Silas Timberman

by Howard Fast

  Silas continued to stare at the man, with increasing wonder and a sort of marvelous disbelief. “You don’t mean the entire English Department?” he asked.

  “I do, Silas.”

  “But how could you commit the whole staff?”

  “Because I had no doubts as to their patriotism.”

  “But is this a question of patriotism?” Silas asked slowly. “Really, Ed, I don’t want to get into a foolish argument on a matter like this, but it’s not an open and shut thing by any means.”

  “It isn’t? Just how do you see it, Silas?” All the warmth went out of his voice now. He put his hands in his pockets and squared his shoulders, staring somberly at Silas, his head up, his massive body posed rather strikingly.

  “Before I say another word,” Silas replied evenly, “I’m going to spell out your attitude and protest it. I’ve known you a long time, Ed, and you know me. If you have an opinion on Mark Twain, you’re entitled to it, and I respect it. If I have an opinion on civil defense, I am also entitled to it, and I think you should respect it. I am not a communist, and I have nothing but hatred for totalitarianism. You know this very well indeed, and as for my patriotism, I gave three years of my life in that direction. I don’t like to bring that up, but you force me to, and I will not accept any implication that there is anything disloyal or unpatriotic in what I may say.”

  Lundfest looked uncomfortable, broke his pose, and placed one hand on Silas Timberman’s shoulder. “That is the last thing in the world I intended to imply,” he said with sincerity. “By God, if you have no right to say what you please, Silas, then what in hell’s name is the good of any kind of defense, civil or otherwise!”

  Even coming as it did from Lundfest, there was a certain insane truth in the statement, and it at least served the purpose of returning Silas to time and reality. He was still standing in front of Whittier Hall on the campus of Clemington University. The grass was green and the sun shone. Most of the students had drifted into the various buildings, and the clock on the tower told him that he had only ten minutes left before his own class started—meaning that he would be unable to do any of the preparatory work he had left for this morning. He brought his eyes back to Lundfest before he answered, and looking at the man now, the tall, sturdy figure in Harris tweed, cashmere sweater, white shirt and neat blue tie, he envied an ability to dress so well and casually, and said to himself, “I don’t want to make an enemy out of Ed Lundfest. There’s no reason why I should. He has his ways and I have mine, but we’ve always been good friends, always respected each other. Of course, he’s impulsive, but on the other hand, I’m stodgy—I don’t move at all. People are different. He’s not asking any great sacrifice from me, only to take him off the hook by joining this civil defense nonsense. Why not? What do I lose?” So his thoughts went, and it seemed as if someone else was speaking when he said, as he had to,

  “But where is that right after you’ve committed me?”

  “Committed you to what?” Lundfest demanded.

  “To civil defense.”

  “Silas, so help me God, I don’t understand what you’re after! Can’t we talk about this quietly and sanely?”

  “I’ve been quiet,” Silas answered. “You ask me what I object to—just this. There’s as much need for civil defense at Clemington as there is in Death Valley, maybe less, for all I know. In the first place, this is a United Nations war—and it’s being fought in Korea. In the second place, if an atom bomb were dropped on Clemington, what good would all this mummery be? In the third place, no atom bombs are going to be dropped here. In the fourth place, I don’t like to whoop up a war, any war, especially a war like this. The thing to do with a war is to get it over with and done with, and you don’t do that by turning a war scare loose across the campus.”

  “And if all that is true, Silas, what’s behind this? Since you know all the other answers, I’m sure you know this one too.”

  “You know it as well as I do, Ed. You said it before.”

  “What did I say?”

  Silas was in it now, as he well knew, in it and deeply, with only one last chance of going back. He would tell Myra about it later, and she would ask him why he had to say what he was going to say, and he would be unable to answer, just as he was unable to explain to himself now why he said,

  “The unique importance of Clemington and President Cabot—”

  “I’m sorry you said that. I’m sorry, Silas. I don’t want to press you any further now. I want you to think this through again. I’ll see you at convocation.”

  * * *

  The mood that Lundfest left with Silas carried over into the classroom, and Silas found himself regarding his students with a mixture of curiosity and uncertainty. Lundfest had succeeded in making him doubt a number of things which were not subject to doubt when he awoke that morning, and to some extent these doubts were effective. He looked at the students as he might at strangers; and this was new, for he had never regarded a classroom as a gathering of strangers before—nor had they ever puzzled him to the extent that they were puzzling him at this moment.

  His first feeling was that he did not know them or anything very much about them, even though this was his sixth lecture with this particular group. There were forty-two students in the class, twenty-eight boys and fourteen girls, and he knew the names of at least a dozen of them and could make a fair guess with a dozen more. But that did not increase his knowledge of them. For several years after the Second World War had ended, he had felt knowledgeable about his students and exceedingly close to them, for they were all—at least the men wholly, and to some extent the women—a part of the enveloping experience of war. But by 1950, almost all of the veterans had gone. A new generation had replaced them, a generation of strong, tall and fair youth who had never known want or fear or deprivation, who had never crouched, face in the mud, and listened to the scream of the planes overhead, who had never talked to death and listened to death, who had never counted the hours and days and weeks and years in some lonely and godforsaken outpost, and who had never walked gingerly and apprehensively into the hallowed and forbidden halls of learning, armed with a scholarship granted by the GI Bill of Rights. The war generation he had known well indeed, but these were something else. These, in this university, were the sons and daughters of the satisfied and the successful of the middle west. Here were the sons and daughters of large and small industrialists, department store owners and storekeepers, doctors and lawyers and men who had the rich franchise with Ford or Pontiac or Plymouth or Coca-Cola, great farmers who had reaped ten good years of crops, and judges and state senators and congressmen and real estate operators and contractors and engineers—from good homes in the pleasant green towns of the middle west, from Chicago and Indianapolis and St. Louis and Cincinnati and Cleveland and Gary and many other cities. They were as fair to look on as any group of boys and girls had ever been in all of the land’s history, for they had been cared for and fed as no other children were—but their health and fairness and robustness only served to foster his doubts and uncertainties.

  When he looked at their faces, he found no uncertainties there, no doubts. Suppose he were to tell them the rather inconsequential story of what had happened this morning? What would they do? What would they say? He did not know because he had never thought of them in this manner before.

  Suppose he raised it to them as a question of principle?—which made it even more puzzling; for he was by no means certain that he was acting on a basis of principle; and he was a little less than certain as to what their principles might be.

  He recalled now that he had no clue. They did not argue with him; they were not inquisitive, and they did not challenge his opinions. Neither were they obstreperous, unruly or disinterested. Satisfied was closer to it, yet not sufficient; they were not deeply interested in American literature, but he was unaware of what their deep interest might be, if they had deep interests.

  He was somewhat defensive when he said to them
,

  “You may have wondered why I seem to build my entire thesis of our literature around Mark Twain—”

  He realized that very few of them had wondered; he was answering Lundfest, and it made him annoyed with himself. He went on speaking precisely, evenly, logically, watching their faces while he spoke and trying to read some message from their faces. But during the next half-hour, he read no more than he had known before.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he was saying, “we can call Twain the first and the last American realist, which makes his tragedy the more pointed, the more forlorn. He was the last novelist who hoped, who believed, who sang a song of praise and pride about American civilization. At the same time, he was the first, and in a certain sense the last as well, to criticize our way of life savagely, pointedly, and directly, his love turned into hate, his understanding into rancor and bitterness—yet never separating his hate from love, his bitterness from understanding. This sounds like a paradox, and indeed the man was a paradox; but the paradox was unified in one heart and one soul, a great heart and a great soul. After him, there were many who appeared to criticize, but their criticism was mockery and disdain, a childish listing of dirty words and dirty scenes, and there were others who appeared to love, but their love was compounded out of copybook patriotism and Chamber of Commerce sermons—”

  Were they with him, or a long way from him? He told them in closing, “I want you to read, for two weeks from today, a short but very wonderful novelette by Mark Twain. It’s not very well known, but I think we can find a good deal in it. It is called, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyberg. You will find it in the library.”

  They were filing out and he was putting his papers together, when a tall, sandy-haired young man stopped at his desk and said,

  “Excuse me, Professor Timberman.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was troubled by something you said before. I thought I’d ask you.”

  “Go right ahead.” He realized that a few other students had stopped by his desk.

  “Well, that remark about the Chamber of Commerce—well, it didn’t sound right. At home, my father is the president of the local Chamber of Commerce. I think he leaves preaching to the preacher. When he talks, he talks sense.”

  Silas stared at the boy for a moment; then he nodded. “I’m sure he does, Brockman. My remark was not directed at any personality.”

  “Then why choose the Chamber of Commerce, sir?”

  Silas noticed that a couple of the students were grinning, whether at the question or at his discomfiture, he did not know. The others were soberly listening, and it was difficult to know what they felt. Another time, perhaps, the whole thing would have meant nothing and would have been easily passed off as nothing. Today, it could not be passed off, and he had to think about his reply carefully and cautiously.

  “Because, Brockman, it has been widely held that the usual Chamber of Commerce statement is not a model of sincerity or deep concern for our well being.”

  “I can’t agree with that,” the boy said stubbornly. “Isn’t that just what the communists say?”

  “What!” The other students were grinning, but Silas felt that his own smile was rather foolish. The boy stood his ground, and Silas found himself saying, “Come now, Brockman—let’s not be foolish about this. I haven’t the vaguest notion of what the communists say, nor do I particularly care—”

  But that didn’t do it, and Silas left the lecture room irritated with himself, angry with himself, feeling foolish, childish, and in some new, strange way, a little afraid.

  * * *

  He shared an office with two other members of the department, a rather plain, ancient office with three desks, green-shaded lamps, old chairs and framed steel engravings of Shakespeare, Browning and George Bernard Shaw; but as he entered it now, it was a place of refuge, warm and comforting, and he himself was very tired. The only other person present was Lawrence Kaplin, who held the Whittier Seat in Anglo-Saxon and Chaucerian literature, a mild-mannered, soft-spoken and scholarly man in his middle fifties. He looked up from the paper he was reading as Silas entered, nodded hello and then studied Silas rather quizzically. Silas sat down at his desk and sighed.

  “How is the family?” Kaplin asked him.

  “All right, I suppose, Lawrence. Yours?”

  Kaplin nodded, continuing his interested inspection of Silas, who had begun to open his mail. It was the general run of material that came to his office, circulars, advertisements for textbooks, a scholarly journal, and a note from an old friend at Chicago University. In his effort to get out of himself, Silas began to read the advertisements, word for word.

  “I saw you with Lundfest,” Kaplin remarked.

  “Oh, yes.” Silas put down the advertisement and looked across at the other as if he had only just realized that he was there, old Kaplin, gray-haired, near-sighted, retiring, desiring no enemies and having almost no close friends, constantly apologetic for the fact that he knew more of old English, the language and the literature, than anyone else on the continent.

  “Did he talk to you?” Silas added.

  “About civil defense? Yes.”

  “And what was your reaction?”

  “Silas, what could be the reaction of any intelligent human being? What is my reaction to any part of this monstrous thing that is growing up in America today? I can compromise with myself, but I have not yet reached the point where I can lie to myself.”

  Though he spoke softly and thoughtfully, what he said was, in terms of his former relationship with Silas, a sort of outburst, a controlled, dispassionate outburst, but an outburst nevertheless; and it also occurred to Silas that in the fifteen years or so since he had first met Lawrence Kaplin, this was the first time he had ever heard him express so strong a social or political opinion. It fascinated Silas. How little you knew about people! How little you tried to know them!

  “You told Lundfest that you would not become a part of this nonsense?” Silas asked.

  “No, I told him that I would.”

  Silas nodded, but remained silent.

  “I suppose you told him that you would have no part of it,” Kaplin said, after a moment. “That’s easier for you than for me, Silas. I didn’t think it was important enough to lose a job for—or even to make an enemy of Ed Lundfest. I don’t know whether it’s important. It makes me uncomfortable, but so do a great many other things that I continue to do.”

  “I don’t follow you at all, Lawrence. I am both expendable and replaceable, but you are one of the foremost scholars in America. Lundfest knows that, and so does Cabot, and they both know what it means to have you at Clemington. You could go to any university in the country if you wanted to, and I’ve wondered why you don’t, if you will forgive me.”

  Kaplin smiled and shook his head. “Just one or two things, Silas. I happen to be Jewish. It’s very simple and quite proper for you to talk the way you do. Your name is Silas Timberman; mine happens to be Lawrence Kaplin. We live in a world where English departments are not breaking their backs to add to their roster of Kaplins—”

  “No—no, I can’t accept that!”

  “Accept it on my word, Silas. It happens to be true. I suppose that if I resigned from here, I could find a job somewhere else. The country is not crowded with young men and women dying for an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Venerable Bede, but I suppose something would turn up. But if I went out of here under a cloud of subversion—I’d never teach again, and that’s the plain, simple fact.”

  “Subversion!” Silas said. “You can’t be serious? You don’t really believe that a refusal to be moved around like a puppet by Ed Lundfest and volunteer for some silly whim of Cabot’s constitutes subversion?”

  “Are you sure that it doesn’t, Silas?”

  “Quite sure,” Silas replied. “I admit that we live in a country where some unpleasant things have happened, but unpleasant things are bound to happen in a situation like this. We can blow them up all out
of proportion. It is still a sound place, Lawrence, believe me.”

  * * *

  After convocation, Silas felt more pleased than ever with his sane judgment of things and more convinced than ever that he had allowed his own depression to influence both his impressions and his actions. President Cabot’s talk was quite sober and unemotional, and Lundfest revised his position of total commitment to a statement to the effect that he had every expectation of almost complete support from his department. Applications were passed around to be taken home and filled in, and when Silas was leaving the great assembly hall, with its fine raftered ceiling and broad air of dignity and thought, Lundfest sought him out, grinned at him, and reminded him of the party that evening. Of course, he would be there, Silas replied, and Lundfest said nothing at all about their former discussion.

  Myra caught up with him outside the assembly hall, and they walked home together. The day was still rich, laden with sunlight and clean air, and Silas’ normal good spirits had returned.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wednesday: October 25, 1950

  MATTERS OF PRINCIPLE

  CHAPTER TWO

  MATTERS OF PRINCIPLE

  Wednesday being a day without classes, Myra usually dedicated it to the household, the children and herself—in the order named, and the result was that she rarely got to herself. While she was more than a little disdainful of acquaintances who made careers of doing nothing except currying themselves, she thought it not unreasonable to want to have her hair done once a week or to get to Indianapolis once a month for department store shopping. Ike Amsterdam had once lectured her upon the simple and irreplaceable virtue of a day wasted—a day during which she would walk and loaf and do nothing at all of any consequence or constructive value; he held that as the years went by, she was becoming tight and mechanical in her actions, and that this was unforgivable in a woman of her charm and attractiveness—altogether something he could say out of his protective coat of years; or so he thought, for she was annoyed with him, and a little angry too. Perhaps her anger partook of agreement, but this was not a matter she desired to discuss with anyone at all.