Introduction to the Annotated Edition
Doctor Professor Roland Modesty Van Buren
The year of our Lord 2591 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of the manuscripts found in the private library of the celebrated antiquarian Sir Albert Makepeace McDonald. Among the books found in McDonald’s collection upon his death in 2540 was Fitzpatrick’s War, otherwise known as The Early Life of Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce. As was true of the other volumes in the eccentric McDonald’s estate, the first edition of Fitzpatrick’s War provoked enormous public reaction, albeit it and its brother texts did not measurably advance our knowledge of earlier periods in the Age of Steam. Millions of readers reared on Gerald’s The Age of Fitzpatrick—still the standard text in most secondary schools—and on Miss Mary Anne Collins’ epic poem From the Atlantic to the Pacific were shocked to read accounts of Yukon soldiers disobeying their supposedly deranged supreme commander and of other soldiers having relationships with foreign women. Bruce’s portrait of the Fitzpatrick family so disturbed the Confederacy that seven members of the Senate sued (unsuccessfully) the original publisher for slander in 2543. But nothing in Bruce’s book outraged right-thinking people more than the assertion that the Order of Timermen was involved in Lord Fitzpatrick the Younger’s untimely death. That the noble Fitzpatrick, who set men’s hearts and pagan cities aflame,1 could have been killed by the Confederacy’s most exalted order was more than the public could endure. I still remember that in my little village in Northfield there were old veterans who swore they would challenge this liar Bruce in court, only to discover that the liar in question had been dead for more than two decades. I also recall newspaper stories of angry young ladies making pilgrimages to Bruce’s grave site outside Astoria, Columbus, for the sole purpose of spitting on Bruce’s headstone. Even in these times Bruce’s book provokes strong emotions. When it became generally known among my colleagues at St. Matthew’s University that I was preparing a new edition of the liar’s book, the Lord Dean of the History and Other Literatures Department took me aside one day during afternoon tea and asked me man to man, “Look here, Ro, do you really need to be blowing old cinders into new holocausts?”
Therefore, let me declare before I sojourn too far in res, I most certainly do not accept the whole or any part of Bruce’s account as Historic fact. Unlike real Historians, Bruce consistently strives for sensation and does not instruct his readers in virtue. Recent research has proven beyond all reasonable objection that Bruce was a disappointed, albeit brave, soldier; it can further be stated with no fear of serious contradiction that he possessed a violent temper, which can be a valuable quality in one who holds a rifle but leads to folly when that same person wields a fountain pen. Bruce was clearly one of those “worker bees jealous of the queen,” as one writer has put it.2 Worse than that, he was obviously overly infatuated with his wife, the lustful and lowborn daughter of a saloon owner, and she—as he himself admits in his book—led Bruce into his vilest mistakes. Often insubordinate and as often frustrated in his efforts to secure a higher rank, Bruce probably wrote his book as a sort of revenge against the great Fitzpatrick, a man in every way his better.
Why then, as the freshman in the famous anecdote demands, should we read this book? The answer, of course, is that just as Plato taught us that pleasure comes from having known pain, and as St. Augustine demonstrated that redemption arises from knowing sin, the great philosopher and Historian Murrey has shown that knowing truth comes from being familiar with lies; indeed, truth could not exist without its opposite.3 Rest depends upon exertion, gratification upon denial, victory upon defeat, and the future upon the past. If the great Murrey (who was, as we all know, one of young Fitzpatrick’s instructors, and thus appears in Bruce’s fanciful story) could accept the proposition that he could grasp the truth only by knowing its opposite, then we can do no better. Even novice scholars must start with the premise that there are certain master thinkers who cannot be challenged, but only appreciated and, in rare instances, improved upon. Therefore, by confronting Bruce’s outlandish exaggerations we can discern the excellence of the accepted accounts of Fitzpatrick’s life.
A Note on the Manuscript
There were two copies of the Bruce book in the McDonald collection. One, written in longhand and containing a host of misspellings and corrupt usages, is probably the older of the two and was once assumed to have been written by Bruce himself or by an amanuensis to whom Bruce dictated. The weight of evidence indicates that in fact this handwritten version is a copy created by an unknown soldier attached to the 105th Long Range Bomber Group stationed at Ft. Lewis and Clark in Columbus, which was near the village Bruce made his home during his retirement.4 Presumably, the unknown scribe presented the copied book to McDonald, as Sir Albert was from 2510 to 2518 a squadron commander within the 105th.
The first page of the handwritten version is missing. Because the first page surely bore a dedication to the local Lord in Astoria, a Lord who had refused to print the book when Bruce presented it to him in 2490, certain people with strong romantic natures but feeble educations would have us believe Bruce ripped the dedication from the manuscript after the rejection. It is more likely the missing first page was simply lost at a later date.
The second copy is typewritten and has been edited, perhaps by McDonald or his secretary. This second version is complete and consequently is the version used in most printed editions, including this one.
Bruce grew up speaking the rough dialect of the rural Pacific Northwest. In spite of his education at the War College and thirty-nine years of military service in the company of well-born gentlemen, in his dotage he sometimes reverted to the corrupt tongue he learned as a boy in the logging camps and farms of his native Columbus. Wherever his language is incomprehensible to the modern reader I have substituted the contemporary equivalents. This, I hope, does not do too much violence to the original.
We can only guess at McDonald’s motives when he decided to preserve Bruce’s book. He was, as we used to say at school, “an odd number,” and did not need a particularly good reason to save a strange manuscript. The Lord God knows Sir Albert saved dozens of other unusual works, some of which are as offensive as Fitzpatrick’s War. It has been suggested that, like Bruce, McDonald was a lowborn soldier who, again like Bruce, became a Knight of the Field, and for that reason Sir Albert felt a certain kinship with Sir Robert, although they were men of different generations.5 At any rate, it can be said of the eccentric collector that at least he kept his books to himself, while Bruce would have thrown his work before the entire world.
Sir Albert’s nephew Donald Warrior Evens discovered the two versions, but they would not have seen publication so quickly if in 2541 had there not been another intellectual movement to further discredit the hated Shay regime. The St. George University Press made the much-regretted decision to print the entire McDonald collection, some parts of which did reflect poorly upon the Shays and their cohorts, though the majority of the volumes dealt with other eras of Yukon History. Among the then newly published volumes, only The Memoirs of Tri Ogallala,6 the notorious tale written by a degenerate American living in the mid-twenty-first century before the Storm limes, caused more consternation among the righteous. Would that the editors of St. George University Press had shown better judgment fifty years ago,7 but now that the forbidden fruit has been eaten—or, more aptly, once Pandora’s Box has been opened—there can be no return to blissful ignorance. We have the document before us, and we cannot ignore it; rather it is our duty to guide the uninitiated reader past Bruce’s misstatements and highlight his insights, such as they are.
The Life of Sir Robert Mayfair Bruce
We know very little of Bruce’s life beyond what he tells us in his book. Records at the War College, always exquisitely accurate, tell us he entered the famed Seventh Infantry Division (then as now known as the Sparrows) of Columbus Province in June of 2411. He was then sixteen years old and the son of a forester. His father had once served in the same famed division, wherein the elder Bruce had reached the rank of sergeant major after seven years of service. After completing the standard twelve-year tour under arms, Bruce’s father had chosen a position under his Liege Lord rather than a continued commission in the Confederate Army. Young Robert must have been a successful student in his village school, for he was a cadet soldier when he enlisted and was marked for higher rank when he became older. He had equaled his father’s old rank of sergeant by the time he was eighteen.
Young Robert was fortunate to serve in one of the numerous wars that have and will always take place from time to time along the Mexican border. He won his Knighthood of the Field for acts of exemplary bravery at the Pass of the North in 2412, and once the Latin hordes were again driven south Bruce was allowed to attend the War College in Centralia City, as is recorded in the book. Sir Robert graduated third in his class, after only the young Fitzpatrick and Sir Jeremiah Truth Hood. Sir Robert was commissioned as a captain of the engineers in 2417 and quickly rose in rank, at first because of his valuable service as a field technician and later for his courageous performance in the Four Points War. At the age of twenty-seven, Sir Robert was a colonel during the glorious times when the Yukon Confederacy exerted a direct hegemony over the entire globe. He worked for Fitzpatrick in the Andaman Islands and elsewhere in 2423 and 2424. The years 2425 and 2426 found him stationed in a remote part of Africa. It was during this period immediately after the Four Points War that Bruce became disaffected with Fitzpatrick and came to look upon the young Consul as an Oriental tyrant. While most writers have seen Fitzpatrick as a shining star in the Yukon firmament, Bruce is not the only man to accuse the stupendously successful Consul of megalomania.8 Still, it remains unlikely in the extreme for a hero such as Fitzpatrick to act as Mason or Bruce say he did. We do have to concede that Gerald mentions Bruce favorably;9 the great Historian, who lived and wrote before Bruce’s book appeared, went so far as to call the young Bruce “one of the unheralded heroes of the Four Points War.” Bruce seems to have clashed with Fitzpatrick in 2426, yet he was readmitted to the Consul’s inner circle later that same year. He was promoted to brigadier and soon was put in charge of his Consul’s personal guard. In light of what soon came to pass, we may safely aver that Bruce failed miserably in this assignment. He was briefly detained by army authorities after Fitzpatrick’s death but was quickly declared not guilty of any complicity in the great man’s demise. At his own request, he went to a remote post in the southwest, where he served in obscurity for another twenty-three years. Upon his retirement he returned to the Columbus countryside and lived there with his wife until he died on January 17, 2519, reportedly while asleep at the family estate in Astoria.
Bruce married Charlotte Purity Raft, a woman of even lower birth than he, when they were both the proper age of twenty-five. If we are to believe Bruce’s account, they had a happy union throughout their many years together. (What is obvious from his book—and this we may indeed believe—is that Charlotte had an exceedingly strong influence upon him. It would not be going too far to state that the loyalty he felt for her displaced in his heart the loyalty he should have felt for Fitzpatrick.) They had five daughters and a son. None of the Bruce daughters disgraced herself, which is the highest compliment anyone can pay a woman. The son became an engineer as his father had been. Some interviews conducted with elderly residents in Bruce’s native Astoria cast some additional light upon his character, and I will deal with a particularly enlightening example in my afterword.
We deduce Bruce wrote his memoirs late in his life, and that someone else close to him at Ft. Lewis and Clark obtained the text directly from his hand. Then, as noted above, someone else passed the book on to McDonald.
Time has now delivered his writing to us. May God grant us the wisdom to obtain some good from reading it.
Acknowledgments
I wish, of course, to thank first the University Liege Lord, Doctor Professor Henry Johnston Perriwig: may God grant him peace and prosperity, and may He give to the same to all within my Lord’s family. Thank you, my Lord, for letting me toil upon your campus.
Many thanks are extended to Colonel Reginald Earnest Dodge, C.A., ret., for allowing me to use the War College’s library. You, my old friend, made my work progress smoothly.
I extend my gratitude to Mr. John Bishop, graduate student, who proofread the final text nine times. I grant the same to Jim, my secretary, and to the young cleaning girl Jim found to help me translate Bruce’s northwestern vulgarities into polite English: I would thank the child by name, but I seem to have forgotten what it was.
—Doctor Professor Roland Modesty Van Buren
Master of the History
and Other Literatures Department
St. Matthew’s University, 2591 A.D.
1 Collins, From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Book II, line 1437 (Downs and Sons Press, Grand Harbor City).
2 From The Liar from Arcadia by James Rawlings Sherman, Brown Bear Press, Southfield, page 22, 2580 ed. For additional criticism of Bruce, see Defending Honor by Helen Johnson Smith, Against Bruce and Satan by Meredith Anne Stout, His Wife’s Slave by Mary Hopeful Carter, and Bruce’s Errors by John Evans Rogers, among many others.
3 See On Existence, Book I, numerous editions.
4 See “Notes on the McDonald Collection,” Terrance Jane Hartman, Literary Studies, Vol. XCIII, Issue 2, Feb. 2588.
5 Ibid.
6 St. George University Press, Midtown, 2541. The entire McDonald collection is available in nine volumes.
7 The reader should not imagine I am being condescending to St. George, which remains to this day fundamentally an engineering school. I am certain that, all in all, there are some learned scholars there. I cannot say what it was like in 2541.
8 See, if you dare, Mason’s lurid account in My Career, also by St. George University Press, 2541. Lord Anthony Waverly Mason was, of course, a longtime member of Fitzpatrick’s inner circle. Bruce mentions him several times. Mason’s depiction of Fitzpatrick and his times remains available only in the restrained version. Families having young children or impressionable young women among their members should not allow Mason’s book within the household walls, as it is the product of a diseased imagination.
9 The Age of Fitzpatrick, chap. 104.