TABLE TALK
Apologia pro vita sua
DENIS BROGAN
On 11 August 1970 I reached my seventieth birthday. So far, I have not found old age, which I have now officially reached, quite as depressing as Holy Writ suggests : 'The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be four- score years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.' Sophocles, we all know, rejoiced at being seventy, as that freed him from the thraldom of sex; not everyone rejoices in this liberation. The first thing I can remember is the bap- tism of my brother Colm when he was two years and two months younger than I. I can remember my maternal grandfather who died when I was just under three. I can also remember my maternal grandfather who died when he was ninety-seven. But the things that come back into my mind are not those which professional historians would normally remember.
Once I learned to read, which was rather late in my childish life, I read everything— penny dreadfuls, newspapers, Gibbon, all mixed up. I can remember that the first poli- tical story I ever read was the inauguration in 1909 of President Taft, one of the dim- mest of Presidents; but I didn't begin to take any real interest in the outside world until the coming of the Italian attack on Tripoli and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Perhaps what I remember most is my telling my father that I was rather disappointed there was not going to be a great European war, thanks to the skill of Sir Edward Grey, and my father's sardonic reply, Don't worry. There will be a great war—quite soon.' (In this, he had a great deal more foresight than had, for example, Dr Arnold Toynbee, who had to be told how dangerous the situation in the Balkans was by his friend Lewis Namier.) War came, and one of my earliest mem- ories of it was getting a sharp clip on the ear from a sergeant of a regiment which had been mobilised at Gourock as I ran along beside it. I noticed with astonishment that this veteran soldier was not in the least cheer- ful or rejoicing that he was going off to fight for king and country, but would obviously very much rather have stayed at home as, in fact, so many of his betters like the first Lord Birkenhead did.
The small town of Rutherglen I grew up in suffered exceptionally heavy casualties be- cause it provided the engineers for the Low- land Territorial Division and lost many men at Gallipoli and on the Somme. I can re- member retorting to a very censorious American citizen of Cleveland, Ohio, that my little home town of some 23,000 inhabitants had suffered more casualties than the city of Cleveland, which had a population of nearly a million. My interest in the war was com- plicated by Easter Week, for my father, who had supported the Redmondite policy hope- fully, was horrified at the savage reprisals taken by the British government. It is too often forgotten that the only serious rebel- lion of the First World War before the Rus- sian Revolution of 1917 took place in the British Isles, which might have forced a thought from people like Andrew Bonar Law and the first Earl of Birkenhead: it didn't. The prosecution of Casement by the
successful rebel, FE, turned the stomachs of a
great many people. So did other aspects of the repression of this futile and originally extremely unpopular rebellion. Shooting the Sinn Feiners, as they were erroneously called, was perhaps a compensation for Gal- lipoli and Kut-el-Amara?
Meantime, I was beginning a long life in the hands of doctors. I was taken away from a very good Jesuit school in Glasgow be- cause I was not fit to travel and was sent to a new school in Rutherglen where I received a very good if erratic education; some of the teachers were first class and in many ways better than the teachers trained in the Jesuit tradition. My parents decided to make a doctor of me, a calling for which I had no vocation. My only ancestral medical connec- tion was that my great-grandfather had been struck off the register, or had simply flown the coop, in unedifying circumstances. But I was now developing unconsciously a ten- acity which enabled me to walk out of the Glasgow Medical School, where I dissected a body with the future great surgeon Sir James Learmonth. Consulting nobody, I competed for a bursary and got the bursary in English; but I went into history instead.
By this time I was educating myself, well or ill, and accumulating knowledge, distin- guishing myself more than anybody expec. ted in examinations, and finally becoming a Snell Exhibitioner and going on to Balliol. Even there I didn't quite play the game, for I abandoned mediaeval history for Ameri- can history, a disreputable subject, if it could be called a subject at all; and it was as a result of this revolt that I met Samuel Eliot Morison, the first Professor of Amen- can History at Oxford, kinsman of the great President Charles Eliot of Harvard and of T. S. Eliot. The only pressure I gave way to came from Balliol, which suggested that I should not do Modern Greats, a brand new Honours School, but do Modern History al- though I was officially a mediaevalist.
When I first went to the new professor's new class, I startled him, he told me much later, by admitting I had read Richard Hil- dreth's History of the United States. Hil- dreth was a dry Benthamite but a much better historian than the highly rhetorical Bancroft. Encountering Hildreth and Mori- son settled my basic academic interests. I found Fort Snelling on the remote Minne- sota frontier as dramatically-interesting as the Roman forts north of the Clyde. Instead of going in for All Souls, I went to Harvard, again at the suggestion of Sam Morison, and my life work, so to speak, was set for me. But I was not narrowly confined. I had been
• to Rome before I went to Oxford, and my first pilgrimage was not to the shrine of Saint Peter but to the shrine of Keats. I had for a while been able to speak Italian, and I had been deeply impressed both by fascism which was wrong, and by the incompetence of the anti-fascist opposition which was right. But my vita nuova began at Harvard, and I have been ever since then an Americanist.
But I had a second string to my bow, or more truthfully, I had a second infection in my mind. When I was nine, my father had taken a house for the summer in Donegal owned by a local schoolmaster, and in it I found a very large flat book bound in heavy pasteboard, and when I opened it I saw a pic- ture of a strange ecclesiastical figure at a desk addressing a man in a very fancy riding costume. Above was the simple title, 'The Shadow of Cardinal Richelieu'. The book was Twenty Years After, and so I had had an infection by the French disease before I fell so completely under the American spell.
But the American spell was the more powerful. To be at Harvard and to move around in the United States was an initiation.
like first love. There were a good many other young British students at Harvard, mainly from Oxford or Cambridge, but they were studying other things—Greek, mathematics. economics. I was the only one who was studying the United States as such. And at that time my industry and interest were in- exhaustible. There were no dull American books, there were no dull American themes. The American Civil War, with the campaigns of Napoleon, was my chief interest in mili- tary history (in which I was very interested anyway), and I found that I had in practice something like a monopoly of serious know- ledge about the history of the United States. Even today I find few American historical works absolutely worthless, which shows how deep my infatuation has been, because a great many are as worthless as many French, British, Italian and other historical works. And from this infection I have never recovered, even today when the sight of the United States is not totally gratifying or in- spiring.
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