Copyright © 1996 
oliloquies Of My Old Man
And His Book
(a conversation you never had)

 I like my old man.

     He's got glasses and a shock of white hair up on top; but he's not that old. He looks quite well, physically, and a bit more wise than just brainy - and like he doesn't throw it around - like he's kind. And he has those eagle eyes.

     They're a soft hazel, and they run in the family; and I guess it's a kind of Scottish trait, maybe, that goes with the freckles and carrot top when you're a kid. When things were going rough for me, out along the way, he never told me off, never said a word. He stuck by me. And he loved his own father, too, and his grandfather.

      We went up to the hunting lodge together, one fine, fall weekend, with the leaves coloring up, to shoot ducks. It's a place he belonged to, up in Michigan, a membership place over by Saginaw. It was glorious up there in the autumn weather, really great for wing shooting. The lodge is still going, I guess, just a log cabin, a big "room" really, with bunks set along the wall at one end and big windows all along the opposite way looking out on the duck marsh. On one of the side walls, they had a huge, walk-in fireplace where you could just throw on these big, hardwood logs - split in half and about three foot long - and they would spark up and burn and really get to roaring and then burn down into a very intense, really red glowing pile of embers, giving off their heat all the way to the windows. You could get up at dawn and stand in the windows and figure out what the marsh was going to be doing that day. Maybe that was cheating a bit, not having to go down in the blind.

      We were up there that time and my old man got to reminiscing. The weather had turned sour late Saturday night and we were going to be stuck all day Sunday. You sat in there and you had two views, the fire-place and the cold drizzle outside the windows. We sat looking at the fire and my old man started to reminisce.

  Firelight was dancing off the brass knobs of those big andirons, heat radiating from the split logs burning down into hot, grey ash; and as he sat there, his feet up to the hearth, motionless in the deep, black leather chair, he seemed to be in silent contemplation.

      His hand was dangling at his side, almost to the floor; and now he brought it up, slowly. He brought it up absently, fumbling gently along the top of the lamp table. His fingers touched several things there, an ash tray, a half empty glass; and then, as if knowing, they went to the little book. He picked it up and, as if to see, held it aloft and slightly away from himself - towards me now - as if to show it to me. Then he was, well, talking, telling me about it. His voice started from the silence, from inside the deep contemplation. It was so pleasant being there with him, the fire going, the heat radiating out, the glow inviting one's fluid memory, maybe stories barely laid in below muted sounds, the feelings of eternity coming quietly in with our contentment. I liked my old man.

     "But you see," he said, suddenly, "...it was not all that pleasant, nor was it meant to be." He's holding up this little, undated green volume in his hand. It is titled A Child's History of England. It is tiny, a little book with no authorship inscribed upon it, nor any date of publication, and like it was, somehow, created to go on by itself forever.

     "This is what I meant," he said. He was holding the book out to me, and as I looked at it, it seemed to me like some sort of, well, a relic of some kind, a talisman from a philosophic past, some artifact of a way deep down, coastal religion, something fluttering here and there and still glittering as a defiant presence in a blue flamed, flickering firelight, being an already ghostly object.

     "This," he said, "is history, son. It's what it is, as it is meant to be taken by you. It is not so in fact, but, only just opinion, not a recollection, but belief, not a declaration," he said, "but pure propaganda."

     My old man turned his white head to me. (I suppose he should have been bearded, too. I know. He should have had a flowing white beard because his thought-lined, immensely intelligent face just wanted one, you could see that.) His hair was lustrously white, his soft hazel eyes piercing behind the rimless crystal. Or maybe the firelight just made it seem so. Maybe it was the iconoclasm shrouded there, maybe his inner rebellion of some sort, who knows what it was; but something shone. He turned, slightly, and looked at me knowingly, without moving anything but his head, without any body language. "Do you understand?" he said.

     "No," I said. He was silent then, in no hurry. He'd let it go on, a defined, specific silence.

     Then he said, "Well, of course, you wouldn't. It's done so differently now. This business of history is a cram-down today, a battering ram. But still, it is instructive to realize."

     "Yes."

     "Yes, it is instructive," he said. "So it is."

     (What was he going to say here? I wondered.)

     "What I was going to say to you," he said then, at last taking the little green book back down from space, "is that you cannot know what it is beyond what was said before, cannot know any more than what was already recorded to tell, than what has expressed its own ignorance dressed out as truth. You cannot tell whether, at any actual time, the truth is or was truly known, the truth being - what?" he asked, "just an approximation? The truth of things known," he said, "is an approximation of truth itself, ultimately an interpretation. If we get past our own conceits, well, we realize it. It is our own 'immediacy', the immediacy of the present," he said - he started to laugh now, almost chuckle at this thought - "which makes us feel truth, the 'truth' of now. But that immediacy," he added, "is no guaranty of it. We can believe falsely of anything."

     I really loved this. It could just envelop you, and go on, like, forever. It was complement to the fire's energy. This old man of the book who doesn't always seem to be that old at all, and who isn't maybe, down inside, is compelling. Mostly he goes about his business, doing his every day things and not talking. But this light probing darkness seems to bring something out in him, something from deep inside, not spoken or spoken of in ordinary circumstances. When it emerged it was like a dawn breaking on the clouded dark, and it prospered in the yellowed flicker of the firelight's aura.

     Most of all, I thought, a sense of calm permanency seemed to bring it out in the deeps of fall, when it was, or seemed, best, when you were full of memories, or maybe even thinking about a future not just as beyond its "dreaming on". I loved to hear my old man talk when he was wandering through his own thoughts.

     "What about the book?" I said.

     He held it up once more, absently, as if it was just a curiosity. It was very old, and looked greenly musty. Then he said, simply, "I will tell you."

     Would he?

     "I will tell you," he repeated.

     And then, silence came once more, like a moment holding still, stifling time. And then, again, "Listen," he said, "look at it. It is unauthored, undated, un-authenticated; and what's more, it is untrue. It is one of a kind of things which was used to teach the English schoolboy what to think. Yet, being so opinionated at the outset, at its own birth so to speak, it taught them not to think, but to believe. It taught them how, for example, to believe that this icon, Henry the Eighth was, well, a burly, and a monstrous sort of a man, hardly responsible for the mutating reformation which so heavily marked his reign. It says nothing of Shakespeare either; but of that anon, I will have more to say."

     (Was he stopping, here?)

     "No, no you look into it, at the beginning," he said, "and in that you see a beginning of lies, of prevarication designed to guide; but actually too, a mere misleading of self, of the callow self reading. You discover quickly here that there is a singular voice, the authenticity of a first person narrative; yet, no author. 'I'm telling you, letting you in on this,' it says, 'without your ever knowing what or who I am, or what I know. You won't even know enough to ask.' It was ever thus with religion."

     He stopped to look over again, pale eyes softening with shadow; maybe to see if I was rapt and puzzled. I was. "Go on," I said. He looked away then, into the glowing flames.

     "So, what is remarkable," he said, "is that it starts with an unrequited, high encomium to a people which time and England had already forgot, to those druidic Celts who inhabited that place long before anyone important was ever there or able to define what should be there, or was ever able to write it down if they knew. The voice assumes you see..." - and here he lifted the worn little, green cloth bound volume up once more, actually opened it up with the fingers of his one hand, the hand which held it, and put it up as if to read it - "...it assumes," he said, "what it says here, that these 'people' were ever the bravest, most independent and resolute of peoples that ever trod this green earth, that ever walked the glades and hillocks, or graced the holy hag mosses of the septred isle, this England. This people, he says to you, had already put Julius Caesar off his feed, and off their island, before their own history began, as if to end his. And the voice telling gives him nothing to remember from it either, and the Romans nothing to keep. He gives no wall to Hadrian because Hadrian's Wall would have had a proper name connotation, were that connotation made real. He attributes the real wall in its great earthen beginnings to one Agricola, and its masonry to a general, one Severus; and he lets the Latin build and rebuild it and give it significance by giving significance to the futility with which it glowingly stands in the reader's mind. It was meant to symbolize impotence you see, to the young blood of Eton. With Caesar barely hanging on to ill gotten gains, even before Christ, and with these indigenous peoples whom we deliberately forgot yet still there, beating his brow into anguished submission, the stage is set for an awe inspiring, unique flip-flop, the conversion of this heathen, savage un-nobility into Saxons, and Christians, the true British."

     Now he did pause, waiting for my silent but surely expected smile to appear quietly before he went on.

     "You know," he said, "why the Saxons were favored, I'll be damned if I know. Those people were nondescripts, just coastal pirates and sea going nomads. Perhaps they didn't offend the deep Celtic consciousness, or their robed Druid Priests, I don't know. But they were genetic scrap, nondescripts who roamed and strayed where they were not rejected, like seaweed. And our singular author says of all of this lot, that out of it came Alfred the Great, the real precursor to an emerging nation's great throne and power; but, in reality you see, this is a mere narrative stop- gap in the nine hundred years of non-history which does not unfold from Caesar onwards, but is invented all the way to the end of the Carolingen era, when it begins in earnest. It took Charlemagne to give definition to Europe, let alone England, and all of this Christian time before that was, well, perhaps 'unhistory'." The old man stopped and reflected. "Per-haps that is a better phrase than 'non-history'," he said, "or 'the dark ages'."

     I could see "dark ages" somehow, and now "unhistory", too.

     "This was," he said, "you see, the time of a fabled Arthur, of hopes dimmed; but that is told to you sotto voce as if no Italian seafarers had ever been wandering on the Little Minch or in the Outer Hebrides, enticing the heathen clan Mc Donald out to sea alongside the crude, long-boat Vikings. So maybe the bias here is simply towards norsemen, favoring that particular Saxon barbarian for his too easy conversion, that pack of clans finally eulogized in the mythical witnessing of Fortinbras, the symbolic strong-arm of the mind of a man who defies corruption. You see, the Saxon was a nobody and nothing; but because of that, ere long, he becomes the genetic feed stock of the Norman, the true conquorer. He is a nobody who is needed, but not necessary. To give him substance, our narrator has to link him up without bonds to the Celtic forebear, and thus endow the mix with terrific brawn and magnificent ideas. That native loves the Christian god at first sight and he will submit to his pre-Carolingen brother without self-will, in order to be civilized. Hah! It is buncombe."

     (What could I say? Was he going to tear England apart? I hoped so. I love it when you pierce the great balloon of history and out it comes like, well, wind and poop, all together, deflating like, well, you just think about it.)

     There was another silence, and I wondered where the old man would take it now, where he would light next. Surely to god, I thought, just something like, well, one of the Henrys before the eighth one. I wanted more.

     But he took his time. We sat staring past the broken shadow into the fire glow, into a far darkness heated with ideas and images now, into anticipation.

     "I really think," he said, finally, "that the years before William's conquest obscured the blending of our Celtic blood into its offal intrusions. Pardon my pun. I mean, I hate the norseman, the Norman, the Saxon barbarian cum acolyte, or whatever he was. I hate the very idea that this telling dwarfs the remarkable feat of the Paulinas, the wandering Jewish Christians, who came up the high Volga from the Caucuses, unheralded and unknowing, learning those strange dialects which persisted and remain today, going from one tribe to another, up over the plains of Hungary onto the low, cold pre-steppes of Latvia and then out onto the Scandanavian Penninsula itself, where they were stopped and probably eaten, yes, and then oversea, straggling, maybe even carried priisoner, or maybe too offensive to the norseman's myths just even to be risked in extinction against that powerful superstition, and on into the Celtic lands like a virus destroyer. They came with nothing but their story of sacrifice and ressurection. Nevermind the love, this story was about submission. And they caught the Celtic ear. Everyone knows that. The Celt was undone by the wandering Jew long before there was any diaspora, any antagonism to him. He came meekly and embraced their superstitions, and gave them soul. He was the true hero."

     The old man sighed. "Dark is a place," he said, "as they say. Light is a way. I learned that as a believer. I don't regret it. The two just coalesce, do they not? always. Yes, and why not? This propaganda tends to sort things out long after the ability of life to sort itself out has gone, and the virus is deeply implanted. We don't hear a fucking thing about these diasporatic pilgrims he said, those ancient ones who believed and went out to preach to all the nations, or whatever. We would just rather conveniently forget that the flesh and the spirit are uneasy in the mar-riage of life, and that flesh demands what the spirit cannot give, that is, possession of itself."

     "Well," I said. "Well, is that it then?"

     He looked over once more, scowling. "I digress," he said. He laughed. "You know," he said, "for a young whipper-snapper, you're hungry for talk." Now I laughed. "You should believe it," I said.

     "Well," he said, "since you can't see what I'm about here, let's just go on. Let's skip ahead. Out of your Renaissance England, according to our little history, there are only three names which, by general consensus, stand out; - Henry, remembered for his adoration of the flesh; and yes, Elizabeth, who was ugly and had psoriasis; and, ah, Shakespeare.

     "Yet, mark it now, looking into this matter, we have no word of this latter person, and no interest expressed in him as a person - not in this little history anyway, and perhaps not until well into other times. Why is this? Of course, part of it is that we readily assume that the language of the Bard was the language of the ancients, and therefore reported ancient wisdom. That made the writing more important than the man. The truth is, however, that the Bard reported conventional wisdom in the voice of antiquity, a common convention of the drama from ancient times, from then owward too, so that it was not the past speaking to them but themselves speaking as if they were the past; and in this sense it was less important to get it right than to be correct. And it was therefore misleading, or at least mis-directing; and now we must ask, in consequence, can the whole convention of wisdom have thus resided in one single mind, in one person, in one pen? Shall we be just so absurd?" He laughed again, rather hoarsely from talking. "No, I think not. I think the unnamed author of this history," he said, "concurs too - must have concurred, because nothing of that appears to be mentioned in our little volume."

     So he let that soak in, and I waited calmly for the rest of it.

     "So, what of Elizabeth," I said.

     He turned toward me a little, and smiled. "The thing about kings," he said, "and queens, is that the only one you need to flatter is the one sitting on the throne. You see, here, too, the male bias is continuing at work long after the need for it has passed, long after she died. You see it in this unauthored tale of the sylph-like Joan of Arc, and in its contrasting version of the virgin queen. Oh, the one had never been fucked, all right; and the other wanted to be, even if she never had been (but you see," he chuckled, "our nameless voice implies that maybe that 'fact' has the same kind of 'on again, off again' quality as the all night deed itself, eh?) You just see," he said, laughing at his own joke now, "he makes her very human, and therefore tries to make her real to remember, notwithstanding reality."

     "But," I asked him, "what then of the Bard?"

     "Ah, yes. The book mentions a bard, that fellow Sydney, somewhat earlier, with some poetic relish, as a gentleman with such grand attributes as would make his nanny cry to see them scolded by any act of nature. He tells a two page story about it, devotes himself to it. Ah, yes; but, of the great workings of the real Bard, that man he calls 'Shakspere'..." (the old man spelled it out for me) "...of which we now hear aught else here, he says only this: '...the names of Bacon, Spencer and Shakspere will always be remembered with pride and veneration by the civilized world, and will always impart (though with no great reason perhaps) some portion of their luster to the name of Elizabeth herself'."

     So I thought, how does a co-mingling possibly make someone heroic, a truely heroic someone?

     Just then a stick of apple reported out from the fire with a pop, sparks bursting onto the fire screen. The old man stopped to consider this, as if enjoying the momentary interruption. "Ah, yes," he said, "the apple reports now, good. That's truth. There's a bit of white hot elm in there too," he added, "but it never acts like the juicy apple does, or the old cherry limb. The elm," he said, "is as stately in its fiery grave here as ever it was above the tree lawns, making high cathedrals with its gothic leaves on their waving, supplicant branches."

     Oh, I thought, a fire is so good to us that way. It provokes, reminds, soothes, inspires. We hope for this in the human soul, but who is to kindle the spark?

     "Well," he said to me now, "well, so you see, history is just a matter of perspectives beyond factual realities. But, it is largely a matter of gossip, too. And you are always surprised," he said, "at what is preserved. Since pure gossip makes for the best propaganda, the unadorned 'ordinary' scarcely makes it into anyone's history books; but anecdotes fill it, as with our ghostly teller here.

     "You will have noticed," he said, "that there is no mention here of the Bible." He looked over at me once again and again I saw the challenge in his eyes. Was I supposed to say, so what? I hardly thought of committing that error. I took the simple coward's way out. "What do you mean?" I asked him. He'd been waiting for this, I suppose, and it seemed to give emphasis to an apparent pleasure coming on now. He looked at me and held me in thrall.

     Then he said, slowly, making sure of his enunciation, "Surely," he said, you are aware that our 'new world' was launched with the King James Version?"

     There it was. "Sure," I said.

     And then he said, "Do you know what it replaced?"

     Ah, silence, the flames now filling into an absence, a void.

     "It replaces," he said, "the Roman catechism. It replaces nothing for the common man, a true nothing; and it gives him the Gospel denied by the Vicar of Christ at Rome. It makes good on Luther's discovery of the New Testament, and on the Protestant promise thenceforward, that no man should stand between any man and his god, a promise pulled and strangled and puffed up and fought over, and misunderstood; but," he said, "one that was kept with the publication of this great mass-produced book, this most widely published and uniquely distributed book in all of human history." The old man was still looking, staring, fixing his eyes at me, becoming triumphant in eyes that were just then full of knowing twinkle. "Had you thought about that?" he asked.

     "No," I said.

     "Well then," he said, "think now, of this." He held the book up suddenly, like a talisman.

     "Here is our unauthored voice," he said, "calling this same monarch of this same great book, in retrospect you see, 'his Sowship'. And who does he mean? Why, King James! What does he say? He says that this James, this child of the redoubtable Mary, the Queen of Scots, was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in mind and person.' He says 'his tongue was much too large for his mouth, his legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull, goggle eyes stared and rolled like an idiot's. He was cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited man on earth.' What, my god," he said, "what was Elizabeth then, mad in her old age, on her death bed? Did she pick this damned ass-hole to rule England?"

     He has got me cold there, and he goes on now, suddenly, reading from it: he says, "This kingly figure '...presented a most ridiculous appearance, dressed in thick padded clothes, as a safeguard against being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), of a grass-green color from head to foot, with a hunting-horn dangling at his side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather sticking over one eye or hanging on the back of his head, as he happened to toss it on. He used to loll on the necks of his favorite courtiers, and slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks; and the greatest favorite he ever had ... used to address his majesty as his Sowship.'"

     He clapped the little tome shut upon its openly, non-secret ridicule.

     "The book is identifying this Stuart king," he said, "with Roman Catholic tendencies, even though that king was admittedly observant of all that the Church of England commanded, and the Kirk of Scotland besides, the one refusing not only, but always you see, the sitused being of the other. But, then you see, he it was whose magisterial 'sow-like' propensities had, after all, nourished - no, maybe 'nurtured' is the more accurate word here - the deep literary culture, the flowering of the 'Elizabethan Age', bringing Shakespeare from the hot house of the Globe into the pure sunlight of mass culture. But, what do you notice from this, eh? You see here now that no one has authored the translation of the Good Book, either. There are no names attached to it. You look inside the front cover and you see an encomium there, to its stately sponsorship, the ass kissing, delicate reference to resistance against the "popish" influence; and yet you see there no one mentioned as having authored the words themselves. We know the translations were not easy, and perhaps would even have been impossible but for the monkish tradition of preserving the Greek along with the Latin. What was that then, was it insurrection even there? even then?" The old man was looking at me and his eyes were really glowing now. "What was it?" he asked. "A secret knowing that the Church at Rome smacked too much of the flavor of pagan empire?

     "No," he said, "what it was, was basal recognition that the original old Jewish language was, had become, a mere husk, and that too much translation had already occurred to it. If it had occurred, he knew, then it needed to be preserved before it occurred again. And that was what it was all about. The Roman Church didn't need the Bible, had only used it as it had used all the other relics from the antiquity of the messianic life.

     "The people," he said, "had no truck with the best evidence of Christ, were not enabled to experience evangelism directly; and so the King James Version was granted to them, was gifted to this small public, and became the cornerstone of the great English speaking world in which, even today, airplanes do not take off anymore, or land anywhere either, in any other language.

     I capitulated, with growing pleasure. "And you are going to tell me," I said to him now, "that no one wrote the Bible as we know it, and that perhaps therefore, no one wrote Shakespeare's folios as we know them, either."

     He had turned slightly and was lolling, basking in the fine calm, dwindling light of the fire and its cooling radiation. He was relaxed in a way I hadn't seen before, almost with his guard down, as if victory had come at the end of his tongue, and he could afford to rest it - anon.

     "Yes," he said, softly now. "I am suggesting that in the confusion of those times, with its non-recognition, even by our nameless historian, of the real lack of definition for argument itself, over whether one or another version of evangelical belief was correct, that there was still argument, turmoil, resentment and violence, all together, for nothing really, for imagined ends. It was no war at all; but it felt like one, it sounded like one, it seemed like one; and finally it even became one. And through all of this shone - something else, and we have its embers in the folios and in the King James Version. We have this if we have nothing else. We have England convulsed in its private contretemps, in its soul-less being from its superstitious becoming. And we have, eventually, as our little historic voice suggests, a fully Protestant England. We have, finally, the basis for empire."

     What else? And what then? My old man seemed to be reading my mental reactions almost before they came into my mind.

     "What else?" he said. "Surely, you notice that this conclusion now requires a dismissal of American history, almost in its entirety, until we get to just now and have the same non-recognition of birth and birthing as we have had and they gave to merry England itself. We are told to ignore the colonial experience, save for the chanced "unluck" of the four Georgian 'bad guesses' and the almost total lack of Georgian foresight (Napoleon included," he said). "What were these? Why, to fight family or to ignore it, but never to recognize it or accept it. We are told that it doesn't matter. Yes, well, since pomp and circumstance ultimately reigned over all, perhaps it truly doesn't matter. And perhaps we see here too, the portents of a mighty empire of the culture, the blinking recognition that in the stead of real facts, the English speaking culture would just begin to dominate the world in a way that all other conquests have failed to do, by commanding imitation. And it began with that 'Shakspere' fellow, or perhaps that non-fellow, who is hardly mentioned here, certainly not as its borne standard, and with the Bible which is not mentioned at all. And it is born of mix and match, of man against man in reasonless struggles for a mindless world. And it begat something more which begins to break down what was already there and that refuses to die.

     "But," he said, looking over, "perhaps the lynch pin of all of this was, well, the English Gentleman."

     The old man came to a full stop here, and waited for my growing amazement. "Surely to god," I said, "you are not authenticating that particular bit of class?"

     "Yes," he said, "I am."

     "But it is," I said, "so blatantly political, so prejudiced, so abused."

     He laughed now, and I saw it was at me. I flushed in the darkness.

     "No," he said. "It is precisely what I am doing. The English Gentleman defines, not a person but a class, the open class, the classification open to all, or almost all," he said, "all men. And it provided," he said, "the relief mechanism agains those natural corruptions of aristocracy which attended progenesis in all the seeds of man."

     He paused. "What I mean," he said, "well, maybe I had best put to you by example. Why not pass over the flower of the Sir Philip of the sonnets, and grasp the meaning of another gentleman of far greater impact, Charles Darwin." He looked at me quizzically. I was not going to challenge this.

     "No," he said, "take Darwin. We think of him as a recluse, which in a way he was, as a pioneer, which in a way he wasn't, as a great thinker, which he probably had to be, and as a courageous iconoclast, which I suppose he was afraid of being. All of those things were in the makeup of his gentlemanly being you see. It was not just a status, but process. Had he not been a gentleman, not been able to be a gentleman, he would have probably been nothing at all, not even a peer of the realm, you see?"

     "Okay," I said, "yes, I see."

     "Yes," he said, "you do. But you need also to see that this well-being we now call "gentlemanly" was also an eclectic fusion of many other manly attributes - polite-ness, tenderness, forcefulness, righteousness - giving, you see, dutifully, all the "nesses" et cetera; because, you see, it defined both its goal and the progress towards it, altogether; and it was, you see, open to all."

     "Yes," I said, "I see."

     "Yes," he said, "you do, certainly. Anyone could be that, and you certainly see that. You do. But you must also see that Darwin sat on his writing hands for some twenty odd years, afraid to publish his seminal work, almost terrified of writing it, was forced to do it by a seminal threat of publication by another. He was afraid you see, that this final act of dedication would not be..."

     "Gentlemanly," I said. "Yes, I see."

     "You do now, indeed," he said, "good. Because the riposte to the hero was self-effacement, was cause without effect, was generality. In the thing called noblesse oblige, and in that other thing - called 'scientific method' - one could place one's feet on the solid soils of resurrection without dropping to the knee. One could co-mingle with the meek, whose inheritance was in play. Above all, one could act without that usual remorse which afflicts every anguished radical, every fanatic, every dreamer. One could, well, be a gentleman. One could therefore be an amateur, at just about everything; and one could pass it on beyond the genes, or in spite of them, to off-spring; and one could rise in the estimation of others and in the hopes of its affectations." The fire was finally dwindling down among its burnt offerings of elm and apple, and the conversation between us now seemed getting ready to lull too, and we could feel it, I suppose. I could feel him there, feel his presence in a different way.

     Then he said, quite inexplicably, "But you know, for a saddled hypo- chondriac, he rode pretty fiercely on horseback, shot his way across the wide Pampas, didn't he, guns well aimed and blazing, and he killed every living thing in South America that one should kill. Sent back everything that wasn't nailed down in a native museum. And sent so much he'd got tired of it by the time he climbed through that high pass in the Andes, above Santiago, and walked through the landscape looking at minutiae in vast, empty snow fields. He triumphed in his quantity," the old man said, laughing now. "He almost forgot to collect as he did. Yes. He was bored in Peru and bored in the islands off its coast, those little lost continents of sea change which inscribed his immortal epitaph. He damn well almost forgot to label there; and passed it off for another, a clerk, to notice. He was the most productive specimen collector the world has ever seen, or perhaps will ever see. But, in all this, he was a rank amateur."

     Yes! Right on! That was the secret, I supposed. This was a mechanism of hope set against the wall of denial. This was why history couldn't lie, couldn't lie forever. I seemed to know it.

     I looked at my old man. His face was receding in a growing dark.

     "And that," he said, slowly, "yes, it is the secret. The gentleman could be all things; but in all things he was also just an amateur. It kept his vistas open to anyone's imitation, and was supremely non-political. It was the brilliant creation of an unconscious need. It made this little volume of history amusing, rather than seditious."

     "And it made the Protestant Empire possible," I said. "And it made the conquest of India possible."

     "And the conquest of much else," he said. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "The conquest of the China trade too, and the conquest of culture, in spite of all its defeats at the hands of the conquered. Yes, it made conquest irrelevant," he said.

     "Yes, yes," I told him.

     "If the concept of the gentleman and the gentleman's concepts had made empire possible," he said, "then the egalitarian proletariat which grew up around him kept it together, for him. These then - they were the hewers of wood and the carriers of buckets - come out of the old woods - they were ultimately the 'expecters' too, of the gentleman empire's industrial reward. If the gentlemanly progressive saw economic sacrifice as a ritual for prosperous continuity, then the proletarian meek also began to see it as the substance of being - they were the sacrifice. And then they rose up in the background, evolved in the intellectual mists, learned, recognized, clearly foresaw - and demanded! No more war without repatriation of that which had not yet even been given - a better life. No more sacrifice without advanced assurances of payment - unless of course, it was, even that was, in pure self-interest, which meant that the common good would be commonly derived from common experience."

     What did science and industry have to do with all of that? "Why nothing," he said, "nothing of substance that is, until it was absorbed by the mass man, in the commonplace. It was 'til then the foo-foo of a crystal palace, nothing more, a mechanical zoo. It pleased, but nothing more, not anything more; and then it began to suffocate, it began to teach the egalitarian soul the meaning of progress. It began to teach it the meaning of denial, of being denied and denying the denial.

     "What all of this had to do," he said, "it did in the fatigue of its own history, you see." The old man held up the little green volume once more, for a last time, as if I had forgotten it. "You see," he said, four or five pages, no more, devoted to the Georges and to the empire that was to come after, and to us who survive it, or in it, and to Victoria, and her grand England, an England which even by then had become non-English - German in fact - had symbolically transformed itself into a cousin's root stock. No more Saxon pretender, no more Norman conqueror; but always the top layer of pretense in the blood lines and at the bottom of it a layer of Celtic pride, of smoldering ash within the soft and graying embers of which glowed the repressed fire of the infinitesimal being of the true god, in man.

     "The truth," he said, "was absorbed by the common man in the only way that was possible, in the commonplace."

     The fire was well worn down now and I could see the ash performing its trick with the mantra, smoothing the violence. "Well," he said, "what now. If England loses the monarchy, I think she will not prosper in any democracy, but will revert to some sort of primal theocracy, some seizing of power and powers that will grip all, rend it to nothing in petty conflict."

     "That's pessimistic," I said.

     "Yes, but the commonplace does not provide for kingdoms, not even the kingdom of god. I suppose what made this nation grand in the first place," he said, "was what? was major conflict. I suppose that fact took it all out of itself, took it out of its petty nature in the selfish, "micro- realities" of ordinary life, and gave it a real facade. To return to that now," he said, "would, I think, be a dis-service to all. When the crown goes, there will be no England."

end