By 1812, however, Andrew is in the quandary aforementioned. Indeed, without giving over his admiration for his grandfather, he now believes himself to have been as mistaken about his father as he thinks his father to have been about his father! I leave it to his eloquent “prenatal” letters to set forth fully his historical investigations and psychological circumstances. He concludes with the resolve to devote the second half of his life to undoing his “wrongheaded” accomplishments in the first — presumably by endeavoring to prevent the very war he has been promoting, or (as he believes it too late now to forestall the declaration of which today is the anniversary) by doing what he can to prevent a decisive victory for either the British or the Americans, in the hope that a stalemate will check their territorial expansion on the North American continent and permit the establishment of an Indian Free State. His career thus bids to be in effect self-canceling, by his own acknowledgment, as the careers of his successive Ancestors may be presumed to have been reciprocally canceling. It is his pious hope, in the fourth and final letter, that this program of self-refutation, together with the pattern he has exposed in the family history, will enable his unborn child — i.e., Henry or Henrietta Cook Burlingame V — to proceed undistracted by the spurious rebelliousness that has so dissipated the family’s energies: that he or she may break the pattern and not defeat, but best, their father, by achieving the goals he can now hope only to take a few positive steps toward.
Dear colleague, esteemed collaborator, fellow toiler up the slopes of Mt. Parnassus: what a mighty irony here impends! My voice falters (I am dictating this by telephone, from notes, into my secretary’s machine across the Bay, whence she will transcribe and send it off to you posthaste). Poor Cooks! Poor Burlingames! And poor suspense, I admit, to leave you thus hanging on their history’s epistolary hook: Did my namesake’s letters reach their addressee? Did “Henry or Henrietta” take to heart his heartfelt counsel? And Andrew himself: did he achieve his self-abnegatory aims? If so, by what revision of his revised program, since we know the outcome of the War of 1812?
Those earlier two questions I shall return to: they are the body of this letter, whose head nods so ready a yes to your invitation. The latter two I shall answer in detail in letters to come — five, by my estimate, though four would be a more appropriate number, to balance the four hereunto appended. The fact is, sir, my major literary effort over the past dozen years — that is to say, since I gave you my “Sot-Weed Factor Redivivus” material as the basis for your novel — has been the planning of a poetical epic of this Border State: a local version of Joel Barlow’s great Columbiad. It was to portray the life and adventures of this child of the Republic, Andrew Cook IV, from their coincident birth in 1776, through the 1812 War, to Cook’s disappearance in 1821. It was to be entitled Marylandiad, though its action was to range from Paris to Canada to New Orleans and lose itself in the mists of St. Helena. It was to be complete and published in time for the Dorchester tercentenary or, failing that, at least the U.S. Bicentennial…
Alas, the practice of literature has, as you know, never been more than my avocation. The practice of history is my métier (I do not mean historiography!); my muse — who is not Clio — is too demanding to leave me time for dalliance with Calliope; I shall not write my Marylandiad. Instead, I reply in kind to your invitation by here inviting you to write it for me — incorporate it, if you like, into your untitled epistolary project! Thus my determination to supply you (in the form of letters, after his own example) with my researches into the balance of A.C. IV’s life. I will follow them with a one-letter account of my own activities on behalf of the Second Revolution, and that with an envoi to my son Henry Burlingame VII, whose relation to me — you will by now have guessed — follows inexorably the classic Pattern.
Seven letters in all: you see how readily I adapt my old project to your new one!
