The Sot-Weed Factor
Part Four of my real-time review of THE SOT-WEED FACTOR by John Barth, a review that will evolve in the comment stream below as I read it…
Continued from Part Three here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/612-2/
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
TO BE CONTINUED IN TWO WEEKS
I think I must have been drunk or am generally confused whatever the cause — especially when I look back at the tail-end of where I left off on the previous page!
29
Ebenezer was of course never dead, and hopefully never will be as long as there are reading eyes to read!
This is, as you know, the famous chapter where Mary whoremonger Mungummory tells him of bawdiness and her tale of maidenheads while poking fun at E’s own maidenhead!
30
I cannot spoil this plot more than I have already, so what if Ebenezer depends on a Lord Baltimore he has effectively never met to retain his Laureateship, amid complaints and recriminations against having been made to sleep in a corncrib all night as well as against Burlingame’s wiles and aliases and alliances, and his fling with E’s sister Anna, I impugn. Whatever the plot’s confusing ins and outs stemming from the channels of Barth’s imaginative wiles, I look forward to aubergines’ aliases, aka eggplants, that were the only real phenomenon that I remembered being in this book from fifty years ago! And they still have not turned up! Perhaps I imagined such eggplants all those years ago?
Still, E does not imagine, I’m sure, the idyllic sight of his heritage house of Malden as he finally sees it upon approaching across water, not like Christ walking but on a sloop sailing!
Cross-referenced with the HOUSE of Leaves, perhaps significantly, here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/24625-2/#comment-15411
31
“To what evil state hath Malden sunk, to house such a circle of harpies!”
It seems apt, in view of the above cross-reference, that Ebenezer is now, at last, at this book’s HOUSE, humiliated at having been swindled out of it, afraid of his sister’s and father’s reactions when they find out, and suffering the indignity of being helped into the house, in his sorry state, by the erstwhile swine herdswoman. No congratulatory toast for him, I guess. And then potentially tricked into marriage to her, and the sudden arrival of another recurring HenryB-typical return into the action as such plot depths duly pan out… including E witnessing a card game that gives the reader pages of typical textual spaces and tricksinesses so characteristic of the arguably truant bookhouse elsewhere in Virginia! —
Not tobacco smoked, so far, but the druggy-angled bookhouse of a more modern age? Of a different Bonnyville?
“…the fact is, at that very instant his chair rose from the floor, passed through the roof of Malden, and shot up into the opalescent sky. As for Maryland, it turned blue and flattened into an immense musical surface, which suavely slid northwestward under seagulls.”
31 & 32
An amazing co-vivid dream within Ebenezer as a premonition in 1960 of our times in 2021 — passages you MUST read about his surreal vision of the two mountains or Twin Peaks and the climbers there up.
“I shall make the piece a fiction! […] All my trials I’ll reconceive to suit the plot…”
Followed by E’s urge to pursue his Laureateship as ‘fiction’, thus solipstically for Barth presaging this very novel itself (“the sot-weed factor allegory” as these chapters have it) (!) on the road to also presaging the truant HOUSE of tobacco LEAVES, I seriously propound.
All the while still carrying such maddeningly complicated plots of these bookhouses as the PAlimpseST of alternate FUTUREs. Leaving Malden, at the end of these chapters, by journeying to or is it from Cooke’s own Point, with the faces of HB, Anna and Joan Toast explicitly merging in the text as one face…?
PART III: MALDEN EARNED
1 & 2
BEWARE SPOILERS
After dealings with that now wharf-rat called Spurdance, E meets another alias of HB! Who chats to E about his twin sister Anna being in Maryland and about her hankerings (not for himself, HB) but about her lust for her twin brother E!
Much said, say, about Adam and Eve and Milton’s Satan and the earlier dream of Twin Peaks or Mountains as Anna’s breasts and much else on this topic that I can only convey as the greatest of all surprising literature by quoting it the whole of the second of these two chapters, painstakingly retyped below in the alternate world where I live, and now rescrabbled as follows under the double line (complete with E’s interpolatory ejaculations) … and I now understand why I showed this earlier:
“…your mother’s silver ring, that Anna gave you in the posthouse: did you
know she was wont to read the letters ANNE B as ANN and EB conjoined?
Can a poet be blind to the meaning of that gift and of the manner of its
giving?”
=================================
A LAYMAN’S PANDECT OF GEMINOLOGY
COMPENDED BY HENRY BURLINGAME, COSMOPHILIST
Ebenezer’s mouth opened; his features contorted wondrously.
“Dear Heav’nly Father, Henry! What have you said?”
Burlingame turned his fist in his palm and frowned at the deck as he
spoke. “Your sister is a driven and fragmented spirit, friend; the one half
of her soul yearns but to fuse itself with yours, whilst the other half recoils
at the thought. Tis neither love nor lust she feels for you, but a prime
and massy urge to coalescence, which is deserving less of censure than
of awe. As Aristophanes maintained that male and female are displaced
moieties of an ancient whole, and wooing but their vain attempt at
union, so Anna, I long since concluded, repines willy-nilly for the dark
identity that twins share in the womb, and for the well-nigh fetal closeness
of their childhood.”
“I shudder at the thought!” Ebenezer whispered.
“As well doth Anna so much so, that her fancy entertains it only in
disguise yet no other thought than this impelled her to me in the summer-
house! Twas quite in the middle of a fine May night; the night of your
sixteenth birthday, and though the time f or’t was some days past, a shower
of meteors was flashing from Aquarius. I had lingered late outside to watch
these falling stars and plot their courses on a map of my own devising; so
engrossed was I in the work that when Anna came up behind ”
“No more!” cried Ebenezer. “You took her maidenhead, God curse you,
and there’s an end on’t!”
“Quite otherwise,” Burlingame replied. “We spent some hours discussing
you, that were asleep in your chamber. Anna likened you to Phosphor, the
morning star, and herself to Hesper, the mortal star of evening, and when
I told her those twin stars were one and the same, and not a star at all but
the planet Venus, the several portents of this fact near made her swoon!
The sap was risen in her, any man could see. We tarried long in the summer-
house that night, and long on many a balmy night thereafter; yet always,
I will swear’t, I pleased her in no wise save as your proxy.”
“I’God, and you think this argues to your credit?”
Burlingame smiled. “There are two facts you’ve yet to swallow, Eben.
The first is that I love no part of the world, as you might have guessed, but
the entire parti-colored whole, with all her poles and contradictories. Coode
and Baltimore alike I am enamored of, whatever the twain might stand for;
and you know already what various ground hath held my seed. For this same
reason ‘twas never you I loved, nor yet your sister Anna, but the twain in-
separably, and could lust for neither alone. Whence issues the second fact,
which is, that de’il the times her blood waxed warm the while she spoke of
you, and de’il the times I kissed her as the symbol for you both, and played
the sad games of her invention, yet your sister is a virgin still for aught
of me!”
He laughed at Ebenezer’s shock and disbelief. “Aye, now, that wants
some chewing, doth it not? Think with what relish, as a child, she would
play Helen to your Paris, but ever call you Pollux by mistake! Recall that
day in Thames Street when you chided her for lack of suitors and as a
tease proposed me for the post ”
Ebenezer clutched his throat. “Marry!”
“Her reply,” Burlingame went on, “was that the search for beaux was
fruitless, inasmuch as the man she loved most had the bad judgment to be
her twin! And reflect, in the light of what I’ve told you, on this matter of
your mother’s silver ring, that Anna gave you in the posthouse: did you
know she was wont to read the letters ANNE B as ANN and EB conjoined?
Can a poet be blind to the meaning of that gift and of the manner of its
giving?”
“To contemplate it is to risk the loss of my supper/’ Ebenezer groaned,
“Yet I must own there is some sense in all you say ” His face hardened.
“Save that she’s still a maid! That’s too much!”
His friend shrugged. “Believe’t or no. Well find her anon, I pray, and
you may get a physician’s word for’t if you please.”
“But what you bragged of in the Cambridge tavern!”
“Many shuffle the cards that do not play. I could as easily have had at
you in Bill Mitchell’s barn, but the truth is, as I said before, ’tis not the
one nor the other I crave, but the twain as one. Haply the day will
come when poor dear Anna’s secret lust will get the better of her reason
and your own likewise (which, deny’t as you may, is plain to me!) : if such
a day dawn, why then perchance I’ll come upon you sack a sack as did
Catullus on the lovers, and like that nimble poet pin you to your work-
nay, skewer you both like twin squabs on a spit!”
The poet shuddered. “This is too much to assimilate, Henry: Coode a
hero; my father in Maryland searching for Anna and leagued with the villain
Baltimore; Anna herself yet virginal; and you, after all that hath transpired
you wholly innocent and still my friend! And marry come up, you make
matters no simpler when you declare my sister’s lust to be reciprocal! Such
a prurient notion hath never crossed my mind!”
Burlingame raised his eyebrows. “Then you quite deceived your servants
at St. Giles. Mrs. Twigg was wont to tell me ”
“She was a foul-fancied harridan!”
“Why, they even had a rhyme, the which ”
“I know their scurrilous rhyme, whatever it be,” Ebenezer said impa-
tiently. “I have heard a dozen such, since I was small. Nor is your wicked
imputation foreign to me, if you must know, albeit I’m not a little shocked
to hear you share it. Poor Anna and I since birth have breathed in an air of
innuendo, the which hath oft and oft caused us to blush and lower our
eyes. Since I was ten our father’s household hath assumed the worst of us,
for no other reason than that we were twins. Twas Anna’s ill luck her
body blossomed at an early age, and e’en her fondest girl friends
e’en that same Meg Bromly who took your letters to her from Thames
Street they all declared her ripening was my work and drove Anna to tears
with their whispering! All this, mind, on no grounds whate’er save our
twinship, and the fact that unlike many brothers and sisters we never quar-
reled, but preferred each other’s company to the concupiscent world’s! I
cannot grasp it.”
“Then for all thy Cambridge learning,” Burlingame laughed, “thou’rt
not by half the scholar your sister is! When first I guessed her trouble, long
ere she saw’t herself, we launched a long and secret enquiry into the subject
of twins their place in legend, religion, -and the world. Twas my intent by
this investigation not so much to cure Anna’s itch which I was not at all
persuaded was an ailment as ’twas to understand it, to see it in’s perspective
in the tawdry history of the species, if we might, and so contrive the most
enlightened way to deal with it. I need not say my interest was as heartfelt
as her own; her oft-sworn love for me, I could see clearly, was love for you,
diverted and transmogrified by virtuous conscience. When she would run
to me in the summer-house, ’twas as a jilted maiden runs to a convent and
becomes the bride of Christ, and I sorely feared, if her case were not soon
physicked, ‘twould bereave her altogether of her reason or else drive her to
some surrogate not so tender of her honor as was I.”
“Dear God!”
“For this reason I led her on,” Burlingame continued. “I declared my
love for her half in truth, you understand and together we explored the
misty land of legends, both Christian and pagan; the stories brought back
by mariners from far exotic places; and the literatures of classic and vulgar
tongues. Four years we studiedfrom your fourteenth to your eighteenth
year and all in secret. On the face oft our enquiry was beyond reproach,
and I yearned for you to join us, but Anna would have none oft, though
she herself could not say why. i’faith, Eben, what a tireless scholar is your
sister!” He shook his head in reminiscent awe. “I could not find her volumes
enough of voyage and travels, or heathen rites and practices: she would
fall on ’em like a lioness on her prey, devour ’em in great bites, and thirst
for more! I’d wager my life on’t, at seventeen years she was the world’s
foremost authority on the subject of twins, and is today.”
“And I knew naught oft?” Ebenezer shook his head and laughed
uncomprehendingly. “But what was the fruit of all this secret labor? What
is there to know of us twins, save that we were conceived in a single
swiving?”
“Why, that Gemini is your sign and springtime your season,” Burlingame
replied.
“It wants no scholarship to hit on that. Tis common knowledge.”
“As is the fact that springtime and Maytime in particular is the season
of fertility and the year’s first thunderstorms.”
“Don’t teasel” the poet said irritably. “This day and night have been
my life’s most miserable, and I am near dead from shock and want of sleep,
to say naught of misery. If all your study ploughed up no lore save this,
have done with’t and let us rest. ‘Tis all impertinence.”
“On the contrary,” Burlingame declared. “So pertinent are our findings,,
methinks you’d as well give o’er the search for Anna unless you hear ’em:
’tis better to be lost than saved by the wrong Messiah.” His manner and
tone grew serious. “You know that spring is the season of storms and fer-
tility, but do you know, as doth your sister, that of all the things our rustic
forebears feared, the three that most alarmed them were thunder, lightning,
,and twins? Did you know thou’rt worshipped the whole world over, whether
by murther or by godhood, if not both? Through the reverence of the most
benighted salvage runs this double thread of storms and fornication, and
the most enlightened sages have seen in you the embodiment of dualism,
polarity, and compensation. Thou’rt the Heavenly Twins, the Sons of
Thunder, the Dioscuri, the Boanerges; thou’rt the twin principles of male
and female, mortal and divine, good and evil, light and darkness. Your tree
is the sacred oak, the thunder-tree; your flower is the twin-leaved mistletoe,
seat of the oak tree’s life, whose twin white berries betoken the celestial
semen and are thus employed to rejuvenate the old, fructify the barren,
and turn the shy maid’s fancies to lusty thoughts of love. Your bird is the
red cock Chanticleer, singer of light and love. Your emblems are legion:
twin circles represent you, whether suggested by the sun and moon, the
wheels of the solar chariot, the two eggs laid by Leda, the nipples of
Solomon’s bride, the spectacles of Love and Knowledge, the testicles of
maleness, or the staring eyes of God. Twin acorns represent you, both be-
cause they are the thunder-tree’s seed and because their two parts fit like
male and female. Twin mountain peaks represent you, the breasts of
Mother Nature; the Maypole and its ring are danced round in your
honor. Your sacred letters are A, C, H, I, M, O, P, S, W, X, and Z ”
“I’Christ!” Ebenezer broke in. “Tis half the alphabet!”
“Each hath its separate import,” Burlingame explained, “yet all have
common kinship with swiving, storms, and the double face of Nature. Your
A, for example, is the prime and mightiest letter of the lot a god in itself,
and worshipped by heathen the great world round. It represents the forked
crotch of man, the source of seed, and also, by’s peak and by’s cross-line,
the union of twain into one, that I’ll speak of anon. When you set two A’s
cheek by jowl you see the holy nippled paps of Mother Earth, as well as
the sign of the holy Asvins, the twin charioteers of Eastern lore. Your C
betokens the crescent moon, that in turn is held to resemble man’s carnal
sword, unsheathed and rising to the fray; two C’s entwined are the union of
Heaven and Earth, or Christ and his earthly church ”
“In Heaven’s name, Henry, what are these riddles thou’rt flooding me
with?”
“Anon, anon,” Burlingame said. “Your H portrays the same happy union
of two into one: ’tis the zodiac sign for Gemini; the bridge ‘twixt the twin
pillars of light and dark, love and learning, or what have you; ’tis also the
eighth letter, and inasmuch as 8 is the mystic mark of redemption (by
virtue of its copulating circles), ’tis no surprise that H is the emblem of
atonement the making of two into one.”
“Again this mystery of twos and ones!” the poet protested.
” ‘Tis no mystery when you know about I and O,” said Burlingame. “In
every land and time folk have maintained that what we see as two are the
fallen halves of some ancient onethat night and day, Heaven and Earth,
or man and woman were long since severed by their sinful natures, and
that not till Kingdom Come will the fallen twain be a blessed one. Tis
this lies ‘neath the tale of Eve and Adam, and Plato’s fable, and the fall of
Lucifer, and Heav’n knows how many other lovely lies; ’tis this the Lord
Himself refers to, in the second epistle of Pope Clement: He declares His
Kingdom shall come When the two shell be one, and the outside as the
inside, and the male with the female. Thus all men reverence the act of
fornication as portraying the fruitful union of opposites: the Heavenly
Twins embraced; the Two as One!”
Ebenezer shivered.
“Your I and O are plainly then discovered,” Burlingame said with a
smile: “the one is male, the other female; together they are the great god
lo of Egypt, the ring on the maidens* merry Maypole, the acorn in its cup,
the circumcised prepuce of the Jew, the genital letters P and Q and the
silver seal ring Anna slipped upon your finger in the posthouse!”
“I’Godl”
“As for the others, your M is the twin mountain breasts I spoke of; S
is the copulation of twin Cs face to face, and is sprung as well from the
sacred Z; W the double-you, as M is the double-me W, I say 7 is a pair of
Vs sack a sack: ’tis thus the sign of the Heavenly Twins of India, called
Vritrahana, and the third part of the Druids’ invocation to their god, the
whole of which was I.O.W. X, like A and H, is the joining of Two into
One, and as such hath been venerated since long ere the murther of
Christ; Z is the zigzag lightning flash of Zeus, or whatever god you please,
and is ofttimes flanked, in ancient emblems, by the circles of the Heavenly
Twins ”
“Enough!” the poet cried. “This dizzies me! What is the message oft,
and what hath it to do with Anna and me?”
“Why, naught in the world,” Burlingame responded, “save to show you
how deep in the marrow of man runs this fear and reverence for twins, and
their connection with coitus and the weather. All over Africa the birth of
twins is followed by dances of the lewdest sort: sometimes ’tis thought to
prove the mother an adultress, since husbands generally get one babe at a
time; other folk think the mother hath been swived by the Holy Spirit, or
that the father hath an inordinate lingam. In sundry isles of the western
ocean ’tis common for the salvages to throw coffee beans at the walls of a
house where twins are born; they believe that otherwise one must die,
inasmuch as twins break the laws of chastity while still embraced in their
mother’s womb! In divers lands no living twins can be found, for the
reason that one is always slain at birth; but murthered or not, they are
worshiped in every place, and have been since time out of mind. The
old Egyptians had their Taues and Taouis, the twins of Scrapeum at
Memphis, as well as the sisters Tathautis and Taebis, the ibis-wardens of
Thebes; in India reigned Yama and Yami, and the holy Asvins I spoke of
earlier, that drew the Heavenly Chariot; the Persians worshipped Ahriman
and Ormuz; the ancient myths of the Hebrews tell of Huz and Buz,
Huppim and Muppim, Gog and Magog, and Bne and Baroq, to say naught
of Esau and Jacob, Cain and Abel or as the Mohammedans have it, Cain
and Alcima and Abel and Jumella —”
“Ah!” Ebenezer exclaimed.
“Some held,” Burlingame went on, “that Lucifer and Michael were
twins, as are most gods of Light and Darkness; and for the selfsame cause
the old Edessans of Mesopotamia, who erst had worshipped Monim and
Aziz, were wont to regard e’en Jesus and Judas as hatched from a single egg!”
“Incredible!”
“No more than that God and Satan themselves ”
“I don’t believe it!” Ebenezer protested.
“Tis not a question of your belief,” laughed Burlingame, “but of the
fact that other wights think it true; ’tis but a retelling of the tale of Set and
Horns, or Typhon and Osiris,, whom some Egyptians took for twins and
others merely for rivals. But I was coming to the Greeks . . .”
“You may pass o’er them,” sighed the poet. “I know of Castor and
Pollux, the sons of light and thunder, and as well of Helen and Clytemnes-
tra, that were hatched with ’em from Leda’s eggs.”
“Then you must know too of Lynceus and Idas, that slew the Dioscuri;
of Amphion and Zethus, that sacked and rebuilt Troy; of Heracles and
Iphikles, that are twins in this tale and half-brothers in that, and of Hesper
and Phosphor, the morning and evening stars.”
“And now you’ll go to Rome, I’ll wager, and speak of Romulus and
Remus?”
“Aye,” said Burlingame, “to say naught of Picumnus and Pilumnus, or
Mutumnus and Tutumnus. ‘Twas the great respect accorded these classic
twins that carried them into the Christian Church, which had the good
sense to canonize ’em in lieu of fighting back. Hence the Greek and Roman
Catholics pray to Saints Romolo and Remo, Saints Kastoulos and Poly-
euctes, and e’en St. Dioscoros; the more superstitious amongst them go yet
farther and regard as twins Saints Crispin and Crispian, Florus and Laurus,
Marcus and Marcellianus, Protasius and Gervasius —”
“A surfeit!” cried the poet. “There is a surfeit!”
‘You have not heard the best of all,” Burlingame insisted. “They will
hold Saints John and James to be twins as well, and e’en Saints Jude and
Thomas, inasmuch as Thomas means ‘a twin/ Til not trouble you with
Tryphona and Tryphosa, that Paul salutes in’s Epistle to the Romans, but
turn instead to the Aryan heroes Baltram and Sintram, or Cautes and
Cautopates, and the northern tales of Sieglinde and Siegmunde, the
incestuous parents of Siegfried, or Baldur, the Norseman’s spirit of Light,
and his enemy, dark Loki, that slew him with a branch of mistletoe!”
“Tis a hemisphere overridden with godly twins!” Ebenezer marveled.
Burlingame smiled. “Yet it wants twin hemispheres to make a whole:
when Anna and I turned our eyes to westward, we found in the relations
of the Spanish and English adventurers no less a profusion of Heavenly
Twins, revered by sundry salvages; and the logs of divers voyages to the
Pacific and Indian Oceans were no different. Methinks there is not a tribe
upon the planet that hath not the like of the Boanerges! Old Cortez, when
he raped the glorious Aztecs, found them worshiping Quetzalcoatl and
Tezcatlipoca, as their neighbors reverenced Hun-hun-ahpu and Vukub
hun-ahpu. Pizarro and his cohorts, had they been curious enough to ask,
would have found in the southern pantheon such twins as Pachakamak
and Wichoma, Apocatequil and Piquerao, Tamendonaré and Arikuté, Karu
and Rairu, Tiri and Karu, Keri and Kame. Why, I myself, enquiring here
and there among the Indians of these parts, have leamt from the
Algonkians that they reverence Menabozho and Chokanipok, and from the
Naked Indians of the north that they pray to Juskeha and Tawiskara. From
the Jesuit missionaries I have learnt of a nation called the Zuni, that
worship Ahaiyuta and Matsailema; of another called Navaho, that worship
Tobadizini and Nayenezkani; of another called Maidu, that worship
Pemsanto and Onkoito; of another called Kwakiutl, that worship Kanigyilak
and Nemokois; of another called Awikeno, that worship Mamasalanik and
Noakaua all of them twins. Moreover, there is in far Japan a band of hairy
dwarfs that pray to the twins Shi-acha and Mo-acha, and amongst the gods
of the southern ocean reign the great Si Adji Donda Hatahutan and his
twin sister, Si Topi Radja Na Uasan . . .”
” ‘Tis your scheme to drive me mad!”
“Nay, that is their name, I swear’t: Si Adji Donda Hatahutan and
his ”
“No matter! No matter!” Ebenezer shook his head as though to jar his
senses into order. “You have proved to the very rocks and clouds that twin-
worship is no great rarity in this earth!”
Burlingame nodded acknowledgment. “Sundry pairs of these twins are
opposites and sworn enemiessuch as Satan and God, Ahriman and Ormuz,
or Baldur and Loki and their fight portrays the struggle of Light with
Darkness, the murther of Love by Knowledge, or what have you. Sundry
others represent the equivocal state of man, that is half angel and half
beast: thus with Hesper and Phosphor, Zethus and Amphion,, Castor
and Polydeuces, Iphikles and Heracles, or Judas and Jesus, the first of each
pair is mortal and the second divine. Still others are the gods of fornication,
like Mutumnus and Tutumnus, or Picumnus and Pilumnus; if less than
gods, they yet may be remembered for incestuous lust, like Cain and his
Alcima, and even be honored for swiving up a hero, as were Sieglinde and
Siegmunde. How Anna loved the Siegfried tales!”
So heavy with revelations was the poet, he could only wave his hand
against this remark.
“Yet whether their bond be love or hate or death,” Burlingame con-
cluded, “almost always their union is brilliance, totality,, apocalypse a thing
to yearn and tremble for! Tis this union Anna desires with all her heart,
howe’er her mind disguise it; ’tis this hath brought her halfway round the
globe to seek you out, and your father to fetch her home if he can find her.
Tis this your own heart bends to, will-ye, nill-ye, as a flower to the light,
to make you one and whole and nourished as ne’er since birth; or as a
needle to the lode, to direct you to the harbor of your destinyl And ’tis this
I yearn for too, and naught besides: I am Suitor of Totality, Embracer of
Contradictories, Husband to all Creation, the Cosmic Lover! Henry More
and Isaac Newton are my pimps and aides-de-chambre; I have known my
great Bride part by splendrous part, and have made love to her disjecta
membra, her sundry brilliant pieces; but I crave the Wholethe tenon in
the mortise, the jointure of polarities, the seamless universe whereof you
twain are token, in coito! I have no parentage to give me place and aim
in Nature’s order: very well I am outside Her, and shall be Her lord and
spouse!”
Burlingame was so aroused by his own rhetoric that at the end of this
speech he was pacing and gesturing about the cabin, his voice raised to the
pitch and volume of an Enthusiast’s; even had Ebenezer not been too
dismayed for skepticism, he could scarcely have questioned his former
tutor’s sincerity. But he was stunned, as well with recognition as with appall:
he clutched his head and moaned.
Burlingame stopped before him, “Surely you’ll not deny your share of
guilt?”
The poet shook his head. Til not deny that the soul of man is deep and
various as the reach of Heav’n,” he replied, “or that he hath in germ
the sum of poles and possibilities. But I am stricken by what you say of me and
Anna!”
“What have I said, but that thou’rt human?”
Ebenezer sighed. “’Tis quite enough.”
By this time the sun was bright in the eastern sky, and the Pilgrim stood
well down the Bay for Point Lookout and St. Mary’s City; the other pas-
sengers were awake and stirring about their quarters. At Burlingame’s sug-
gestion they fastened their scarves and coats and went on deck, the better
to speak in private.
“How is’t you know Anna to be in St. Mary’s? Why did she not come
straight to Maiden?”
“’Tis your man Bertrand’s fault,” Burlingame answered and, laughing
at Ebenezer’s bewilderment and surprise, confessed that when he had dis-
patched Bertrand from Captain Mitchell’s to St. Mary’s City back in
September, he had charged the valet not only to retrieve the Laureate’s
trunk but if possible to claim it in the guise of the Laureate himself, the
better to throw John Coode off the scent while they made their way to
Maiden. “To this end I rashly loaned him your commission ”
“My commission! Then ’tis true you stole it from me back in England!”
Burlingame shrugged. ” Twas I authored it, was’t not? Besides, would it
not have gone worse with you had Pound been certain of your identity?
In any case, there was some peril in your man’s assignment, and ’twas my
thought, if Coode should kill or kidnap him with the paper on his person,
he might think you yourself were an impostor ‘twould have spun his com-
pass for fair! Howbeit, he could not rest at fetching your trunk, it seems,
but must parade St. Mary’s City as the Laureate and declare his post in
every inn and tavern.”
“Ah God, the vain and faithless wretch!”
Thus it was, Burlingame declared, that on reaching the port of St. Mary’s
some time ago, Anna had been given to think her brother was in the town
and had disembarked in quest of him. “I myself heard naught of this until
old Andrew came to Captain Mitchell’s; he had leamt in London of my
whereabouts, and, like you, thinks Anna hath come to be my wife. But he
believes thou’rt party to the scheme as well and are pimping us in some
wise: when he learns the state of things at Maiden, today or tomorrow,
he’ll assume you’ve fled with the twain of us to Pennsylvania, where fly
all fugitives from responsibility the more readily, inasmuch as neither
Anna nor the false Laureate hath been seen or heard of since she landed.”
He sucked in the corner of his mouth. ” ‘Twas my intent to stay with
Andrew, disguised as Timothy Mitchell, the better to temper his wrath
and learn his connection with Lord Baltimore; but so vain hath been my
search for parentage in the world, and so much rancor hath that search
engendered, from the Jesuit Thomas Smith and others, ’twas no longer safe
to play that role.”
Ebenezer asked what were his tutor’s present plans.
‘We’ll put ashore together at St. Mary’s,” Burlingame said. “You then
enquire in public places for news of Anna or Eben Cooke, and I shall search
alone for Coode.”
“At once? Is’t not more urgent to find my sister ere some harm befall
her?”
“Tis but two paths to a single end,” replied Burlingame. “No man
knows more than Coode of what transpires in Maryland, and for aught we
know he may have made prisoners of them both,”
“‘Sheart!”
“Besides which, if I can win his confidence, he may abet us in regaining
your estate. ‘Twill be a joy to him, after all, to hear the Laureate of Mary-
land is his ally!” ^
“Nay, not so swiftly,” Ebenezer protested. “I may be disabused of my
faith in Baltimore, but I’ve sworn no oaths of loyalty to John Coode. In
any case, as you well know, I ne’er was Laureate and even had I been, I’d
be no longer. Look at this.” He drew the ledger from his coat and showed
Burlingame the finished Marylandiad, which in view of its antipanegyric
tone he had retitled The Sot-Weed Factor. “Call’t a clumsy piece if you
will,” he challenged. ” ‘Tis honest nonetheless, and may spare others my
misfortunes.”
“What’s full of heart may be bare of art” Burlingame asserted with in-
terest, “and vice-versa.” He held the ledger open against the rail and read
the work closely several times while the Pilgrim ran down the Bay to Point
Lookout, where the Potomac River meets Chesapeake Bay. Although he
made no comments either favorable or unfavorable, when the time came
for them to transfer to the lighter for St. Mary’s City he insisted that the
poem be forwarded aboard the Pilgrim to Ben Bragg, at the Sign of the
Raven in Paternoster Row.
“But he’ll destroy it!” exclaimed the poet. “D’you recall how I came by
this ledger back in March?”
“He’ll not destroy it,” Burlingame assured him. “Bragg is obliged to me
in ways I shan’t describe.”
There was no time to ponder the proposal; with some misgivings Ebene-
zer allowed his former tutor to entrust The Sot-Weed Factor to the bark’s
captain, who also refunded the balance of his fare to England, and the
two men were ferried upriver to St. Mary’s City.
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