Letters (147 page)

Now, the movie. Its two remaining “scenes”—the Attack on Fort McHenry and the Destruction of Barataria—should provide opportunity for me (Us? I pray so) to deal with at least some of these threats and nuisances, some final rehearsal in the diversion of media and “available action” to our purposes, and (as when the U.S. Navy destroyed Jean Lafitte’s base on Grande-Terre Island on September 16, 1814) a covering of our tracks in readiness for the fall/spring season. When, blending less obtrusively with our surroundings, we will ring down the curtain on Act One (the 1960’s, the First 7-Year Plan) and raise it on Act Two.

I had thought, Henry, to commence that act, and the new decade, and the Second 7-Year Plan, by marrying Jane Mack in January 1970. Last March I set that as my “target date” for enlisting you to me by putting in your way the record of our forebear’s proud and pathetic attempt to transcend the fateful Pattern of our history—that endless canceling of Cooks by Burlingames, Burlingames by Cooks, which he was the first of our line to recognize—by rebelling against himself before his children could rebel against him. Those four “prenatal” letters (which I myself discovered just two years ago in the archives of the Erie County Historical Museum in Buffalo, and which the historian Germaine Pitt was to have annotated and published) were meant to say to you what I yearned and feared to say myself. I would then have reintroduced myself to you in my proper person, who would in turn have introduced you to your prospective stepmother. Moreover, I would have introduced you, for the first time in your conscious life, to
your biological mother,
whom History and Necessity (read “Baron André Castine”) have dealt with sorely indeed in this particular.

Do I have your attention, son? You are
not
the half-orphan you have believed yourself these many years to be. I know who, I know where, your mother is. When you shall have represented yourself to me, when we are at one with each other and with the Second Revolution, I will bring you and her together. She has awaited that reunion for 29 years! For a certain reason (call it the Anniversary View of History) I propose we keep her waiting until November 5 next, your 30th birthday—and no longer.

Thus my plan. But events have accelerated and changed that original schedule. Lady Amherst’s defection (and that earlier-mentioned novelist’s lack of interest) obliged
me
to transcribe and attempt to send you Andrew IV’s “posthumous” letters, you having somehow acquired “on your own” some version of the “prenatals.” And Jane wants us married three weeks hence, at September’s end, instead of in the New Year. Andrew Burlingame Cook VI has therefore but a few days more to live. On our drama’s larger stage, the death of Ho Chi Minh, and Nixon’s announcement of further troop withdrawals from South Viet Nam and Thailand, signal that the war in Southeast Asia is grinding down to some appropriately ignominious dénouement, and with it the mainspring of our First 7-Year Plan.

On then to the Second! No more mass demonstrations, riots on the campuses, disruptions, “trashings,” “Fanonizings”; no more assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings, heavy drugs. All these will live their desperate half life into the 1970’s, as the 18th Century half-lives into the 19th, the 19th into the 20th—but they will not be Us. Our century has one “Saturnian revolution” to go. Its first fetched us out of the 19th Century, through the cataclysms of World War I and the Russian Revolution, the explosion of hard technology and totalitarian ideology, to the beginning of the end of the Industrial Revolution, of nationalism, of Modernism, of ideology itself. Our First 7-Year Plan marked, in effect (not to boast that it itself
effected
), our transition from the second to the third third of the century: the revolutionary flowering, scarcely begun, of microelectronics; the age of software, soft drugs, smart weapons, and the soft sell; of subtle but enormous changes in Where the Power Is; of subtle enormities in general: large atrocities in small places and small print.

This morning’s three headline stories reflect and portend these things:
VIET CEASE-FIRE ENDS: U.S. “MAY RESPOND” TO DE-ESCALATION. ISRAELI PLANES RESUME ATTACK ON EGYPT. NIXON YIELDS TO CONSERVATIONISTS, NIXES EVERGLADES JETPORT.
Note especially that second: it wants no prophet, Henry, to foresee that one day soon the nations of Islam will employ their oil production as an international diplomatic weapon. Just as the arrival of the sultan’s seneschals in Constantinople on a certain afternoon in 1453 may be said conveniently to mark the end of the Middle Ages, so that day just predicted will mark the beginning of the end of the 20th Century, and of many another thing.

What exploitable convulsions lie ahead, forecast on every hand but attended seriously by few save Us! Fossil-fuel reserves exhausted before alternatives can be brought on line; the wealthy nations poorer and desperate, certain poorer nations suddenly wealthy; doomsday weaponry everywhere (Drew Mack speaks of
dynamiting
certain towers and monuments; but you and I could build a nuclear bomb ourselves); intemperate new weather patterns in the temperate zones; the death of the Dollar, a greater bereavement than the death of God; old alliances foundered and abandoned, surprising new ones formed! The American 1950’s and 1960’s, that McCarthy-Nixon horror show, will seem in retrospect a paradise lost. The 1980’s and 90’s will be called the New Ice Age—and who can say what will be crystallized therein?

Why,
we
can, Henry.

I had been going to review for you in this letter my own history. There is not time, except for barest outline. You know already—from your copy of my letter to that novelist back in June—the circumstances of my birth and early youth. (I leave it to your mother to retail for you the circumstances of your own, and why it was necessary to raise you as if orphaned.) Though I understood by 1939 that my father was not a bona fide revolutionary, but an agent of the U.S. and Canadian secret services—whose infiltration of “subversive” groups was to the end of thwarting their own infiltration of, for example, U.S. Naval Intelligence at Pearl Harbor and the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos—I loved the man dearly and continued to work “with” him until his death (for which, my son, I was not responsible, though I acknowledge that its echo of
his
father’s death at the Welland Canal on September 26, 1917, seems incriminating), gently frustrating his aims to the best of my ability. Therefore, for example, Pearl Harbor was virtually undefended on that Sunday morning in December 1941, and although the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (by when dear Dad was dead), the balance of terror was soon after restored.

Not until 1953, my 36th year, did I realize my error: i.e., the year of Mother’s death, when I discovered at Castines Hundred
les cinq lettres posthumes
of A.B.C. IV, cracked “Captain Kidd’s code,” understood what our ancestor had come to understand, fell asleep in mid-meditation on a summer afternoon on Bloodsworth Island, awoke half tranced—and changed the course of my life,
Q.E.D.
My later discovery of the “prenatal” letters only clarified and revalidated my conversion. I became your Uncle Andrew Burlingame Cook VI, called myself poet laureate of Maryland, established myself on Chautaugua Road and in Barataria Lodge, befriended Harrison Mack and John Schott, Senators McCarthy and Goldwater, and Maryland Governors George Mahoney and Spiro Agnew. I recruited and then ruined (in order to rerecruit to our actual cause) such vulnerables as the late Mr. Morgan. I created the image of myself as a faintly enigmatic but intensely regional flag-waving buffoon, while orchestrating on the national level a systematic campaign, gratifyingly successful, to organize and transform
almost without their knowing it
the political revolutionism of the “New Left” into something transcending mere politics. (We did
not
engineer the assassination of the Brothers K. and of M. L. King. To imagine that our organization for the Second Revolution is the
only
such effective covert group, or even that our aims and the others’ always coincide—not to mention our means—would be paranoiac.)

Thus the first 7-Year Plan, for which the civil-rights and antiwar movements were as handy a catalyst and focus as were Napoleon’s second abdication and exile to A.B.C. IV. That grand, protracted opus of Action Historiography—call it the 1960’s!—if it did not quite fulfill its author in chief, both gratified and exhausted him. Time now, Henry, for your coauthorship! Rather (for I am tired), time for me to pass on to you the pen of History, the palm of (secret) Fame.

More immediately and less grandly, it is time to do certain dark deeds by the rockets’ red glare, etc. Our principal action is scheduled for Saturday the 13th. I shall be commuting from here to McHenry daily through the Sunday, when Napoleon took Moscow and the British abandoned their Chesapeake campaign. I shall be “playing” Andrew Cook VI’s formidable namesake, to a similar but more final dénouement, after which I shall come forth as Baron Castine and, in time, claim my bride. You whom so proudly I hail, Henry: can I, by the early light of one of those dawns, from one of those ramparts, hope to see you?

Wednesday, Sept. 17, 1969

Dear Henry Burlingame and/or A. (Andrew? Andrée?) B. Cook VII,

McHenry
(or
M’Henry,
as F. S. Key spelled it in the title of his song
Defense of Fort M’Henry)
means—I needn’t remind a polylinguist like yourself—“son of Henry.” But in honor of brave Henrietta Cook Burlingame V and that courageous line of Andrée Castines, let us translate it as “child of Henry”: the child or children I warmly wish you despite the Burlingamish shortfall (you B’s know how to overcome); the grandchild or -children I fondly wish myself, to carry on my name, our work.

You
did,
then, after all, receive my letters—so comes the word from Castines Hundred. And by when you read this we shall have been reunited, briefly and fatefully, between Twilight’s Last Gleaming and Dawn’s Early Light. A. B. Cook VI will have regrettably met his end in the Diversion sequence. The Destruction of Barataria will have been successfully reenacted, and
Baratarian
will be embarked—like Jean Lafhte’s
Pride
from Galveston in 1821—upon her momentous voyage: the initiation of Year 1 of our 7-Year Plan. At sunrise a week from Friday—American Indian Day and anniversary of our 1917 Welland Canal Plot—there will occur another kind of Diversion sequence at Marshyhope State University: the Algonquins’ Revenge, let us say, for the desecration of their ancient burial ground on Redmans Neck. Drew Mack’s last project, I conceive, and the “ascension” of Jerome Bonaparte Bray to his ancestors.

All this we watch, you and I, from our certain separate distances. It is no longer our affair.

You wonder why, having so diligently searched you out and laboriously urged you mewards, I am not aboardship with you, en route to the Yucatàn. You were promised your father, and anon your mother; you find, instead, yet another letter! Was it not A. B. Cook alone who was to die? Was not Baron André Castine to marry Jane Mack and divert her enterprises to ours? As our forefather Ebenezer Cooke, late in his laureateship, produced a
Sot-Weed Redivivus,
were we not to make this first trial run together, you and I, in pursuit of another sort of sot-weed?

Yes. And—now that we shall have remet, respoken, been reunited—no. I remind you, again and finally, of A.B.C. IV’s futile effort, on behalf of his unborn child, to undo the first half of his program in the second—an effort more successfully reenacted on your behalf by myself. I shall say only that I died at Fort McHenry. That this morning, three days later, I woke, as it were, half tranced on a point of dry ground between two creeklets, in the steaming shade of loblolly pines, realizing where I was but not, at once, why I was there. As in a dream I reached for my watchpocket, to fetch forth and wind my ancestors’ watch… and, as if vouchsafed a vision, I understood that I must not nor need not reappear publicly in any guise.

You,
Henry, if my letters have done their work, are henceforth my disguise. You have the Plan; you have the means (and shall have more: Harrison Mack’s estate is not done with us; claimants thought dead and/or disposed of—also certain missing, shall we say
secreted,
items—may yet turn up, be heard from, nosed). Even should you “betray” me… but you will not. You must imagine me present in my absence, not dead and gone but merely withdrawn like my ancestor to that aforementioned certain distance: watching from some Castines Hundred or Bloodsworth Island of the imagination, with some “Consuelo del Consulado” of my own to console my latter years and check my perspective. We look on; we nod approval or tisk our tongues. What we see, at the end of these seven years to come, we shall not say: only that should you falter, flounder, fail us, we shall not despair, but look beyond you, to your heirs.

For if your father has not broken the Pattern for you, the Pattern will surely break you for

P.S. to J.B. from H.B. VII: The foregoing was
not
written by A. B. Cook at Barataria Lodge on Wednesday, 17 Sept. 1969: I am adding this postscript to it on Monday,
15
Sept., from that same place, about to reembark aboard
Baratarian
before the film company return to shoot the “Destruction of Barataria.”

At Fort McHenry, Saturday last, during the “Wedding Scene,” which I attended in sufficient disguise, I heard “my father” mention that the document representing the “Francis Scott Key Letter” was in fact a letter in progress from himself to his son. Cook so declared it, of course, for my benefit, assuming or hoping that I was within earshot (I could have passed for the mayor, the best man, the groom himself if I’d needed to—even as the “father of the bride”). Not long thereafter, to let Cook know I was on hand, I retrieved that letter, without otherwise revealing myself to him.