By means which we will not here disclose (but which must bear some correspondence to those by which Your Majesty effected his own escape from Windsor), we departed St. Helena in 1822 for my American headquarters—1st in a house not far from your own in the Maryland marshes, ultimately in western New York — an area to which our attention had been directed during our 1st Consulship by Mme de Staël (who owned 23,000 acres of St. Lawrence County) in the days before that woman, like Anteia or the wife of Potiphar, turned against us. Here, for the last century and ½, we have directed our operatives in the slow elaboration of our grand strategy, 1st conceived aboard Bellerophon, whereof the time has now arrived to commence the execution: a project beside which Jena, Austerlitz, Vim, Marengo, the 18th Brumaire, even the original Revolution, are as our ancient 18-pounders to an H-bomb, or our old field glass to the Mt. Palomar reflector: we mean the New, the 2nd Revolution, an utterly Novel Revolution!
“There will be no innovations in my time,” Your Majesty declared to Chancellor Eldon. But the truly revolutionary nature of our project, as examination of the “Bellerophonic” prospectus (en route to you under separate cover) will show, is that, as the 1st genuinely scientific model of the genre, it will of necessity contain nothing original whatever, but be the quintessence, the absolute type, as it were the Platonic Form expressed.
The plan is audacious but certain of RESET Nothing now is wanting for immediate implementation of its 1st phase save sufficient funding for construction of a more versatile computer facility at our Lily Dale base, and while such funding is available to us from several sources, the voice of History directs us to Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of RESET Adversaries, we shook the world; as allies, who could withstand us? What might we not accomplish?
In 1789 Your Majesty “recovered” from the strait-waistcoat of your 1st “madness,” put to rout those intriguing with your son to establish his regency, and until your 2nd and “final” betrayal by those same intriguers in 1811, enjoyed an unparalleled popularity with your subjects — as did we between Elba and St. Helena. Then let us together, from our 2nd Exiles, make a 2nd Return, as more glorious than our 1st as its coming, to a world impatient to be transfigured, has been longer. To the once-King of the Seas, the once-Monarch of the Shore once again extends his hand. Only grasp it and, companions-inarms such as this planet has not seen, we shall be Emperors of the world.
N. (ENCL. 3)
Enclosure #2
July 4, 1967
TO:
Mr. Todd Andrews, Executive Director, Tidewater Foundation, Marshyhope State University College, Redmans Neck, Md. 21612
FROM:
Jerome B. Bray, General Delivery, Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752
RE:
Reapplication for Renewal of Tidewater Foundation Grant for Reconstruction of Lily Dale Computer Facility for Reimplementation of NOVEL Revolutionary Project
Sir:
Inasmuch as concepts, including the concepts Fiction and Necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterf_ies exist in our imaginations, along with Existence, Imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.
Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk now to a Luxembourg, a San Marino! Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, churchgoing. What is wanted to restore its ancient dominion is nothing less than a revolution; indeed, the Revolution is waiting in the wings, the 2nd Revolution, and will not stay for the Bicentennial of the 1st, than which it bids to be as more glorious as its coming, to a world impatient to be RESET Now of “science fiction” there is a surfeit; of scientific fiction, none. Attempts to classify “scientifically” the themes of existing fiction (e.g. Professor Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature) or even its dramatical morphology (e.g. the admirable reduction, by Professors Propp and Rosenberg, of the “Swan-Geese” folktale to the formula
— these are steps in the right direction, but halting as a baby’s, primitive as Ben Franklin and his kite — and made by scholars, to the end merely of understanding for its own sake! They are like the panderings of historians upon the Napoleonic Wars; whereas our own textual analyses (beginning with the grand Concordance of the Revised New Syllabus from which the Revolutionary NOVEL Project grew) are like the Emperor’s own examinations of military history — to the end, not merely of understanding, but of mastering and perfecting it, in order, like a cunning wrestler, to RESET We were born on August 15, 1933, in the Backwater Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and raised by 1 of the staff rangers in the absence of our true parents, who for reasons of state were obliged to keep their whereabouts hidden and were never able to communicate with their only child except by coded messages which not even Ranger Burlingame was privy to. These messages trace our descent “originally” from the abortive marriage in 1803 of our namesake the Emperor’s brother Jérôme and Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore; more immediately from their grandson Charles Joseph Bonaparte and the Tuscarora Indian Princess Kyuhaha Bray, Charles’s wife in the eyes of God and the Iroquois though not in the white man’s record books during his tenure as Indian Commissioner in 1902 under President Theodore Roosevelt. There being at present no bona fide Bonapartes more closely related than ourself to the late Emperor, we have in fact some just pretension to the throne of France — which it is not our concern to press here, but which we do not doubt was instrumental in eliciting support for our original Tidewater Foundation grant from Mr. Harrison Mack, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most RESET Under various assumed names, for our own protection, and in circumstances as strait as our ancestor’s on St. Helena, we completed our higher education in sundry night schools and supported ourself by teaching technical and business-letter writing, 1st in the Agricultural Extension Division of the state university, later at Wicomico Teachers College, most recently in Fredonia, New York. We shall not describe here the conspiracies of anti-Bonapartists and counterrevolutionaries which drove us from academic pillar to post: they did all in their power, vainly, to mock and frustrate our literary career, knowing that our writings were never the fictions they represented themselves as being, but ciphered replies to those parental communications which have sustained us through every ordeal.
Of the fictions qua fictions you will have heard, all published by the Wetlands Press under various noms de plume: The Shoals of Love, by “J. A. Beille” (a name meant to echo Beyle, the French Bonapartist a.k.a. Stendhal); The Wa_p, by “Jean Blanque”; and Backwater Ballads, by “Jay Bray.” The use of our Indian ancestor’s surname in that last nom de plume was a coded challenge to our enemies; it elicited an altogether unexpected result, which changed our life. By the time Ballads appeared in print (to go unnoticed, like its predecessors, by the anti-Bonapartist literary establishment, but not by those for whom its private message was intended), we were at work on another “novel,” to be called The Seeker, whose hero reposes in a sort of hibernation in a certain tower, impatient to be RESET For reasons we did not ourself understand at the time, our work on this fiction had come to a standstill: then in September 1962 we were vouchsafed our 1st bodily visitation by an emissary of our parents — though we did not recognize him as such until some years later. This episode is recounted in the “Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher” of the “novel” Giles Goat-Boy (1966): an account accurate enough in its particulars, since the text was lifted outright from our Revised New Syllabus; yet wholly perverted, since its “author” is either the leader or the tool of the anti-Bonapartists who have done all in their power, vainly, to RESET O stop New ¶