print previewback GRAHAM HILLARD
The Surrender of Breda
17 September 1972
Dear Harold,
A student asked me this morning if Waterloo can be said to have discredited the cavalry charge as a weapon of psychological warfare. Might Wellington and von Blücher (the garbling of the Prussian’s name brought chuckles from adjoining rooms, barely audible) have unknowingly hastened the twilight of the mounted soldier? This, mind you, in the second week of the term. I assumed my haughtiest smirk and told the young fool that the grand proposition would serve him better after his mastery of pronunciation. The dullard was two winks from resting his feet on my desk, I tell you. Three from career sycophancy. One salts a field before one’s enemy sows his crops.
Yet the west of Tennessee is glorious in September! These bones want heat, and walking about campus below this morning’s sun, I might have been a pair of steamed trousers beneath the press. Marjorie tells me that my autumn gait is that of a champion hurdler at Ascot. She practically gallops to the door to meet me in the evenings, colour rising in her cheeks like cherries to the top of a Tom Collins. (The Yanks’ cocktail houring is endless, bless them.) Who, even at our age, can resist such a season? Air wet as a scouring rag. Leaves clinging to their youth past all reason. And the wind! No dirge of the dying year but a fine accelerando, a flute’s aria rising to mezzo-forte as the tempo quickens. It scatters one’s papers on occasion, yes, but not the better ones.
Or the oldest. Do you ever think of Father’s letters? You could fetch them in an instant, I know, but for me their drawer in Dorset might as well be Xanadu. Yet every one of them seems stamped upon my mind indelibly. To know Curzon, to see the partitioning of Bengal but to write only and always of the heat. One doesn’t know whether to admire such reticence or recoil from it.
Talk of McGovern and Nixon fills the hallways, as if either will stop the slaughter. What Heath will do about the miners, the Irish, and Thatcher is on no lips but mine.
Your lost brother,
Clifford
30 September 1972
Dear Harold,
Marjorie and I left Colorado in 1967, Anno Domini Nostri Jesu Christi (Mother smiles), stolen away by promises of snowless winters (my weakness) and blues clubs (hers). We took the lie of the land for a time (flat as the Queen’s forehead) before settling ten blocks from the university, and I walked that distance daily before succumbing to the same hip that, if God’s justice prevails on Earth, has crippled you, too.
I jest, dear one!
Emily stayed behind, and the grinning gent she married is vice president now of acquirement or attainment or another useless abstraction. Marjorie’s position in the library supplements my humble professor’s wages, and we have remained in our lovely bungalow (from the Hindi baṅglā, as Father would remind us), lo, these many years, mildly and pleasantly decaying, awaiting the knell of parting day.
Though less mildly of late, I must confess. Academe’s particular witchcraft ensnares even the strong, and I fear that my concentration has begun to disintegrate. As in this instance: Today I found myself maneuvered into the chairmanship of a committee appointed to replace a departed colleague. An honour, you’ll suggest, and I shall try to scoff quietly. Summoned to a meeting with the dean, pinned to a far wall by the muscular stench of his overspritzed Monsieur Rochas, I found myself unable to retrieve either a suitable reason for my unsuitability or an alternate neck for the gallows. I sputtered, Harold, and a less dignified reaction to tyranny, aside from soiling oneself, is difficult to imagine. So now I must advertise in the usual places and wait for the young Turks to assail me with their sententious vitae. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
M. warns that one renewing so neglected a correspondence must fill his letters with wonders and reveries intoxicating to behold. Yet, glancing over my shoulder, she declares that I wander like Burgoyne at Saratoga. Charming woman. Whatever our efforts, we shall never best your news that the Teutonic child-bride you fetched from Berlin has blossomed into womanhood and rewarded you with sons in your old age. Can it be so? Pass my greetings to the strapping Brunhilda and your prancing Visigoths!
Your lost brother,
Clifford
15 October 1972
Dear Harold,
The Miracle of Dunkirk was less thrilling a feat than my taming this morning of the vicious and feral beasts with whom the dean has beset me. Has ever a more quarrelsome party been assembled by man? First, the advertisement I’d sketched for the empty position was too expansive and had to be narrowed (from modern European history to early modern European history, thank you). Next, my description of the local geography was called into question. (Does the Mississippi Delta extend into the southwest of Tennessee? One would have thought lives were at stake.) Finally, my very use of the term “historian” was revealed to be neglectful of important trends in the discipline. (Had I read David Hackett Fischer’s latest? Mightn’t “conceptualiser” be the more accurate word?) Faced with dissension at every turn, I drew myself to my full (seated) height and announced that my chief antagonist—the wretched Dr. Linksmiller, a publican and sinner about whom I shall have more to say later—was welcome to assume my post should he wish to do so. Storm clouds gathered, crash of thunder, et cetera, but no further complaints were voiced. A cat-o’-nine-tails pulled from my satchel couldn’t have made a graver impression than such a threat.
But, Harold, what soft light greeted our emergence into the world! The elms paid no heed to our hour of bickering; their leaves hung lovely and changeful as before. The sky seemed to envelop the earth like a great blue coat, smartly made. One forgets how right Ruskin was. Nature ignores us, cheerfully, despite the crassness of our feelings. She bends her will to no man. In that, we are the most fortunate of souls.
Myself especially. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that today I am sixty-seven years old. Congratulate me. Most Brits in America die of shock by fifty. Oh, they’re a vulgar people, loose and strong of limb but feeble of mind, unwilling to notice the blood of their president’s enemies dripping from his ravenous maw. To be sure, the children hate him (a young woman suggested, Friday, rather stupidly, that he might reasonably be compared to Mussolini), but Tuesday’s revelation seems not to have sunk the great ship of his inexorable progress. Did you read the latest from our intrepid Bernstein? “Massive campaign of political spying and sabotage.” (I meant to save the clipping but overturned my tea upon it, damn these hands.) Nevertheless, the man sails on, buoyed by the foolishness of his public and the eagerness of his opponents to be defeated.
Yet, despite all (and here I must ask you to guard this letter as you would Brunhilda’s—all right, Ingrid’s—virtue), I find myself rather liking the wicked fellow. Perhaps only an Englishman who saw his father’s empire crumble can cheer such incorrigible will. Nixon will leave no wounded on the field of battle. Even now, his archers prepare their indiscriminate arrows. His mercenaries await the looting of the corpses. In neighbouring rooms, my colleagues shudder with the very depth of their loathing, and I, an alien among them, delight in their suffering. Tell no one.
Your lost brother,
Clifford
8 November 1972
Dear Harold,
A persimmon tree near my room has grown querulous and discards its stinking offal on the pavement to be trod upon. (Do you know the species? Think of a damson plum corrupted by lust.) I spent the morning scraping its foulness from my boots. Gruesome work. I shall request a battlefield commission.
What were the trees in Mother’s orchard? Do you remember? Apples and pears, of course, but am I wrong to envision a row of blackcurrant bushes? A harvest of almonds? Memory is a poor actor, fleeing the stage the moment I address him, unwilling to make his speech. How I wish I could return to those Dorset hills for an afternoon, drive my spade into the ground and extract the fossil of my childhood from the clay and chalk. Is it buried too deeply? Marjorie says that all our pasts molder beyond reach, but she remains an American despite our many years together and can say nothing of value on the subject. Creatures without history they are, Harold. Convinced that God formed Washington from dust and Jefferson from his rib. She’ll not see what it is to forget the land on which one’s ancestors built Stonehenge, quarried limestone for Longshanks, hurled rocks at Cromwell.
You will have read of our Mr. Nixon’s triumph—a smashing success! M. grimaces to see me so pleased, but the Châteauneuf-du-Pape I’ve uncorked will lift her mood. I pray, for your sake, that Ingrid is as easily mollified.
Your lost brother,
Clifford
9 November 1972
Dear Harold,
How quickly our fortunes change! Yesterday I fairly wept with plebian sentimentality. Today I’ve the bile of Coriolanus. Linksmiller (he of Harvard pedigree, middling scholarship, and detestable lecture hall theatrics—you’ll recall the name) has assembled the hiring committee outside my presence and ranked our applicants according to his own pleasure. No minutes were taken—indeed, my absence assured that no official business could be done—but he has doubtless arranged a voting bloc that I shall be unable to crack. (How did I learn of this ill turn? I saw the conspirators filing from their assassin’s den. Not one of them would meet my eye.) At close of day I managed to corner the stupidest among them (the quivering Dr. Pendlemist) and wrest from him the names of the candidates on whom they’d settled. I sit now with their materials before me, aghast.
First is a Dr. Smyth, not a fellow Englishman meant to appease me, as one might guess, but a rustic North Dakotan in search of warmer climes, benumbed to his surname’s archaism or made insufferable by it. Next is Dr. Fortier, a woman scholar whose work on late Plantagenet feminism is said to be “of a quality rarely seen.” One dares to hope. Last is a Mr. Barnstead (yes, the dean will allow us full consideration of only three applicants—gross penury!), a chap whose misspelling of my name might be forgiven were his dissertation complete. What, you may ask, has drawn such ignoble folk to the top of our pile? All are young—surely the freshest of the lot if I’m to judge by their vitae—and can be had cheaply. All are beholden, their writing makes clear, to the new thinking, in which theory trumps discovery, narrative bests fact, and nothing can be known with certainty. History, Harold—that difficult, consuming work in which a lifetime spent in archives yields but one precious inch of territory—is dying. The Fabian cowards will kill it one retirement at a time, winning no battles, making no advancements, planting no flags, but subtly shifting, subtly creeping as I and my lot clear out our rooms. Victory by hiring committee.
Yet you’ve a son who wants to read of England! Forgive me—I mean this—for saying nothing of it in yesterday’s letter. The boy is seven, yes? Give him Maria Elizabeth Budden’s True Stories. Give him Baden-Powell. (My Scouting for Boys may yet be buried in Father’s study.) Give him Esther Copley’s History of Slavery and its Abolition. All are meant for children, I assure you, despite their length.
Tomorrow promises combat. I shall relay the outcome.
Your lost brother,
Clifford
16 December 1972
Dear Harold,
Raking the last leaves this morning (autumn has given way not to winter but to an unnamable half-caste of a season), I found my thoughts drawn to a paper I began in my student years and laid aside: an inquiry into the German evasion of the Maginot Line. Before you ask, no, I have secured no similar victory for myself, despite my efforts. (And inspiration born of autobiography never lasts, as any scholar will tell you.) Rather, it was the refuse I flanked on my way to the garden—branches felled by Sunday’s storm, quite the show—that stirred my memory of the project. Orthodoxy faults Gallic imbécillité, of course, but I saw finer shades of meaning, deeper hues.
I digress, of course, and delay my story. You’ll excuse my long silence on that count, won’t you? The conquered army writes no histories, as the cliché has it, and while I have not yet relinquished my sword, I begin to suspect that my enemies have left me that dull blade merely to increase my shame. Confronted, Linksmiller denied nothing. (His toady Pendlemist had confessed all, remember.) Instead—and hideously—the villain stood on his rights and asserted that the high-handedness and despotism of my chairmanship were to blame—that a fair hearing for “the appropriate candidates” required my absence. The man’s calmness, Harold, was infuriating. Even now, I recall the scene and yearn for blood. Linksmiller would have thrashed me—I say so freely to spare you the bother—but not without reprisal. These limbs have life in them yet.
My mind, however, grows dim. Three days after my last letter, the committee met formally to act on Linksmiller’s recommendations. Faced with almost certain defeat, I felt for the second time in as many months my wits deserting me, my resolve shaking at the pitch of battle. Why must age humiliate us so? To have been possessed of even last year’s store of intellect and instinct would have been to thresh Linksmiller’s party into chaff unfit for the trough. Instead, I merely blustered—I roared as a child might have done, toothlessly—and was overrun. So now I must choose. Complain to the dean (he will play Eisenhower to my Eden, mark my words) or allow myself to recede further into irrelevance. And who is watching, in any case, or will notice? As with matadors and maestros, my gestures are largely superfluous.
Your lost brother,
Clifford
1 January 1973
Dear Harold,
Luck of the new year to you. Kisses to Ingrid (chaste, of course, unless she wishes otherwise) and greetings to my nephews. I trust that Seamus has commenced the studies I recommended and that William will soon follow. Lovely lads. Let no one cast shame, dear one, upon our preference for sons. It can no more be helped than the changing of the seasons.
Which is its own sad business, of course, though not my reason for interrupting your grateful pudding. Tidying our Christmas mess, I realised that I have neglected properly to describe my antagonist. Allow me that displeasure now.
Conrad Linksmiller visited our campus in 1969, freshly armed with an Ivy credential (we whore after them like Heath chasing the Common Market) and a published monograph causing some minor stir. Something to do with the Yuan Dynasty, though I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. Though senior by age, I was low man by years served at that time and had little to do with the hiring. But I put my oar in, Harold. Told them precisely what I thought.
Now, you may ask how I knew that Linksmiller ought to be avoided, and I shall take off my hat to the question. First, and most seriously, the man dressed as if readying himself for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Grey to the soles of his boots, never mind the splendid weather. Second, the stupid fellow repeated as fact—and as if to teach us something!—Randolph Hearst’s apocryphal vow to “furnish the war” with Spain should Remington supply the photographs—an error bespeaking both carelessness and pretension. Finally, Linksmiller revealed himself to be a poseur of the basest sort, as the following anecdote shows.
In the early part of ’69, you’ll recall, Nixon had climbed the Capitol steps and begun la Terreur, and our own J.E. Ray had pleaded guilty to his shooting of the Hon. Rev. King. And what had the two to do with one another? Everything, if our friend Dr. Linksmiller is in the witness box. Our chief candidate kept his radicalism to himself at the hiring committee dinner in his honour, though certainly he would have met with sympathetic ears among my more fashionable colleagues. Only later, conversing with students after his teaching demonstration (vile ritual, I grant you), did he find himself unable to keep silent any longer. Nixon and his ilk, Linksmiller declared, face white with enfantin rage, may not have ordered the killing in any literal sense, but they had done so in spirit rightly enough.
You will not be surprised, dear one, or perhaps you will, to learn that our students stood and cheered the man. As if he were Henry at Agincourt. Leave aside his politics for a moment, puerile though they are. It was his sage nodding as they applauded—a performer’s gesture—that turned my stomach. The next day I wrote to both dean and hiring committee. For naught, of course: the vote to extend a contract succeeded on first ballot.
Since that day, having marked me as an enemy, Linksmiller has engaged in a steady campaign to see me put out. Wresting control of the search from me is only the latest in a series of shock attacks. Now you see, I trust, why I was right to wish that this particular cup might pass from me, and why Linksmiller was right to decline it when I offered. Committee chairmanships, like all official endeavours about campus, can only end in thankless success or open humiliation and failure. So much better to undermine, to wheedle, to work one’s will slyly, anonymously, in secret.
Your lost brother,
Clifford
20 January 1973
Dear Harold,
The spring term began Monday last amidst unusual fanfare. It seems that our governing body has secured for May’s commencement ceremony the services of one George Stanley McGovern—historian, erstwhile senator, and hors de combat presidential candidate. The resurrected carcass of Ho Chi Minh could hardly have pleased the students more, and everywhere spirits are high.
It was with some trepidation, then, that I read the tersely worded note left in my mail slot over Christmas holiday. (I recognised the dean’s handwriting on the envelope at once; his f’s have the crooked staff of the sexual deviant.) Would I please make myself available for a meeting at my immediate convenience? Not earliest possible, mind you, but immediate, which, when one considers the matter, rather contradicts the convenience, does it not? What could I do but telephone his secretary and agree to a sit-down? I tried to coax some hint of our agenda from the old cow, but she has grown rather skilled at putting off such inquiries, no doubt through repetition.
So blindly forth I went, as Tiresias before Creon. Having managed to delay the assembly ’til Thursday noon, I approached the administrative building (a right dungeon, erected on the corpses of the unpublished dead) with something of a swagger. Shall I confess that it quickly abandoned me? Hardly had I taken a seat before the dean informed me that the process necessary to revoke my tenure had been set in motion, that the Department of History was unanimous in its approval of the action, and that Linksmiller himself would take the case before the faculty senate. Hadn’t I rather think of retirement? A change of scene? Anything to avoid the humiliation (public, he assured me) of termination?
The reasons for my dismissal were obvious, of course. I have made myself a Jonah and must be cast into the sea. I have habitually resisted progress. I have “displayed a pattern of uncollegiality,” as the perfectly vague complaint against me will surely state, and my berating of the hiring committee last month is merely the offense in whose name they will hang me.
So how am I to proceed? Shall I go gently? Sheath my sword and retreat? Today saw the second inauguration of the Great Enemy, a fellow whose uncollegiality is more pronounced even than my own. Perhaps I shall follow his example. Give everything, everything, to beat them.
Some hours later
I take up my pen again, Harold, to tell you that all is changed. It is after midnight—M. is long asleep—and I have just returned home from a late evening’s work. And what wonders these eyes have beheld! Locked in my room, lost in the reflections of Sir John Moore upon the Battle of Corunna, I began to hear what could only be described as a dull knocking. But persistent. Leaving my desk, I stepped into the hallway and turned to left and right. I listened, and the sound grew louder. Had my telltale heart contrived to damn me? Indeed not, for on second glance, I saw that the dimmest of lights shone from beneath Linksmiller’s door.
Put aside your squeamishness for a moment, Harold, and follow me to the threshold. The sound is unmistakable now. (You would know it in a trice.) The lock—shocking carelessness!—has not been set, and we throw open the door to find Linksmiller in flagrante delicto, closeted with an undergraduate and tupping her like Othello upon Brabantio’s “white ewe”! What shall we say to him? What did I say? Not a word. I merely gasped, met his eyes, and strode away. Let him come begging.
Your lost brother,
Clifford
1 May 1973
Dear Harold,
History’s greatest surrenders are dignified affairs—nary a shot fired or a tunic ruffled. Appomattox. Napoleon before Maitland. The surrender of Breda. Do you know Velázquez’s painting of that title? The Spanish baroque is insufferable, but that work is a marvel. Take your boys to Madrid and study it. Note Spinola’s courtesy as he receives the key to the city, his hand extended in friendship. Believe not those who say the heart of man is the heart of a beast.
As for my own surrender—yes, mine—it came much more quickly than the long break in my correspondence would indicate. (Yes, I’ve received your letters—all of them. They sit upon my desk accusing me.) Linksmiller, I now know, is a poor one for begging. Every evening I sat in my room awaiting the inevitable confession and prostration that would reverse my dismissal. Every morning I arose in new hope. Cornered, however, Linksmiller crushed me brilliantly, a decisive blow. Caught red-handed (and white-arsed, a lamentable sight), he dug his trench in the only ground left to him.
He married the girl.
That he did so not eventually, not at the point of a sword, but willingly, joyfully, and within the month is further proof of his genius. For what could the university then say? He had given them an out, as it were. Permission to look away. One might almost applaud his tactics were it not for that pitiable young Isabella, led by her Heathcliff to a vengeful altar.
But thus is warfare. We celebrate thrusts and feints, enshrine hopeless charges, build monuments to sieges, and forget the wretches scrapping for crumbs within the walls. And so the past elides all of us, finally. Marjorie and Clifford. Harold. Emily, in her time. Your wife and sons. Men and gods together. Linksmiller may have his triumph. May he live to see its emptiness.
I release you now, Harold. Put my letters with Father’s, won’t you? Let Seamus find them after a time and smile.
Your lost brother,
Clifford 
