Lincoln's Briefs

by Wayne, Michael

  The same possibilities for freedom of expression that were attractive to Charlie Parker proved a lure for Jackson Pollock. He produced a dramatic series of murals for the concert hall, which opened in 1958. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” performed there the following February. However, probably no one had a greater impact during the decade of the 1950s than James Dean. Working with Carole Lombard, he revived the drama society that had provided so many pleasurable hours for Abraham Lincoln. Among the more notable productions Dean and Lombard mounted were the Shakespearean comedy As You Like It, and Porgy and Bess, which George Gershwin adapted for a Canadian wilderness setting. Dean also directed performances of the two operas and three musical comedies that Gershwin wrote after his move to Ontario.

  It was, however, the decade of the 1960s when local culture blossomed most spectacularly. Sylvia Plath came and Flannery O’Connor. Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac. Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves. Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. Dinah Washington. Judy Garland. Lenny Bruce. Marilyn Monroe arrived in 1962. Together she and James Dean set up the first film company. John Kennedy followed her a year later and Bobby Kennedy five years after that. But no one had a greater impact on the settlement than Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. United in their disillusionment with the American dream and united as well in their commitment to the principles on which the community was founded, they agreed to give up preaching, took up residence together, and led a series of educational seminars devoted to exploring how the meaning and exercise of freedom had evolved over the course of human history.

  Since the 1960s notable Americans have continued to find their way to the settlement. Diane Arbus. Richard Brautigan. Anne Sexton. Robert MacArthur. Arthur Ashe. “Pistol Pete” Maravich. John Belushi. Natalie Wood. Bobby Darin. Duane Allman. Mama Cass. Marvin Gaye. Alvin Ailey, Jimmy Hoffa. Abbie Hoffman. More recent arrivals include Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., John Kennedy, Jr., reunited at last with his father and uncle, Paul Wellstone, Hunter S. Thompson, Stephen Jay Gould, and now, finally, the President.

  Today the community covers almost ten square kilometres. The cabins, numbering more than one hundred, are all modest in size but vary widely in conception. Some few are square and rough-hewn, like so many cottages across the Canadian north. Others are vibrant with colour and unique in design, distinguished by sweeping curves and odd angles. The very fine concert hall, with the Pollock murals, still survives, and in addition there is a theatre, a community centre, a hospital, a baseball field, and basketball and tennis courts. The favourite winter sport is, of course, hockey—non-contact hockey. Each December, when the lake freezes over, a delegation of young men and women takes on the task of sawing wooden planks and building a rink. And with the arrival of a caterer from San Francisco fifteen years ago, there is now a very fine restaurant serving a variety of traditional American dishes, ranging from Boston clam chowder to hamburgers to gumbo to barbecue to, of course, apple pie. The specialty of the house, however, is another dessert, a Lady Baltimore cake. Each year the caterer bakes a gigantic version in the shape of a moose for the annual Canada Day celebration.

  Human nature being what it is, minor conflicts arise from time to time. Overall, however, the community is doing well. Material goods are by and large equitably distributed. And while there are occasional complaints that some or other resident might, say, contribute more to keeping the grounds clean, work seems to get done without anyone having to take on an undue burden. The settlement introduced universal health care long before the rest of Canada. But most noteworthy of all, given Lincoln’s vision of human emancipation, each person is free to craft his or her own identity, and to change identities whenever and as often as he or she wishes. Race carries no public meaning in the community, nor, for that matter, do ethnicity, religion, or sex. You are who, or what, you imagine yourself to be.

  This extraordinary level of freedom has produced an exceptional sense of closeness among residents. Everyone comes together to commemorate Lincoln’s birthday as well as festivals marking important moments in the history of the settlement, and also for Canadian public holidays. Births are celebrated by all; deaths mourned by all. Each morning the caterer and a rotating crew of volunteers serve a communal breakfast—during the summer months on the shores of the lake, and during the rest of the year in the community centre. And once a week, at twilight, everyone gathers at a clearing in the woods to hear storytellers weave magic tales, to roast marshmallows over the campfire and make s’mores, and as the flames flicker low, to listen to Elvis sing “Imagine,” accompanied by Jimi on guitar, with Janis, Jim, Kurt, and John Lennon himself providing backup vocals and Michael doing the moonwalk.

  LXXII

  A small item on a back page of the same special edition of the National Enquirer revealed that Felicia Butterworth had vanished under mysterious circumstances. Apparently also gone, under no less mysterious circumstances, was over half the three-billion-dollar university endowment fund. The Dean Responsible for Relations with the Mafia was said to be helping police with their inquiries.

  In a 453-page press release, written in a language invented specifically for the occasion, Acting University President and CEO H. Avery Duck reaffirmed the commitment of the institution to “the very highest of ethical standards.” Accordingly, as the first act of his administration, he distributed a 77-page memorandum to all cafeteria staff outlining the issues of principle to be addressed when considering which condiments to make available to students at dinner time.

  LXXIII

  Stand on Telegraph Hill in St. John’s and look out to sea. Can you see a small boat, a clinker-built dinghy with a single sail? There would be a crew of two, a man in his thirties and a diminutive woman of advanced age. The woman is likely wearing a crown.

  No, I can’t see them either. But don’t lose heart. The English never do. They are a resolute, tenacious people. Dauntless and self-assured. Utterly confident in the superiority of their culture and possessed of a quiet faith in their ability to prevail against all odds, no matter how seemingly hopeless. Remember, it was these very qualities that allowed them to acquire the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Of course, it is the same qualities that explain why they lost the greatest empire the world has ever seen. But this would hardly seem to be a good time to dwell on negative thoughts.

  LXXIV

  Who is that sitting on the floor, writing furiously, a pasteboard balanced on her knees? Why, it’s Bobbi Jo Jackson! Scattered around her are sheets of bluish gray, wide-lined foolscap, much like the kind of paper Lincoln used. She has only been at work for a few days, yet the floor is already covered with hundreds of pages in her distinctive shorthand script. What we have here are the beginnings of her acclaimed work, Manifest Deception: The American Plot to Take Over Canada. By the time she has finished, she will not only have demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that the White House was, and remains, deeply implicated in separatist activities in Quebec, but she will also have explored in unprecedented depth the history of American designs on Canadian land and resources.

  Eventually her desire to understand the origins of American expansionism will take her back into the colonial period, and that in turn will lead to her second great project: English attitudes toward the colonization of Canada. Of necessity she will spend much of her time exploring records from the age of Elizabeth I. Among her most valuable sources will be The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation made by sea or over land to the most remote and farthest distant quarters of the earth, at any time within the compass of these 1500 yeares by Richard Hakluyt the younger. After a trip to London to examine the records of the Colonial Office, she and Yale Templeton will visit the quaint old Tudor cottage in Saffron Walden, then bicycle to Cambridge, where they will wander hand in hand along the backs and punt down the river to Grantchester for cream teas.

  For her third work, she will revisit the history of French Canada. She will discover that the romantic storie
s woven by René Purelaine and his brother, while not without grains of truth, hardly do justice to the complexity of the Canadian past. Here she will begin to develop her groundbreaking insights into the delicate interplay between material interest and the stories historical actors tell themselves about their own intentions and the workings of fate.

  There will be further volumes as well. On the Portuguese fisherman who made their way to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland during the fifteenth century, before the famous voyages of Cabot and Cartier. On the Vikings and their settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows. But most notably, on First Nations peoples. Relying heavily on oral histories gathered in interviews with Native elders (here her extraordinary linguistic abilities will prove invaluable), she will produce a series of award-winning studies ranging from a radical reassessment of how and when Canada was originally settled to a sensitive interpretation of contemporary Ojibwa culture.

  Between writing books she will turn out scholarly articles for the Canadian Historical Association on various immigrant groups: Scotch-Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Greeks, Ukrainians, Jamaicans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Somalis, many more. And when she is done, she will draw on her years of wide-ranging research to produce what will become her most celebrated work, Imagining Canada, in which she will explore in great subtlety and depth how the Canadian landscape effectively served as a vast untreated canvas on which so many different people painted so many inspiring dreams. It hardly matters, she will conclude, that the dreams invariably turned out to be hopelessly naive.

  After that there will be just one more story for her to tell, the history of the small settlement Abraham Lincoln helped found. “But you don’t have enough evidence,” Yale Templeton will protest. “All we know is what Slinger the Trapper told us. Think how paltry your footnotes will be.” (Her footnotes, let it be noted, were always beyond reproach.) And so she will put her story in the form of a work of fiction, a novel. And in a whimsical moment, she will decide to call the novel Lincoln’s Briefs. Needless to say, Yale Templeton will not get the play on words.

  LXXV

  But now it is time to say goodbye to that selfsame Yale Templeton. The question is: How best to go about it? I had thought, perhaps, to contrive to get him entangled in hemp rope and strapped to the back of the Great White Moose. That way the two of them could spend eternity together, shambling through the vast forests of the Canadian North. However, as you no doubt have noticed, I am already more than a little indebted to Herman Melville. One more borrowed allusion and you might charge me with plagiarism.

  Had I decided to write a satire, I might have sent Yale Templeton off to Turkey to consult with a dervish, and then brought him home to cultivate his garden (if he had a garden). That was how Voltaire bid farewell to Candide. Or perhaps I could have had him, in the manner of Don Quixote, recognize the folly of his obsession (for the Great White Moose) and die a broken man. I might even have arranged to have a poignant epitaph engraved on his tombstone.

  We live, however, in perilous times. More perilous, I have to believe, than the times in which Cervantes lived, in which Voltaire lived. Too perilous for satire it seems. An author today has an obligation to portray the institutions of our society with all the seriousness they deserve. Which I have endeavoured to do.

  But to return to the problem at hand: How to take our leave of Yale Templeton? Love and history dominated his life, so arguably the sensible course would be to seek guidance from a work built upon the same themes. For reasons that will become clear momentarily, my choice is Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. For those unfamiliar with the novel, let me briefly summarize the story line:

  The central character, Hans Castorp, journeys from his home in Hamburg to the Swiss Alps to visit a cousin who is a patient at a small hospital, or sanatorium. While there he develops what appear to be the symptoms of tuberculosis and decides to stay at the hospital for treatment. Even though it is never entirely clear whether he has actually contracted the disease, he stays and stays and stays. By the end of the novel he has been atop the “magic mountain” for seven years. The better part of Mann’s narrative is devoted to exploring the relationships Hans Castorp forms with the other residents at the hospital, both patients and staff.

  There are a number of obvious parallels between the experiences of Hans Castorp and Yale Templeton:

  Throughout The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp remains confined, by personal choice, to the vicinity of the hospital. With the exception of one short trip to Chicago and another to Je-me-souviens, Quebec, Yale Templeton remains confined, by personal choice, to the province of Ontario.

  Hans Castorp meets two men—Herr Settembrini, an Italian humanist and champion of scientific rationalism, and Naphta, a Jew turned Jesuit, pessimist, mystic, and proponent of terrorism—who command his attention and influence his understanding of European history. Yale Templeton meets two men—Slinger the Trapper and Louis Montcalm—who similarly command his attention and influence his understanding of North American history.

  Hans Castorp falls in love with an exotic Russian beauty named Clavdia Chauchat. Yale Templeton falls in love with a stunning American blonde, Bobbi Jo Jackson.

  But more than anything else, what links the two characters is their personalities. In the very first sentence of the very first chapter of The Magic Mountain we learn that Hans Castorp is “ein einfacher jungen Mensch”: “an unassuming young man.” Is there a more apt description for Yale Templeton? Elsewhere I have referred to him as a man “more acted upon than acting.” It means much the same thing.

  However, my point is not just that Hans Castorp and Yale Templeton are alike in being unremarkable men. It is that they are unremarkable men who live in extraordinary times. The Magic Mountain takes place during the years leading up to World War I. Yale Templeton is a contemporary of ours: yours and mine. He inhabits the same troubled world as we do.

  In the final scene of The Magic Mountain, Mann leaves Hans Castorp wandering across the countryside, his fate uncertain. That seems eminently sensible to me. History can have no definitive end, and Hans Castorp is a child of history. Yale Templeton is a child of history, too. Let us leave him wandering as well. Wandering across the ancient landscape of the Canadian Shield.

  Of course, the contexts Thomas Mann and I have created are not exactly identical. The countryside in which Hans Castorp finds himself is an unnamed battlefield in a horrific war, the deadliest the world had yet witnessed. Bombs are exploding all around him. He has to climb across the mud-spattered, blood-spattered bodies of other conscripts, fallen friends. His own prospects seem hardly more promising. “Deine Aussichten sind schlecht,” Mann tells him.

  And Yale Templeton? Well, despite what you may have heard, there is only minor danger involved in tracking a domesticated moose that has been painted white. And when he tires of his wandering, he can always return to his beloved facts and statistics about boot sizes and casualties and his equally beloved footnotes. He can return as well to the prestige that must inevitably attach to the first Abraham Lincoln Distinguished Professor of the American Civil War. (There is already talk that the university will commission a portrait of him by Phil Richards.) Then too, waiting for him is a woman who reminds people of Marilyn Monroe, but is even better looking. And brilliant, as it turns out. Chances are that he will be all right.

  Meanwhile, somewhere in Toronto …

  LXXVI

  Meanwhile, somewhere in Toronto, Joel was in love.