Текст книги "Letters"

Автор книги: John Barth

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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

Clearly, Jacob Horner, what you are Involved in is no ordinary soap opera: it is Bayreuth by Lever Brothers; it is Procter & Gamble’s production of the Bathtub Ring.

But never mind the Big Picture, which you will likely Never See; or which, if it exists at all, may be like those messages spelled out at halftime in U.S. college football matches by marching undergraduates: less intelligent, valuable, and significant than its constituent units. The movie people have dispersed, to reassemble in Maryland next week. Mensch and Lady Amherst have gone with them. Bibi will leave to rejoin the company (against the Doctor’s orders: how his authority is shrunk!) after tomorrow’s, or Saturday’s, minstrel show, flying back as necessary for her therapy sessions and her role in Der Wiedertraum. Casteene appears, disappears, reappears as always, often taking Pocahontas with him in some secretarial capacity. (You are Jealous. Why are you Jealous?) Even Merry Bernstein, now that she can sit and walk almost normally, speaks of lighting out with her friends to, like, Vancouver? As far from Lily Dale as possible. For dramaturgical purposes, in this corner of the Big Picture only you and Joe Morgan Remain. It is his motive, not Casteene’s or Prinz’s, that truly Concerns and truly Mystifies you.

But now that your Drama has taken prospective shape, Joe will not speak to you again on the subject of you and him and Rennie and the Fatal Fifties “until the time comes”—presumably July 21, when your Wicomico Teachers College Interview, at which you First Met him, is to be reenacted. Or perhaps July 22, anniversary of (among other things) your First Meeting Rennie, with her husband, in your Newly Rented Room, whither they’d sought you out to congratulate you on your Appointment.

“Day Two of your Hundred Days,” is what Joe said, and would say no more.

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?)

Well, that is your problem. Mine is what to contribute, for my part, to the design and theme of our enterprise, beyond the genealogical material I shall of course again gladly share with you. I have given the matter some thought this morning, and the fact is I believe I have exactly what we need! This July – exactly a month from today, in fact – Dorchester County commences a week-long tercentenary celebration, in which I shall take a small part in my capacity as laureate of the state. But my real interest in that anniversary (both my official and my deeper interest) is its anticipation of the more considerable one seven years hence: the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, of which no one yet hears mention, but which will be on every American’s mind – and all the media – before very long. This anniversary, the 200th of a revolution that much changed history, will coincide (and not coincidentally) with a revolution to revolutionize Revolution itself: what I propose, sir, as the grand theme of our book: The Second American Revolution!

The Second American Revolution! In a manner of speaking, it has been the theme of my family ever since the Treaty of Paris concluded the first in 1783. My parents devoted their lives to it, my grandparents and great-grandparents before them, as shall be shown. I have done likewise, and so I pray shall do my son – who is by way of being at once the most prodigiously gifted and the most prodigal revolutionary of our line. And, as the letters of my great-great-grandfather make plain, both the gifts and the prodigality antedate the War of Independence: he traces our revolutionary energies back at least as far as Henry Burlingame III, whom you characterize as the “cosmophilist” tutor of Ebenezer Cooke, first laureate of Maryland.

Andrew Burlingame Cook IV (whose birthday fortuitously coincides with the Republic’s) wrote these four letters on the eve of the “Second War of Independence,” as our ancestors called the War of 1812. It was the eve as well of his 36th birthday – i.e., the evening of his life’s first half, as he himself phrases it, and the dawn of its second. Like Dante Alighieri and many another at this famous juncture, he found himself at spiritual, philosophical, even psychological sixes and sevens. He misdoubted the validity of his career thus far: He had been active in the ménages of Madame de Staël and Joel Barlow during the French Revolution and the Directorate; coming to America after 1800, he had involved himself with Aaron Burr’s conspiracy and Tecumseh’s Indian alliance, more out of antipathy for what he took to be his father’s causes than out of real enmity toward the U.S. or sympathy for the Indians. At the time of these letters, about to become a father himself, Andrew Cook IV profoundly questions both the authenticity of his own motives and his appraisal of his father’s, whom circumstances have precluded his knowing at all closely. With the aid of his remarkable wife, he researches the history of the family and discovers a striking pattern of filial rebellion: since the convergence of the Cooke and Burlingame lines – that is to say, since the child of Henry Burlingame III and Anna Cooke was named and raised as Andrew Cooke III after his father’s disappearance (per the epilogue of our Sot-Weed Factor novel) – every firstborn son in the line has defined himself against what he takes to have been his absent father’s objectives, and in so doing has allied himself, knowingly or otherwise, with his grandfather, whose name he also shares! Thus Andrew Cook IV, in aiding Tecumseh against the U.S., reenacted Andrew Cooke III’s association with Pontiac in the French and Indian War, thinking to spite his father Henry Burlingame IV as Andrew III had thought to spite his father, H.B. III, et cetera.

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!

But this ancient history lies in the future (Have you a timetable for our project? Are the dates and sequence of the several letters to be of any significance? Have you a Pattern of your own in mind?), beginning at this letter’s end, when you shall commence the tale of Andrew Cook IV as told by himself. Meanwhile, in the most summary fashion, here is the line of his descendants from the end of his last letter to his child (dated May 14, 1812; what would your Jacob Horner make of this anniversary of King Henry IV’s assassination, George Washington’s opening of the first Constitutional Convention, the death of Mme de Staël’s mother, Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination, and the departure of the Lewis & Clark Expedition from St. Louis?) to the beginning of this my first letter to you:

My ancestor chose the wrong conjunction. A week into Gemini, just after he closed that long fourth letter, Andrée Castine Cook gave birth to opposite-sex twins, duly named Henry and Henrietta Cook Burlingame V. The old cosmophilist H.B. III must have smiled in his unknown grave! In the time-honored manner of our line, their father lingered on at Castines Hundred until he was assured of his wife’s and children’s well-being – then left at once (but not directly) for Paris, to try to assist Joel Barlow in the business he had lately done his best to obstruct: negotiation with Napoleon concerning the Berlin and Milan decrees.

He will not get there in time: unbeknownst to him, the emperor has already left St. Cloud to lead his army’s ill-fated march into Russia; the Duc de Bassano, unable to stall Barlow further, has produced on May 11 the “Decree of St. Cloud,” falsely dated April 28, 1811, to “prove” that France had rescinded the Berlin and Milan decrees more than a year since, at Barlow’s first request! The old poet is delighted, never mind the chicanery: the more so since on that same May 11 Prime Minister Perceval, a staunch supporter of Britain’s Orders in Council against American shipping, has been assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons, and his successor Lord Castlereagh is known to be amenable to lifting those orders. Barlow has rushed the St. Cloud Decree across the Channel via the U.S.S. Wasp; on May 19 it has reached Lord Castlereagh. Surely the author of the Columbiad is about to score a brilliant diplomatic triumph: no reason now for Britain not to raise her embargo as France has done, and Madison not to revoke in turn his Non-Intercourse Act against Britain. The western war hawks have lost their only casus belli of interest to the eastern states. There will be no War of 1812!

But ah, the mails. Unaware of Barlow’s coup, Madison has delivered on June 1 his Second War Message to Congress, emphasizing the issue of British impressment of U.S. seamen; today 157 years ago he signs the Declaration of War, but the British ministry will not hear of it until well after their tardy revocation (on June 23) of the Orders in Council. Adieu, Joel Barlow, who have but six months more to live and must spend them chasing Napoleon all over eastern Europe! Au revoir, Andrew Cook IV, chaser of wild geese, of whom we shall hear more!

For the next dozen years his good wife remains at Castines Hundred, raising her children. Twice during the first three of those years – that is, during the “Second War of Independence”—her husband returns (once without her knowing it), between his wartime adventures, not to be here chronicled. Andrée herself, once so politically active, seems to take no further interest in the Game of Governments. She is paid a single visit (in mid-September, 1813) by her friend and hero Tecumseh, who has fought so ably for the British along the Great Lakes that the question is no longer whether the U.S. will capture Canada, but whether the western states, so eager for the war, will become new territories of the Crown! Detroit has fallen; Fort Chicago has been massacred, Frenchtown, Fort Miami, Fort Mims. Tecumseh has more than regained the prestige lost at Tippecanoe: he is the undisputed leader of a confederacy that now includes the southern Creeks.

But he confides to “Star-of-the-Lake” that he has ceased to believe in his mission. His Indians are good fighters but not good soldiers; with British encouragement, their ferocity against captured troops and civilians has redoubled; he cannot restrain them. The American retaliation has already begun, and is plainly exterminative. Forts Wayne and Meigs and Stephenson did not fall, and they should have; the Creeks cannot possibly withstand the army that Andrew Jackson is assembling against them; the British general Proctor, Tecumseh’s immediate superior, is a coward and a beast. Most ominous of all, the American Commodore Perry has just defeated the British fleet on Lake Erie: the Long Knives will now control the Lakes, and who controls the Lakes controls the heart of the country.

It is to confirm rumors of this defeat, about which Proctor has lied to him, that Tecumseh has come secretly from Bois Blanc Island, his camp on the Detroit River, to the other end of Lake Erie; having confirmed them, he has stopped at Castines Hundred to say good-bye to his friend forever. His old enemy General Harrison is assembling an army of vengeful Kentucky riflemen on the Ohio shore of the lake; Perry’s fleet will carry them unopposed to the Detroit river forts. Somewhere thereabouts, and soon, the decisive battle will be fought. He Tecumseh is not sanguine of its issue; in any case, he knows – though he cannot say how he knows – that he will not survive it, and that the cause of Indian confederacy will not survive him.

But this is not Tecumseh’s history, any more than it is Andrew Cook’s (who, we shall learn in another letter, is observing this fateful tête-à-tête from a place of concealment on the grounds of Castines Hundred). During the British invasion of Chesapeake Bay late the next summer – specifically, during the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore following the burning of Washington – my great-great-grandfather will officially die. The news will reach Andrée (still in mourning for Tecumseh) a week or so later – along with the rumor that her husband has merely faked his death in order to mislead certain authorities; has changed identities and set out for New Orleans, the next destination of the British fleet. The “widow” considers the news, the rumor, his long silence, her familiar position. After the destruction of Jean Lafitte’s Baratarian stronghold by the American navy that same September and the American victory at New Orleans the following January – the war of course is over by then, but the mails, the mails! – the expected letter arrives at Castines Hundred, purportedly from her husband but in a fairly suspicious hand, as if penned with difficulty by either a wounded Andrew IV or a moderately artful forger: She is to join him at once in Mobile to help reorganize the surviving Creeks and Negroes enlisted by the British and now abandoned by them. She is to bring the twins…

Andrée makes the painful choice: she resolves to disbelieve, and holds fast to that resolve for the rest of her recorded life, though four more “posthumous” letters follow this first over the next several years, comprising the body of my Marylandiad. She remains a widow; the twins grow up fatherless. Napoleon abdicates, is exiled to Elba, returns for the Hundred Days, is defeated at Waterloo, surrenders aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon, appeals to the prince regent for a passport to America, and is transported instead to St. Helena by Admiral Cockburn, the erstwhile scourge of the Chesapeake. The Rush-Bagot Treaty neutralizes the Great Lakes forever. Mme de Staël dies in Paris of liver and hydrothoracic complaints, George III at Windsor of intermittent hematuria, inguinal hernia, hemorrhoids, bedsores, and terminal diarrhea; the prince regent becomes George IV. Henry Clay’s Missouri Compromise prohibits slavery in all the new territories except Missouri which open up west of the Mississippi; the Indians are resettled and re-resettled. The state of Indiana considers naming its new capital city Tecumseh after their late great adversary, but decides on Indianapolis instead. Schemes are concocted to spirit Napoleon from his second exile to New Orleans, to Champ d’Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

The last letter from “Andrew Cook IV” reaches Castines Hundred in the winter of 1821. Andrée is not to believe that the emperor has actually died on St. Helena, any more than that the writer of the letter actually died in Baltimore in 1814: Yours Truly and his associate Jean Lafitte have successfully rescued Napoleon from that rock, like a latter-day Perseus his Andromeda; they are hiding out in the Maryland marshes, planning together the Second Revolution; he will shortly appear at Castines Hundred to fetch her and the twins.

Brazil declares its independence from Portugal, Mexico from Spain; Simón Bolivar (of whom more later) leads the revolutions in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru. The “Chesapeake Negroes” are left chillily in Nova Scotia; those from the Gulf Coast are urged to rejoin their American masters; Tecumseh’s Indians are abandoned to their own devices. The aging Marquis de Lafayette returns to visit each of the 24 United States. In May of 1825, on their 13th birthday, Andrée discloses to the twins the four letters their father wrote to them in 1812 (those here appended). She is herself 36 now, her husband’s age then. Carefully she reviews for the children her life with their father, her genealogical researches, his fervent hopes for them.

Then, having discharged her duty to his memory and been to that point a model mother to their children, she adds her personal wish: that they will take as their example neither the Cooks nor the Burlingames nor herself, but the idle, pacific Barons and Baronesses Castine, indifferent to History and everything else except each other and their country pleasures. She goes further: lays a deep curse upon marriage, parenthood, the Anglo-Saxon race, and the United States of America. She goes further yet: renames herself Madocawanda the Tarratine, exchanges her silks and cottons for beads and buckskins, kisses the twins a fierce farewell, and disappears into western Canada! There will be rumors of her riding with Black Hawk in Wisconsin in 1832, a sort of middle-aged Penthesilea, when the Sac and Fox Indians are driven west across the Mississippi. It will even be reported that among the Oglala Sioux, during Crazy Horse’s vain war to break up the reservation system in 1876, is a ferocious old squaw named Madocawanda who delights in removing the penises of wounded U.S. Cavalrymen. Andrée Castine at that time would have been 87! But we need not identify “Star-of-the-Lake” with these shadowy avatars.

And the twins? They kept company with each other, raised by the Baron and Baroness Castine much in the manner that their ancestors Ebenezer and Anna Cooke had been raised in St. Giles in the Fields (per your account in our Sot-Weed Factor)—only without the radical stimulation of a tutor like Henry Burlingame III. Opposite-sex twins, the psychologists tell us, tend to regression. And why not? They were not lonely in the womb. Expelled from that Paradise, they know what Aristophanes only fancied: that we are but the fallen halves of a once seamless whole, searching in vain for our lost moiety. They have little need of speech, but invent their own languages; they have less need of others. Their eventual lovers will seem siblings, as their siblings had seemed lovers. Henry V is the only Burlingame of whose genital problems (and their traditional oversolution) we have no report; of Henrietta’s sexual life, too, we know next to nothing. Neither married; they lived together until their 49th year in a kind of travesty of Andrée’s advice, apparently uninterested in anyone except each other and in anything except, mildly, literature, the great American flowering of which was at hand.

In 1827, their 16th year, they received a letter from one “Ebenezer Burling” of Richmond, Virginia, delivered to Castines Hundred via the newly opened Erie Canal. With your dear mother, it began, has gone my soul, my name… (A true Burlingamish pun there, involving mon âme and the truncation of Burlingame: we remember A.C. IV’s long tenure in France, and the twins’ bilinguality.) He is their father, the letter goes on to declare, now past 50 and constrained by circumstances to this evocative nom de guerre. He understands and sympathizes with their mother’s defection; he hopes they will permit him, belatedly, to take her place and assume his own, as he has sought to do since 1815. He is about to leave Richmond for Norfolk with a gifted young poet-friend, whom he is helping to escape certain disagreeable circumstances and on whom therefore he has bestowed another of his own amusing aliases, “Henri le Rennet”: a mixed pun on “Henry the Reborn” and “Henry the Reemptied” or “cleaned-out” (The young fellow is destitute; he has written some admirable verses about Tamerlane; he believes that the story of “Consuelo del Consulado” needs reworking, and proposes for example that her poisoned snuffbox be changed to a poisoned pen; he is headed for Boston to try his luck as an editor and writer; his actual name is Edgar Poe). He Burling himself is en route to Baltimore, to try whether what he learned about steam propulsion from Toot Fulton many years ago can be applied to railways. He hopes his children will join him there and encloses money for their journey, along with a separate sum for the Baron Castine in partial remuneration of the expense of their upbringing. He also encloses, by way of proof of his identity, a pocketwatch which he claims was similarly and belatedly given him by his own father: a silver Breguet with “barleycorn” engine-turning on the case, steel moon hands, and a white enameled face with the seconds dial offset at the VII, the maker’s name engraved in secret cursive under the XII, and the monogram HB similarly scribed before the appropriate numeral IV. I have this watch before me as I speak.

The baron advises them to demand an interview at Castines Hundred, but the twins seem as attracted by the prospect of travel as by the possibility that the letter is authentic. They insist; their guardian shrugs his shoulders and returns to his bucolic pursuits. They set out for Baltimore – and there they live, in obscure circumstances and with much travel intermixed, until the Civil War.

Of the fate of “Ebenezer Burling” and their connection with him, there is no record (the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad opened on Andrew IV’s birthday in 1828, horse-drawn); the source of their income is unknown. From references in later letters – exchanged during the twins’ separation by the Civil War – one infers that there was much coming and going between Baltimore and Washington, Baltimore and Boston, Baltimore and Buffalo. They remember having encouraged “E.B.‘s” young poet-friend, during his own residency in their city (1831-35), to give up alcohol and poetry for short prose tales readable at a single sitting, and not to hesitate to marry his 13-year-old cousin. On the other hand, having read the young novelist Walt Whitman’s maiden effort (Franklin Evans, or, the Inebriate), they urged its author to switch to verse. Perhaps presumptuously, they take credit for passing on to Whitman Henry Burlingame III’s “cosmophilism”; Henry V opines, however, that the scandalous pansexualism of Leaves of Grass is entirely rhetorical, the author being in fact virtually celibate. With Longfellow they could do nothing, beyond suggesting that Edgar charge him with plagiarism; no more could they with Mrs. Stowe. With Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson they were content, except as the latter two strayed into verse. None could be persuaded to make literature out of their father’s Algerian adventure or their mother’s reenactment, in reverse, of the story of her ancestor Madocawanda the Tarratine. (They did not live to groan at Longfellow’s versification of it in 1871 as “The Student’s Second Tale” in Part Second of his tiresome Tales of a Wayside Inn: