PAST IMPERFECT

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun • Nor the furious winter's rages; • Thou thy worldly task hast done, • Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages. • Golden lads and girls all must, • As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. - William Shakespeare, Cymbelline

If I'm not mistaken it was Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, who first advanced the idea of the good dying young. Our illustrious Greek friend tells the story of a pair of golden lads who, because the family oxen had been stolen, pulled the cart carrying their mother to the festival of Hera. At the temple - if memory serves - the mother asked Hera to grant the boys the greatest of all gifts. Thus the boys, exhausted from their exertions, went to sleep and never woke. Hera's priestess told Mum that the requested gift had been bestowed: the boys would wake with the gods. Point being: "Whom the gods love dies young."

Defoe, of course, would pick up on the idea in - I believe it was - 1697, writing in elegy to his beloved pastor, Dr. Annesley, "The best of Men cannot suspend their Fate; The Good die early, and the Bad die late." And I would be remiss indeed were I not to mention Mr. Wordsworth who, in his 1814 opus Excursion (I: 27), admonishes, "Oh sir! the good die first/And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust/Burn to the socket." (This longest of Wordsworth's poems - I seem to recall - received some famously negative notices, including the Edinburgh Review's "This will never do.")

In our own era, we have the erstwhile pugilist William (Billy) Joel, penning that memorable stanza and refrain:

They say there's a heaven
For those who will wait
Some say it's better
But I say it ain't
I'd rather laugh with the sinners
Than cry with the saints
The Sinners are much more fun...
You know that only the good die young
Oh woah baby I tell ya
Only the good die young

As you may have gathered from the "I do believes" and the "If memory serveses", I cribbed the stuff on Herodutus and the rest from that immense flea-market of fact and fable called the internet. In fairness to me, I did remember most of the words to the Billy Joel song ... But for future reference, sweet reader, know that the presence of these supercilious phrases signifies erudition of web-based origin. E-rudition, we might call it if we wanted to be CBC-precious. Or just good plain bullshit.

As always, it's a fine line. Herodotus - if I'm not mistaken - was known not only as the "Father of History" but as "The Father of Lies." My current iteration - "Historian" - provides an appreciation of the enduring power of bullshit. As deputy editor of Vol. 8 of Ted Byfield's The Christians, I'm currently immersed in the 14th and 15th centuries - the period of the Black Death, 100 Years War, Joan of Arc, Tamerlane, the Fall of Byzantium, the Early Renaissance, the Borgias, the discovery of America, Papal schism, Dante, Chaucer and Petrarch - and often find myself foundering in a swamp of questionable facts originating from dubious sources refracted through two thousand generations of historical prejudices. It's like herding ghosts.

Take Henry V - that great hero of the Battle of Agincourt in which three thousand English soldiers (mostly archers) trounced twenty thousand French soldiers (mostly heavy cavalry). The primary sources on Henry are people in his employ or camp who, like modern-day PR flaks, found it in their best interests to make their liege look good. It is only by dint of these 15th century chroniclers' failure to anticipate the squeamishness of later ages, that Henry's less laudable actions - the burning of a heretic Lollard in a barrel, the massacre of a slew of captured French nobles after Agincourt, the brutal campaign of conquest in Normandy - were passed down. But, generally, king Harry, as portrayed by his contemporaries, was pious, wise, just, and the rest of it - and would remain that way until certain 19th and 20th-century historians, following the lead of that smart-ass Gibbon*, felt it necessary to cast a skeptical eye.

*I am indebted to Edward Gibbon for providing a motto roughly applicable to my current line of work, vis: "Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of compassion, I resolved to write a book."

Thanks to Shakespeare, though, King Harry remains a star. The Bard's sources for Henry V were the Tudor historians of the 1500s - operating under the political requirement to cast their monarchs' Lancastrian forbears in a favourable light. Shakespeare, ever conscious of Elizabeth Tudor's gimlet gaze, further gilded an already gilt lily, producing a monumental being - and a most eloquent one, as demonstrated in the much-quoted St. Crispian's Day speech delivered prior to the Battle of Agincourt:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Of the two movie versions of Henry V, by the way, I prefer the almost whimsical 1944 Laurence Olivier version (war is glorious) over Kenneth Branagh's rather grim 1989 rendering (war is - yawn - hell). Olivier, of course, was operating under directions from Churchill to boost English wartime morale, and thus Shakespeare's already whitewashed Harry was further whited. For example, Olivier has removed the bloodthirsty exhortation outside the walls of Harfleur at which Henry suggests that if the French don't surrender his soldiers will:

Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls;
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confus'd
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.

This speech more closely characterizes the Henry V that Byfield wished me to produce in the chapter on the Hundred Years War. His reasons for wanting Henry demonized were twofold: firstly Ted's favourite Christian apologist and medievalist, C.S. Lewis, summarily relegates Henry to Hell in two of his books (without really explaining why); and secondly, the chapter ends with the heroism of Joan of Arc. Thus the preceding account of England's long and bloody campaign against the French, culminating with Henry's becoming king of half of the country, needed to be played up to enhance the saintliness of Joan. So despite an English-born inclination to admire Henry, I was bound to ascribe to the dissenting 19th and 20th century interpretations of Harry as prick. Desmond Seward, for example, writes in his 1978 book The Hundred Years War that the king "had more than a little in common with Napoleon and even Hitler" and quotes an unnamed Victorian historian's summation of Henry as "hard, domineering, over-ambitious, bigoted, sanctimonious and priggish."

Like those chroniclers of old, I know which side my bread is buttered on, and therefore shall our Henry be the bloody-hunting slaughterman.

Incidentally, Henry died of dysentery at 35 - a fairly young age, even in those days. Following the precepts of Herodotus and Joel, this would make him fairly good - though not as good as Saint Joan, barbecued at the tender age of 19.

* * *

Is 60 a fairly young age to die in our days? Certainly it seems so for my old buddy and business partner CFF, who attains that age this month but likely won't attain 61. Three weeks ago his doctors diagnosed a thoroughly cancerous prostate, which, although inoperable, could be managed and slowed. Estrogen shots and chemotherapy, he was told, could extend his life by three years. But when I visited the Frenchman two Sundays ago, he greeted me with the words, "It's not good."

The latest scans had showed the cancer to have spread through the lymphatic system and erupted at five more locations, including the kidneys and the pancreas. The doctors also strongly suspected the cancer had infiltrated his bones. They are now telling him to enjoy himself as best as he is able, and to get his affairs in order before he becomes incapacitated. CFF can't bear the thought of too much palliative care and therefore wishes to end things before he becomes a drooling vegetable. "Christmas, maybe," he said. "Or maybe I should wait until after Christmas so dee girls don't always associate Christmas with ... with dat."

Since he first learned of the aggressive prostate cancer seven weeks ago, it has been the future of his fraternal twin girls - who turn 10 in September - that has most preoccupied him. He had originally thought he might remove them from school for a year and take them on the sailing trip he's always dreamed of - "Give dem a chance to get to know the old man, so dey don't always remember me as just the guy who kicked deir asses to do deir homework." Now that that's out, he's trying to put in place a system that will best keep the girls on the trajectory he has been working on, and do so with the least disruption.

He fought hard and long to gain sole custody of the twins after his relationship with their mother, a Newfie golddigger eighteen years his junior, fell apart six years ago. Since then he has been busily grooming them in a fashion befitting the princesses to whom all of daddy's millions will ultimately come. He enrolled them in Edmonton's best private school; hired tutors to teach them piano, guitar, tae kwon do, dance, French, horseback riding, etc.; tutored them himself at home using the Kumon scholastic enhancement program; has hired a series of nannies who have served as surrogate mothers (and sometimes surrogate wives); and extensively renovated his large west end house and provided each of the girls with her own big room, replete with balcony, study area, jacuzzi ensuite, and gas fireplace.

The lavish quarters, CFF once explained, are an attempt to counter any yen the girls might acquire for returning to their mother's house. And although CFF has sole custody, the mother has been allowed to take the twins every second weekend. Those weekends are as unstructured and laissez-faire as the mother, who has an on-again, off-again marriage to a sheet metal worker, and is - at least according to CFF - "a flake". Understandably these relaxing times with mom have some appeal to little girls otherwise enduring the regimented life chez CFF.

When CFF first heard of his cancer, his hope was to beat it so that his girls would not be fated to sink into the morass of mom. Now that death appears inevitable and just six months away, CFF is having to devise the best contingency he can. For mom will automatically become the girls' guardian upon his passing. His daughter from his first marriage - a 38-year-old psychologist in Québec - was not an option. She is living with a guy, but is more interested in her flamenco dancing lessons than in having kids. She already told CFF, prior to any diagnosis, that, although she likes her step-sisters, she was not to be named in his will as default guardian because such responsibility would interfere with her style de vie. She suggested CFF view that latest Hollywood demonization of the conformist 1950s - Revolutionary Road - to get some idea of where she's coming from, lifestyle-wise.

The plan that CFF has come up with is to form a council - made up of various of his employees, including his accountant, his investment manager, and the manager of his BC apartment buildings - to administer the trust for his girls according to certain stipulations. These stipulations require that the girls remain in their home and attend their same school under the the day-to-day care of the latest Filipina nanny - a kind-hearted woman in her early thirties who might be described as CFF's lover if CFF still had the ability to "get an 'ard-on" (which, to his great chagrin, he doesn't.) The girls' mother, who lives with her husband in a town 50 km away, will be assigned a suite in the basement that she can use as a pied-de-terre when visiting the children, and be granted a gas allowance of $500 a month.

Initial indications are that mom isn't crazy about this arrangement and I suspect she may be planning some sort of posthumous end run that will somehow allow her access to a portion of the girls' inheritance. The best thing would be for CFF not to die, but I don't think that's an option.