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The Confession of a Child of the Century by Samuel Heather
A Novel
By Thomas Rogers OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1972 Thomas Rogers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-4981-7
CHAPTER 1
There is a novel by Alfred de Musset called La confession d'un enfant du siècle which I have never read but which seems to provide an excellent title for this book since my terminus a quo is 1930 and actuarially speaking I am due to cease upon the midnight with no pain at the beginning of the year 2000 when I shall have attained my threescore years and ten. It will have been a purely twentieth-century life, which qualifies me to speak as a child of the century if not as its citizen.
I once thought of calling this book How It Was, but the title sounded presumptuous. I'm not sure how it was. I thought too of adapting to my era Ruskin's great title Stormcloud Over the Nineteenth Century, a very interesting meteorological study, but finally I rejected the idea because my story (this is a story) is really a kind of comical historical pastoral. The worst stormcloud I have seen, to wit a tornado that once chased me up Route 66 for several miles, finally bounced over the car I was driving and did no worse damage than to husk all the corn in a field half a mile away. I've been lucky. So I decided to call this book The Confession of a Child of the Century.
You know what the confessions of children are like. They are not meant to be taken very seriously nor should they really end up as big bound books like those of St. Augustine or Rousseau. Ideally this confession should come to you as a loose sheaf of papers perhaps kept together by being encased in the foundation stone of a civic Fun House of the future. Ideally, too, the confession of a child of the century should be anonymous, but this ideal has proved as impractical as the first since my publisher was unable to think of a commercially feasible way to market an anonymous book encased in stone. Hence, Reader, you hold in your hand this volume by Samuel Heather entitled as above.
Perhaps I should have waited. I will have more to confess by the end of my life, yet how would I know when to begin writing? The Venerable Bede expired a minute after dictating the last sentence of his translation of St. John, but how often do you get timing like that? And even if I can be sure of serving out my seventy years, suppose I wait till I'm sixty-nine to start writing and then fall apart physically? Held together by baling wire and chewing gum, would I have the necessary freshness and peace of mind to write a good book? It seems doubtful. Life is short and art takes a long time. To be sure, medical science might keep me going clear up to my terminus ad quem and even beyond. I could very well spill over into the twenty-first century with a strong young heart in my chest—that of a freshly slaughtered teen-age motorcyclist. And with fresh kidneys and liver available at the local organ bank, plus imperishable teeth courtesy of Medicaid, I might very well be in splendid shape thirty years from now, especially if vanity triumphs over common sense and I decide to purchase a full new head of hair. Though in that case what would be me and what would be bits and pieces of less fortunate others, only chance and the ravages of time will tell. So, balancing one thing against the other, I have decided to start writing today, when I am forty, and while my organs are all my own and my memory is still intact.
This memory of mine is a wonderful power or faculty which I possess in common with all men. Life, which takes us in hand and makes of us what we never expected to become, kindly leaves us our memories of what we were, so that nothing is ever lost. And please note that memory is the mother of the Muses, so we are all potential artists. In fact I will go further and declare that we are all actual artists continually transforming and re-creating our experiences in the laboratory of memory like so many alchemists stirring the pots and getting smoke in our eyes. My style is not always so metaphorical, but a prologue goes to one's head.
Of course, memory works in different ways for different people. Losers transmute the raw material of their disasters into the pure lead of woe, while winners transmute their triumphs into the pure gold of success. And, to get to the point, this child of the century has transmuted his adventures into a comical historical pastoral, a tricky literary genre which I would like to define except that something tells me it is time to get the story started. I suspect authors enjoy their own prologues more than readers do.
So now to my story.
Father was Bishop of Kansas City. "What is it like to have a bishop for a father?" people ask. Well, it's hell. Most fathers are terrible (most sons are terrible, too) but a bishop father is worse than most. He is a professional father. His diocese is his family. He delivers homilies and distributes advice. He gets into the habit of being a father, whereas most fathers are fatherly only on occasion. Their daily work is to be businessmen or dentists or farmers. My father's daily work was to be a father. It was excruciating.
Dinners had the mixed character of a sacred repast and a gladiatorial combat. The episcopal palace of Kansas City (actually a ten-room McKinley Administration house) was far from cheerful. There was more stained glass than one wants in a home. The downstairs rooms were too lofty for small talk and the halls too narrow for comfort. The bedrooms were like old-fashioned Pullman cars, all green and hard. It was really a terrible place to live.
Our dining room table was round. Suspended above it was a large, branching electric light fixture with fourteen flame-shaped light bulbs that gave off a yellowish glare which contrasted, painfully, with the white tablecloth. The view from where I sat was largely filled by a full-length oil portrait of Bishop Benedict (1845–1923) in mitre and cope, with his left hand resting on a terrestrial globe and his right hand raised in benediction. I identified with the globe. When I looked at the picture—and I could hardly avoid looking at it—I felt my head was being patted.
Naturally when I was young I seldom ate in the dining room with my parents. When I was older I was away at school. But off and on during the years the setting became etched in my mind until even now I can see it as it was on the evening shortly before Christmas in the year 1949 when I was nineteen years old.
There were just the four of us, which was something of a rarity: Mother on one side of me, Father on the other, and Bishop Benedict across. Father, as usual, blessed the food. Emma stood near the pantry door holding a tureen of soup, because in point of fact Father's blessings always took place before there was anything on the table but bread, butter, olives, celery, salt, and pepper. Presumably the real edibles were unsanctified.
His blessing over, Father raised his head and asked me whether I had studied that morning. One of our problems at that point was my school record, which was only average. As it happened I had read Homer that morning, or rather about Homer in a book on archaeology I'd gotten from the public library.
"Yes," I said, "Homer."
Father nodded with approval.
"It appears," I said—it appears was one of Father's favorite opening gambits—"it appears there are two historically distinct styles of warfare described in The Iliad. The earlier is foot combat, in which warriors use immense oxhide shields like Ajax' and obviously move about very slowly with plenty of time to announce their pedigree and insult their opponent before laying on. In the later form of warfare combatants drive horse-drawn chariots and use bronze shields like Achilles'."
This little speech gives some notion of our domestic life.
"Very interesting," Father said. "Where did you learn that?"
"From a book."
"Not responsive," he said. He picked up legal language from his lawyer friends.
"From The Celts, by Childe."
"Oh? Do you call that reading Homer?"
"Roughly," I said.
He looked at me directly. A man does not get to be a bishop without having a direct look. "I consider it reading Childe."
"Father," I said, "I've been meaning to ask whether you would be pleased if I were to become an archaeologist?"
He frowned.
Mother was not always left out of our conversations. She had her own point of view, as a matter of fact, and when so inclined she was perfectly able to make herself heard, as she now was. "I don't enjoy these disagreements," she said. "I love you both. Now can't we have a quiet dinner?"
This made us both cross.
"I cannot see the relevance ..." Father began.
"What's the point of being quiet?" I asked.
Mother went on eating her soup. Father turned back to me. "In other words, you have not read The Iliad at all today?"
"No."
"Anyway, it is his vacation," Mother said. "Even if he's doing badly he still needs a vacation as much as anyone."
"I am not doing badly," I told her. "I passed all my Hour Exams."
"Passed?" Father said. "Passed? Is that your idea of success? To pass? Is that the modest level of your ambition? To get through? How many boys are there with your advantages? And yet you set yourself goals anyone could achieve."
"You exaggerate," I said. "Not quite anyone could pass at Harvard."
"How often have I told you not to quibble?" he asked.
"Anyway, grades are only a superficial indication."
"A stupid answer. Everyone knows it. To scorn superficial indications indicates superficiality." He surprised himself with that turn of speech and so he stopped short to think it over. I wondered if we were witnessing the birth of a sermon.
"Would you be pleased?" I asked.
He waved his hand and turned to his soup, which was getting cold.
"Archaeology is exciting," Mother said. "There is something healthy ..." she meant digging, I think, "and at the same time intellectual."
At that point, Reader, the ceiling of our dining room opened, a beam of light descended on me, and I had one of my visions of Western civilization. I saw that all our notions of duty, work, and sacrifice are simply rationalizations of a bad climate. In Kansas City, for instance, the mean summer temperature is 80° and the mean winter temperature is 20°. The Midwestern steppes undulate away in every direction. Naturally, in such a spot, who could conceive of life as a thing of joy and beauty? Who could fly in the face of facts and pronounce the great sentence: Be happy. Even the Mediterranean basin where our civilization started is subject to temperature extremes. There are cold winds in Greece, and in Palestine the summers are broiling. So, made uncomfortable by the weather, Western man has rationalized the fact and built up religions, laws, and moral codes that treat discomfort, strenuousness, guilt, and misery as the proper and necessary conditions of life. In the South Seas they would not have invented Christianity simply because they have no seasons, and as everyone but people like Father know, the story of Jesus Christ is simply the old seasonal fertility legend all over again. One might as well worship a pumpkin or a string bean. Air conditioning and central heating have obviously been more effective in undermining Christianity with the masses than Voltaire, Huxley, and Anatole France combined and squared. Iron out the seasonal variations and Christianity ceases to exert any real appeal. Even Christians give indirect acknowledgment of the importance of climate. Heaven, you will find, is always moderate and unchanging, while Hell is always extreme. Read Dante. Part of the Inferno is icy and part is fiery, while some poor wretches, like people in Kansas City, are roasted at one end and frozen at the other. And so ended my vision.
Mother was a Clay. Rather, her mother had been a Clay but had married a Jones. The Jones connection was never much talked about but the Clay connection was. As everyone knows, the Clays arrived in Virginia in 1613, seven years before the Pilgrim Fathers made it to Provincetown or Plymouth or wherever they did finally pull in. Those seven years—mystic number—figured prominently in Mother's thoughts. When she heard of a Bradford or a Brewster or a Winslow accomplishing anything she would shake her head slightly as if to imply that newcomers were taking over the country.
Between my Clay mother and Father, who had been consecrated by a bishop who had been consecrated by a bishop and so on back to St. Peter, I was pretty well fixed with a sense of tradition. As the dinner table conversation reveals, I was made to be aware of my advantages, the strongly implied conclusion being that I damned well ought to be grateful for all they had given me. The upshot of the particular conversation I have begun by recording is that Father delivered the following speech once he had eaten his soup.
"One day you will discover that life is not a joke. You will be troubled and helpless and all the things you are now throwing away will be unattainable. Without faith, without good habits, without a profession, you will find yourself unable either to bear burdens or surmount obstacles."
As can be seen, Father was at heart a Puritan. For all his fashionable High Church practices, his real vision was gymnastic rather than sacramental. He saw life as an obstacle course to be successfully and effortfully negotiated by those with good habits, a plausible view given the climatic conditions of Kansas City. However, to transport you into the future, Reader, I should now reveal that Father's warnings, though superficially sound, turned out to be as mistaken as his ecclesiastical views and his political opinions. He was—need I say?—a Republican. Out of loyalty to her Clay ancestors Mother was a Whig. I know it sounds odd. I've never pretended my family was ordinary.
CHAPTER 2
And that, reader, is more or less the start of this confession. I have spared you my childhood and the earlier stages of my adolescence, together with my loss of faith and other saga material which does not fit into the rather perfectly classical framework of this story. And now a word about my method.
I have a good memory, but not, I would say, an exceptionally accurate one. I remember, or think I remember, the names of the kings of Judah and Israel as well as the first fifteen or twenty Roman Emperors and how they died, as from eating poisonous mushrooms, sword thrusts, strangulation, and fever. I believe I could tell you, if you wanted to know, the sixteen or eighteen different ways in which Louis XV descends from Henry IV. I can recite, though not here, passages from Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth, but I am conscious of a certain shakiness here and there, a tendency to transpose and skip. When, or if, Western civilization is totally wiped out, I am not the sort of person who can be relied upon for a literal reconstruction of any particular texts or historical episodes. So don't come asking me. In what follows—for that matter, in what has already come—I aim at the essential truth of the scene. Who cares what we ate for dinner that evening in 1949? Could it have been lamb chops? I have no idea nor does this lapse of memory worry me, just as I am not worried over my haziness about the battle of Manzikert. My current impression is that some time in the year 1076 the Emperor Manuel Commenus led his Byzantine army to a stunning defeat at the hands of the Seljucks. Go look it up if you want to check the accuracy of my memory. The reason I haven't checked is that I believe books should be written straight out of your own head without looking up anything, even the spelling of words. What is remembered is all that counts, the rest is just research. An author who checks everything and quotes a lot is relying on other men's memories and other men's minds. And what is the distinction between such a writer and the next pretty actress who goes all the way and simply hires a hack to write her autobiography? Or what about politicians who have speech writers? What kind of monkey business is that? No, I must play honest with you, Reader. I will write down my story exactly as I remember it, with only such omissions and curtailments as my own sense of tact and artistic economy shall dictate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Confession of a Child of the Century by Samuel Heather by Thomas Rogers. Copyright © 1972 Thomas Rogers. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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