Thirty-nine. With luck, about halfway through. Nothing to show for it but a pickup job, a screwy bibliography, a sore divorce, a short string of hedged liaisons, a cracked tower, a brain-damaged daughter. My heart smarts. My birthmark itches. Milady is properly fed up. This letter goes into Chautauqua Lake: the first one guaranteed not to return to sender.
Eloquence, redescend upon me. I despair.
E: The Author to A. B. Cook VI. A request for information and an invitation to participate in the work in progress.
Department of English, Annex B
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14214
Sunday, June 15, 1969
A. B. Cook, Poet Laureate
Chautaugua, Maryland 2114?
Dear Mr. Cook:
Eventually, I hope, this letter will reach you. I learned only recently that you live in a place called Chautaugua, Maryland; my zip code directory lists no such post office, but while I was down your way on business two weeks ago, I noticed a road sign for Chautaugua along the Governor Ritchie Highway between Baltimore and Annapolis — it caught my eye because I live on Chautaugua Lake in west New York — and my map of Anne Arundel County confirms that there is indeed a Chautaugua Road not far from the mainland end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I must hope that four-fifths of a zip code plus your title will do the trick.
I have been told that you are descended from Ebenezer Cooke, poet laureate of late-17th/early-18th-Century Maryland, and from Henry Burlingame of Virginia, who is listed among those accompanying Capt. John Smith in his exploration of Chesapeake Bay in 1608. Fictionalized versions of both gentlemen play a role (indeed, Cooke plays the leading role) in my 1960 novel called, after Cooke’s satirical poem, The Sot-Weed Factor. I am forwarding you a copy, and trust you’ll indulge the liberties I’ve taken with your forebears.
My work in progress, which is of a different character, accounts for this letter. It is itself to be composed of letters, in both senses of the word: an epistolary novel, the epistles to be arranged in an order yet to be devised (I’m just past half through the planning of it). I’m also past half through my biblical threescore-and-ten, which detail no doubt accounts for my second notion about the story: that it should echo its predecessors in my bibliography, while at the same time extending that bibliography and living its independent life. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in the womb, but the delivered child must breathe for itself; one’s forties are the “product” of one’s thirties, twenties, etc., as the present century is the product of those before it — but not merely the product. You see my point.
Thus I am hazarding, for various reasons, the famous limitations both of the Novel-in-Letters and of the Sequel, most fallible of genres. The letters will be from seven correspondents: one from each of my previous books (or their present-day descendants or counterparts, in the case of the historical or fabulous works), plus one invented specifically for this work, plus — I blush to report, it goes so contrary to my literary principles — the Author, who had better be telling stories than chattering about them.
These seven correspondents I imagine contributing severally not only the letters that comprise the story but the elements of its theme and form. The main character, for example — a remarkable middle-aged English gentlewoman and scholar in reduced circumstances — by inviting the Author to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from the small American college where she’s presently teaching, suggests to him, even as he declines her invitation, the general conceit of “doctored letters.” From “Todd Andrews” (the lawyer-hero of my first novel, The Floating Opera) came both the notion of free-standing sequelae and the Tragic View of history, to which in fact I subscribe. From “Jacob Horner” (novel #2, The End of the Road) comes what might be called an Anniversary View of history, together with certain alphabetical preoccupations and the challenge of “redreaming” the past, an enterprise still not very clear to me. Et cetera.
#3 was The Sot-Weed Factor. While I don’t conceive the work in hand to be a historical novel, and have no intention of resurrecting Henry Burlingame and Ebenezer Cooke, I evidently do have capital-H History on my mind. You are, in a sense, the “sequel” to the laureate poet, possibly self-denominated, of Lord Baltimore’s palatinate. This letter is to solicit from you, as one author to another, (a) any information you’re willing to provide me, or direct me to, concerning the activities of the Cooke and Burlingame lines from the 18th Century to yourself, beyond what’s available in the standard local histories; and (b) your sentiments about reincarnating, as it were, your admirable progenitor. Might I presume so far as to include, mutatis mutandis, some version of yourself among my seven correspondents?
Cordially,
P.S.: What do you suppose accounts for the coincidence of your Indian place-name and mine, 450 miles apart?
5
~ ~ ~
L: Lady Amherst to the Author. Despair at Ambrose’s infidelity. Their Fifth Stage.
24 L Street, Dorset Heights
Saturday, 12 July 1969
John,
Lost, aye, I’m lost right enough, and not in any funhouse.
Three nights and days he spent with her down there in deserted “Barataria,” where except in goose-shooting season there is nothing to do but copulate and swat mosquitoes. They did both, did my A. and his Bea — more determinedly, I gather, than successfully — in A. B. Cook’s air-conditioned hunting lodge on the north end of the island, where the only dry ground is and where Reg Prinz’s movie set was and will be. (It’s to be rebuilt in August for redestroying in September: an example yours truly may be doomed to follow.)
Three nights and days! The whole long holiday weekend, whilst I steamed and stewed and reached new lows in Dorset Heights! Late on the Monday (7/7) he returned to me, covered with welts and cross as a bear. Confessed straight off, he did—announced, rather — that his philandering idyll had been no idyll: Couldn’t get it up for her (I’m glad, says I) about half the time (Ah, that hurt, and damn me for crying then and there). Would’ve called it quits even if Bea hadn’t got urgent word from “Monsieur Casteene” about the Doctor’s death.
You will have heard, no doubt: among the 200 pleasure-boaters feared lost in the big Lake Erie storm of 4 July — whilst we-all were making cinematical merry here on the Choptank aboard the O.F.T. II—was the dark proprietor of the Remobilisation Farm. No details yet.
Who cares? Who cares?
Well, Bea, it seems, for one. Anyroad she took the occasion to beat it out of Barataria and back to Fort Erie, leaving crestfallen Ambrose to scratch his own itches.
I gather further (And who cares? I do, God help me!) my prodigal has scrapped his Perseus piece, and there’s a pity. Indeed, while I still don’t know what he wrote to Bea Golden in that famous Unfilmable Sequence of Independence Day, I learn now that what he wrote it on was the verso of his manuscript, which then — like the legendary poet Gunadhya in The Ocean of Story (or Rodolfo in Act I of La Bohème)—he destroyed page by page, giving each to B.G. to read and chuck overboard. That hurts, John: it was… our story, if you know what I mean: Ambrose’s and mine. His notion that Medusa the petrifying Gorgon, Perseus’s snake-haired adversary, might actually have loved him and longed for destruction at his hands; that in the “2nd Cycle” of their connexion, recapitated and restored to her original beauty, she would teach him to love instead of to accomplish by heroical destruction; that by some magic physics of the heart they could become, not stones, but stars, rehearsing endlessly the narrative of their affair — I loved that; I had presumed to see in it the emblem of my trials thus far and a future hope.