper informs me that it is the birthdate of Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s prime minister and foreign secretary during the period of both the Napoleonic and the “Second American” wars. A piquant coincidence of anniversaries — but so what? As there are only 365¼ days in the year, each must be the birthdate of some eight or nine millions of the presently living and hundreds of millions of the dead, and the anniversary of any number of the events that comprise human history. What is one to see with an historical “view” apparently as omnivalent — which is to say, nonvalent — as history itself?)