Lincoln's Briefs

by Wayne, Michael

  It was a cloistered existence. His mother refused to have a telephone or television in the house and did not read the newspapers. They owned a radio, but she only turned it on for BBC concerts and only when the program included English choral music, especially Elizabethan madrigals.

  But then, there were so many things to be avoided in contemporary society, she warned her son. For years afterward he would remember her cautionary lectures with great clarity. About London. (“A sink of iniquity. Drunks in the gutters. Pickpockets in the alleys.”) Immigrants. (“Oily-skinned cutthroats just waiting to get their hands on unsuspecting little boys.”) The “lower classes.” (“Immoral, slow-witted, dirty.”) But mainly about sex. Not that she ever used the term. Instead she filled his mind with images obviously meant to disgust: overripe female bodies awash in sickly sweet scents, lacquered lips, flesh dripping with perspiration. “They’ll promise you pleasure,” she confided in hushed tones, glancing around as if she thought someone might be listening, “but give in to temptation and you’ll end up in disgrace.” He was horrified. “Who were they?” he wondered. Women, it seemed. But how to reconcile the images with the matronly ladies who came to tea or the young girls he occasionally saw on the streets or in the park down the road from his house?

  Nor did his confusion about sex end once he entered school. His mother enrolled him at the prestigious Robinson-Fallis Academy for Boys, just a short walk from their home. Although he had several sexual encounters during the years he was there, he never identified them as such. And because he lived at home, he was spared the ritual initiation into puberty inflicted on those other small, bookish students who boarded at the school.

  But then, school was bewildering in so many ways. “After you hit the ball, run to the wicket over there,” the games master shouted at him, “then run back again.” “Run back again? Whatever for?” he wanted to ask. And in one game you carried the ball. In another, touching the ball with your hand was a penalty. Then there was the music the boarders liked to listen to. Loud, raucous, discordant. Nothing like the lilting melodies of William Byrd and Thomas Morley. When he was in third form, two of his classmates were expelled for sneaking off to Newcastle to see some band called the Animals. “The Animals! What will mother say!” he wondered. He was only glad she hadn’t heard the rumour that one of the boys had been caught with marijuana.

  Games, music, sex. Why bother with particulars? Just about every aspect of modern existence was baffling to Yale Templeton. If his personality had been different he might have sought refuge in a fantasy world. But, unlike his mother, he had such little imagination. So instead he escaped into the past. Even as a small boy he could often be found wandering around the historic monuments of Saffron Walden: the Roman and Saxon graves; the remnants of the de Mandeville castle; vestiges of a medieval maze cut into the earth. Later, when he was school age, his mother would take him to the town museum, with its famous necklace dating back to the ninth century, and to historic Audley End, the mansion built in the early seventeenth century by the Earl of Suffolk, Lord Treasurer to James I. And there would be trips to Cambridge, less than an hour away, to visit the Fitzwilliam Museum, where he would roam the lower galleries, with their artifacts from ancient Syria and Phoenicia, Greece and Rome. The Egyptian mummies captivated him, and for weeks after seeing them for the first time he had disturbing dreams in which his mother was embalmed and wrapped in linen.

  More than anything else, however, he developed an interest in the history of war. It would be difficult to say why. Maybe it was that he needed no understanding of women to talk about weapons and battles and strategy. Or maybe it was that wars allowed him to concentrate his mind on specifics: the deployment of soldiers, the quantity of armaments, statistics on casualties. Even then he was developing that fascination with detail that would so bore a later generation of students. Or more likely he was attracted to wars simply because he knew their outcome in advance. They had a definitive quality, a certainty, lacking in contemporary life.

  By the time he was ten, books on war spilled out of his shelf and across the floor of his bedroom. Two years later his mother reluctantly allowed him to turn the den into his own personal library. He read about ancient wars and modern wars, border wars and continental wars. He read about the Wars of the Roses and the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the War of 1812. And then for Christmas when he was eleven, he received a present from a distant relative in the United States who must have heard about his interest. It was a picture book of the American Civil War. And although it can scarcely be said he recognized it at the time, from that moment the future course of his life was set.

  There is no obvious reason why the photographs by Mathew Brady and the coloured illustrations of Union and Confederate soldiers should have taken possession of him as they did. By this time he had seen thousands upon thousands of pictures of other soldiers in other wars. But compulsive disorders are invariably mystifying to those not similarly afflicted, and it is a sad truth that many otherwise normal people—not to suggest Yale Templeton was otherwise normal—have found themselves similarly obsessed with the American Civil War. His mother was appalled, of course, having never lost her antipathy to the United States. She would have much preferred to see him learning about the English Civil War and the triumphs of those Cavaliers she had managed to convince herself were her ancestors. So he did his best to keep his reading a secret from her, reserving his contemplation of Lee and Jackson, Grant and Sherman, and the battles of Antietam, Shiloh, and Gettysburg for the hours he spent alone at the town library in the old Corn Exchange on Market Square. And by the age of fifteen, he knew as much on the subject as anyone in the British Isles, except perhaps for a handful of scholars.

  Not that he exhibited any sort of gift for original thought. His was a singularly pedestrian mind. But he had an extraordinary memory. By fourth form he was including quotations from Thucydides, Mahan, and other legendary military historians in the examination answers he wrote at Robinson-Fallis. Although quiet and timid, he was easily elected president of the Junior History Society, his wealth of accumulated knowledge discouraging other candidates for the office. He increased the meetings from once a month to twice a week, with members discussing such topics as “Confederate Cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley,” “Union Strategy at Missionary Ridge,” and “Who Was to Blame for Picket’s Charge?” When the master responsible expressed reservations about the narrow range of topics, he replied that it “reflected the interests of the membership,” which by the third week of term included just himself, two foreign exchange students from Greece (neither of whom could speak English), and the son of a Civil War specialist from Vanderbilt University on leave for the year at Cambridge. At the annual banquet held by the Society during Easter term, the Vanderbilt historian gave a talk on Confederate tactics at the Battle of Chancellorsville, which left Yale Templeton so impressed he neglected to point out the three errors of fact and one misquoted passage he had noticed.

  It was a foregone conclusion that he would go on to Cambridge. Otherwise, as his mother explained, he would be unable to continue living at home. Caius College was the obvious choice, having become, under Joseph Needham, the renowned authority on the development of Chinese science, the preeminent centre for the training of historians at the university. At his interview, he dazzled the examiners with the broad sweep of his learning and not only was granted admission but became only the third student from Robinson-Fallis to win a scholarship.

  His next three years were almost entirely given over to researching and writing essays. Naturally, he concentrated on American history. He attended all the lectures offered by Jonathan Steinberg, Hugh Brogan, and R.J. Post. In Part I of the Tripos, he sat “American History from 1689 to the Present Day”; in Part II, he enrolled in the seminar Post offered on “Race Relations in the United States from 1863 to 1896.” And because Cambridge had recently introduced the option of the undergraduate
thesis, he was able to indulge his passion for the Civil War by writing a paper of ten thousand words (his petition to triple the prescribed maximum length having been rejected) on the battle of Chancellorsville. “So I can correct the errors of the talk I heard at Robinson-Fallis,” he explained to his entirely disapproving mother. The thesis was subsequently published, in expanded form, in the Annals of the Cheshire Round Table on the American Civil War.

  The hours he spent in the university library (not to mention on the bus travelling back and forth between Saffron Walden and Cambridge) left him little time for addressing the problem of his arrested social development. However, at meetings of the Caius History Society, he did manage to meet some students who shared his devotion to obscure detail. They would all get together in the Junior Common Room after dinner to exchange arcane bits of information or debate the proper form for citing anomalous primary sources in footnotes. On rare occasions he accompanied a friend to The Red Lion, although his mother repeatedly warned him about the dangers of pubs. He would discreetly sip tea, look around nervously, and never, absolutely never, enter into conversation with a woman.

  Indeed, his bewilderment about women and sex only deepened during his years at Caius. The college did not open its doors to female students until several years after he had graduated, so there was never a chance he would find himself sitting next to a woman in the dining hall or encounter one in the Common Room. In the privacy of his own room, at night with the lights out, the images of female bodies conjured up by his mother sometimes intruded into his thoughts. He found release in the conventional way. But since her lectures on sexual activity had warned about public humiliation, not damnation, these episodes did not leave him with a sense of guilt, only additional bewilderment.

  With one exception the examinations in history at Cambridge tested memory not originality. The exception was the compulsory general historical essay, which asked students to comment on a quotation by some notable figure. The year he sat Part II of the Tripos the quotation came from Lord Namier and had something to do with the role of psychology in historical interpretation. Much to his astonishment, he had never encountered the quoted passage before. At a complete loss, he filled his answer booklets with as many facts as he could scribble in three hours, only a handful of which were even remotely connected to the issue Namier had sought to raise. However, because he was able to provide footnotes documenting the source for each fact (including the author, title, edition, and place and date of publication for every book cited, as well as the relevant page number), the examiner interpreted his confusion as brilliance and awarded him a first. Since all the other examinations merely tested his ability to recall facts and statistics, he recorded firsts in them as well. He graduated with distinction, never once, it must be acknowledged, having given expression to anything approaching an original thought about history or anything else.

  His grades were certainly high enough to secure him a doctoral fellowship at a prestigious university in the United States, the logical place to pursue graduate studies for someone with his interests. At Yale, perhaps, where he might have had the eminent historian of the American South C. Vann Woodward as a supervisor. But of course, his mother never would have permitted such a thing. So he remained at Cambridge, moving to Churchill College, where he could continue to study under R.J. Post, who had the advantage of being a very respected and respectable Englishman. His dissertation would deal with the Civil War; there had never been any question about that. But which specific topic? Or rather, which topic that would not require research in archives or libraries in the United States, since that was out of the question? After consulting with his mother he decided to write about attitudes toward the Civil War in the British press. There would have to be several trips to London, he explained to her. She reluctantly agreed, though only under certain conditions: He could not stay in the city overnight. He could not go to pubs. He could not speak to “strange women.” (Not that he knew what a “strange” woman looked like.) And he must stay out of those neighbourhoods where immigrants or members of the lower class lived.

  Three years later the dissertation was finished. “A Survey of Facts, Statistics, Editorial Opinions, and Related Material Regarding the American Civil War as Published in the British Press between April 9, 1861 and April 12, 1865” was the size of the Manchester telephone book. “And about as interesting,” one of the readers commented. Yale Templeton had painstakingly examined 97 newspapers dated from the firing on Fort Sumter to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—large papers and small papers; papers from cities and papers from villages; papers from the North and papers from the South; papers from Liberal strongholds and papers from Tory strongholds. He had looked at news reports and editorials, cartoons and notices of public subscriptions. And the central conclusion he had reached? “No broad patterns can be discovered.” But then, broad patterns had never really mattered to Yale Templeton. It was detail that excited him—to be able to report that on March 23, 1863, on the same day it informed its readers about the Emancipation Proclamation, the Sheffield Register ran a story regarding a drunken Union soldier who had shot a cow at the recent battle of Murfreesboro in the mistaken impression that it was General P.G.T. Beauregard. Now that, to Yale Templeton, was history.

  “It’s a monumental achievement,” commented one of the readers when they all sat down to evaluate the dissertation. “Truly it is,” agreed R.J. Post. “To say so much and have so little to say.” And everyone nodded. Then, as anticipated, they awarded him a passing grade. No one wished to make him write another draft. Not when they would have to read it.

  On a pleasant Saturday in June at two in the afternoon, Yale Templeton joined several hundred other students at the Senate House. He was dressed in a new black suit and, as prescribed by university regulations, wore a white tie and the hood and gown of someone about to receive the degree of doctor of philosophy. The senior proctor read the supplicants and then, at the appropriate moment, the praelector of Churchill College took him, right hand by right hand as was the custom, and led him to the vice chancellor to announce that he was of respectable character and had reached the level of academic attainment required to receive his degree. Then Yale Templeton knelt down and placed his hands together between those of the vice chancellor, who, with all the dignity appropriate to such occasions, pronounced the formal statement of admission to the doctorate.

  Ten minutes later he was outside on King’s Parade with his mother. He rented a punt and took her down the Cam to Grantchester, where they celebrated over scones and tea. Then it was back to Saffron Walden to begin preparing for his future. He had a great deal to do in only a short time. There were lectures to write, reading lists and handouts to put together. The first year of university teaching is always the most demanding. And in his case there would be additional stresses. He would be leaving the security of home for the first time. Not incidentally, he would be leaving his mother as well.

  V

  There had been five candidates for the position in American history at Toronto: Yale Templeton, a high school history teacher from Buffalo, a professor of Armenian history at the University of Toledo who had misread the job advertisement, a middle-aged caterer from San Francisco who was just getting over a failed relationship and wrote that he desperately needed a change of scenery, and a recent graduate from Harvard, described by her supervisor, the renowned historian David H. Donald, as “without question the finest student I have had in more than thirty years of teaching.” Her dissertation, an investigation of the effect of the Civil War on family structure and gender relations in the Midwest, had been published by Oxford University Press. Quickly recognized as a landmark work in women’s history—“vastly extending the boundaries of the subject,” according to the admiring review in the New York Review of Books—it had been awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize. Under the circumstances, the four men who made up the search committee had little difficulty coming up with a shortlist. They chose the caterer, the professor o
f Armenian history, and Yale Templeton.

  A recent external review of the History department had noted a “lack of diversity” in the faculty. Accordingly the Dean of Arts and Sciences sent a memo to the department chairman requesting the search committee explain its reasons for leaving the graduate of Harvard off its list of candidates. The committee produced a detailed report outlining her numerous shortcomings, including her susceptibility to PMS, the likelihood that she would agitate for access to the men’s bathroom, and the probability that one day she would decide to get married and have children, being “more attractive than most woman historians of our acquaintance.” Privately the chairman complained that the commitment to “affirmative action” was sacrificing “standards” for “political correctness.”

  At his interview Yale Templeton presented a paper entitled “Some Rather Interesting Facts and Statistics on the Second Battle of Bull Run as Reported in the Lincolnshire Sunday Post.” The professor of Armenian history gave a talk, in Armenian, documenting atrocities against Armenians throughout history, especially Armenian professors living in Toledo. As for the caterer, he presented a critical analysis of the menus chosen for all the inaugural balls from the first administration of Dwight Eisenhower to the second administration of Ronald Reagan, including suggestions about how they could be adapted for departmental receptions. He concluded his presentation by having one of his assistants wheel in a Lady Baltimore Cake in the shape of the Star-Spangled Banner, while a Dixieland band played “America the Beautiful” in ragtime.