Chapter 11: In Which I Feel Overwhelmed and Impotent, and Wonder at the Falsity of Glory

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest. 

Our fascination with war is downright exhausting.  

I’ve now read roughly half of all the books on the list of Pulitzer fiction awardees and the number that deal with war—whether directly or indirectly—betrays our fascination. Just recently I’ve read Tales of the South Pacific (WWII), The Caine Mutiny (WWII), The Killer Angels (Civil), The Confessions of Nat Turner (Pre-Civil, but clearly connected), A Bell for Adano (WWII), A Fable (WWI, though I thought it was WWII until I checked Wikipedia), and the half-million-word Gone With the Wind (Civil). Still to come is the equally lengthy Andersonville (Civil), along with probably a few others which hide their subject matter behind more cryptic titles. 

A thread that runs through them all, a thread that tapestries a mythical history, is the one that weaves the idea that there is glory in war, that there is always a cause, The Cause, worth fighting for. In the stories of the Civil War there are endless numbers of characters that act as the Tarletons, Stuart and Brent, did, childishly eager to don the grey in the hopes of participating in the adrenalin-filled adventures of fife and drum, bayonet and rifle. Never once did they think that flesh bleeds, that horses scream. 

Neither came home: that was the result of their quests for glory. 

There has always been this myth: it crosses religious, geo-political, cultural, and racial boundaries. There is always someone, somewhere who trots out the Idea of glory, the idea that this time it’s different, that this time there is a greater, more glorious, purpose. It is a devil’s whisper in the ear of those easily persuaded, those whose egoism and nationalistic tendencies need only the slightest push. 

But don’t misunderstand me: there are reasons for war, true justifications. There is genocide. Self-defense. Truly evil individuals creating truly evil states. But never—never—is there glory in it. And never—never—is glory a reason. 

And yet it is. Look to the ancient Greeks and Spartans, the Visigoths, the Mongols, the Crusaders, the Samurai. Look to the English and the Scottish and the Welsh. Look to the French and the Germans and the Russians. 

Look to the Iranians and the Israelis and the Iraqis and the Syrians. Look to Al-Qaeda and to ISIS.

Everywhere you look: the myth of glory. And we write about it and propel the myth ever forward; even within those corners of art where the horrors of war are so well displayed—Guernica, Catch—22, Platoon—still there is that misguided, subtle sense that somewhere, beneath the blood and the limbs and the hunger and the agony there is, just a bit, just a touch, of heroism, of righteousness, of glory. 

Reality begets fiction begets belief begets a new reality, and as long as war parades this myth of glory, there will be an ample supply of soldiers willing to be blown to bits. 

But who are these storytellers? Who convinces the thousands upon thousands upon thousands that the myth is true? It isn’t just history unwinding, self-propelled, that takes so many there—it is a technique, a strategy—of those who benefit (and there are always those who benefit) from war.

They are those who long not for glory, but for other, more material goods. For control. For wealth. Look to those who promise and see what they do, where they are. Look to the recent leaders of theocratic states (including, it often seems these days, our own). Look to the military-industrial complex. It’s not hard to find…. 

And why is it so easy? Why are so many led so fervently down such suicidal paths in that eternal quest for glory? The answer to this question, sadly, remains more stubbornly elusive. Perhaps it’s because we avoid hard truths and swallow easy lies. Perhaps it’s because we behave commonly and consistently without thought to the unintended consequences that come from the ways we treat the conquered—think Treaty of Versailles and Reconstruction. And perhaps it’s because we think in the short-term, about ourselves and (maybe) our children, but never their children, or their children’s children.

And we are fragile souls; glory feeds both our sense of self-worth and our need to connect. When we are faced with the ails of our world—with poverty and anomie and a vision of others that are superficially different than we are—our sense of self becomes supremely important (as does our need to connect with others who share that same sense), a way for us to value our time on earth. And so we are led to a place where that can happen, a place of seeming nobility where we can partake in fellowship and perhaps rise heroically or, if not, at least attempt our own place in history by creating a reason for remembrance. And we are led by those who don’t partake of any of that, who use others for those baser purposes: money, or power, or money and power. 

The calls now are as loud as ever. The Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and more all require new (or renewed) intervention (according to some), and the call for such intervention relies on the need for pride, the call for glory, the myth of the American Savior. There are voices enough shouting that message. And they will continue to do so until we stop believing what they tell us, stop needing so aggressively, until we take just a moment to look at them and ask: Why? 

This is no conspiracy theory, no poorly plotted warning against an ethereal them. This is a request that we question, ponder, analyze—and then question again—anyone who propels the myth forward, who rides it, steed-like, across our apocryphal plain of emotional resonance. Because as long as we don’t, they will. 

Read since last post: 

• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2005)
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (1937)
• Years of Grace, Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931)

 

Currently reading: 

• Dragon’s Teeth, Upton Sinclair (1943)
• Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 46 read, 41 to go.

Chapter 10: In Which I Ponder Time Travel and Discuss the Impact of a Minor Surgical Procedure

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

I love a good time travel story, particularly one that loops back on itself in ways that make the mind spin. It can be a movie—like Star Trek IV (the one with the whales) or Looper; it can be a television show—like Quantum Leap (seriously underrated, by the way) or The Time Tunnel;  or it can be written words—like Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, or Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I even like clever references to time travel, as when the nerd quartet populating apartment 4A on The Big Bang Theory jointly purchase a replica of the time machine used in, well, The Time Machine.

As it turns out, though, you don’t need to read a time-travel story to find yourself reading a time-travel story. In a somewhat sudden epiphany I’ve realized that most books—if not all—are, in their own way, time-travel stories. I say “somewhat sudden” since part of said epiphany actually emerged while I was writing about Laughing Boy and The Color Purple; I just didn’t realize it at the time as I’d been so unilaterally focused on the more resonant themes of race and privilege. The epiphany shouted aloud, however, during a recent sprint during which I hurtled through eight books in ten days.

A bit of explanation is required here, lest you think that I’ve either recently completed an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course, or that I’ve suddenly become the world’s foremost erudite slacker. In fact what happened was a bit of minor surgery—again. This time my right hand went under the knife—specifically the thumb and middle finger (which doctors apparently prefer to call the “long finger,” supposedly, I can only assume, to avoid numerous instances of crude adolescent humor). I had developed a couple of odd-shaped growths, one on each of the aforementioned digits, and basic flexing called forth rivulets of decidedly unpleasant pain. Since I have a fondness for most of the tasks allowed an opposable thumb (and since I still had occasional need for my middle finger), removal beckoned. And, in case I hadn’t mentioned it, I’m right-handed.

And so it goes.

Facing two weeks or so of nearly non-existent right-handedness meant that I couldn’t write or type. That seems somewhat minor until you realize that even a business conference call requires a bit of note-taking—and I couldn’t do even that. (Nor could I cook or clean or weed-whack or write checks, all to my wife’s chagrin.) Television beckoned, but having recently marathoned all five seasons of The Wire (not to mention the previous surgery’s Doctor Who immersion), I thought I would try to minimize hours spent before the big screen. That left books.

I don’t know how many of you have ever read so many literary examples so quickly, but it is an entirely different experience than the more conventional and casual approach, particularly when your selections are predetermined—as they are with me during this Pulitzerian experience. I had certain books at hand—so to speak—and those were the ones awaiting.

Here’s where the time traveling comes in: When you quickly pass through numerous books written at numerous times about numerous times, it all gets rather jumbled. The mind comes unstuck now and then as you try to remember what you’re reading, when it was written, and  how that compares to another book you’ve just finished that was written about the time you’re now reading about, though it’s about another time altogether.

Whenever we read a book, we enter into a world with three types of prejudice. The first of these is the prejudice of narrative, necessary because it represents, accurately one hopes, the time in which the story is set. Martin Dressler, the 1997 winner written by Steven Millhauser, offers a solid example. While written in the last twenty years, the book’s tale exists in the early days of the 20th century and reflects those times: women have their assigned roles, as do blacks; the attitude towards immigrants is largely unflattering; and the separate attitudes and ethics of those with wealth and those without are nearly two-dimensional. And yet, as I read the book, the writing inadvertently brought me back out of those times, largely through the second form of prejudice: the prejudice of author.

Authors bring their own values and voices to everything they write; the concept of a neutral writer is no more than impossible phantasm: no writer can leave his or her own time behind no matter the eras they travel into with their pens. Millhauser, try as he might to maintain the proper aura of a New York City unused to buildings more than six stories high, gives us a too-independent woman, and judges her well, and a too-dependent woman, and judges her harshly. Immigrant roots are ennobled, then ignored, and those who exhibit cautious conservatism are painted as backward while those with vision are those who forge forward, seeing progress much as the author must have when he wrote the book: as inevitable.

And then there is the prejudice of reader. My prejudices. Everything I’ve written about Martin Dressler betrays them. Here I am, in the 21^st century—a time of global warming and global strife, of terrorism and cataclysm, a place from which I can look back and worry that progress may be nothing more than a one-word oxymoron, something from which we would do well to recover. And from this perspective I read the words of an author some twenty years distant writing about a time some one hundred years distant. I feel both stuck and unstuck in all three times, a Billy-Pilgrimage of the oddest sort.

This is both a strength and weakness of the best books: I’ve come to find that we can never completely free ourselves to enter them, never thoroughly encounter the worlds they contrive and, yet, at the same time we are offered a deeper look at ourselves and our own worlds, our own times, our own travels.

Read Since Last Post:

• Tinkers, Paul Harding (2010)
• Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser (1997)
• The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1995)
• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
• A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor (1987)
• Ironweed, William Kennedy (1984)
• In This Our Life, Ellen Glasgow (1942)
• Now in November, Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935)

  

Currently Reading:

• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (2005)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 43 read, 44 to go.

Chapter 9: In Which I rue my Own Dearth of Curiosity and Tell the Reader Entirely too much about my Shower Habits.

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

Inspiration for these essays arrives conventionally. Shortly after turning a book’s final page, my emotional center checks itself, measuring my autonomic response on a purely binary scale: Did I like it, or not? (such triviality being both unimportant and universal). I then unwillingly fall to mental meanderings, loosely coupled but largely incoherent thoughts that go nowhere and give nothing. It’s rather akin to drinking a Bud Lite and then wondering why.

Then, usually a day or two later, comes the coalition of sense, idea, and semantics: I begin to compose. Unfortunately this nearly always occurs while I’m in the shower, where the only real option would be to write with my finger in the foggy residue that clings to the tiled enclosure, an obvious exercise in futility. I’m forced, instead, to repeat certain key phrases over and over again in my head, hoping (despite history) that I can shift one or two word-strings from short- to long-term memory. It rarely happens. Yet I know that when I write like that—completely in my head—I’m at my most brilliant. At least I think so. Needless to say, the words I imagine are always more crisply wrought than anything that finally ends up on the page. (A good example, for example, is the unneeded “needless to say” which, as any good editor will tell you, simply doesn’t require saying, needlessly or otherwise. It’s something I never do when composing while wet.)

So it was with an odd sort of quivering that I realized I wanted to write something about the book I’ve just begun rather than the books I’ve recently finished. Unasked, composition began too early and wouldn’t quite let me be. Why this should be so seemed at first unclear, but that fog now wordlessly lifts, and since I’m not so foolish as to fight inspiration, I’m going with it.
 

The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields’ 1995 contribution to the list, gives us the story of Daisy, told by Daisy from shortly before her Birth through to (and possibly beyond, if symmetry is to hold) Death. Throughout Shields provides, in words not always perfect but nearly always lyrical, the histories of two families across generations, across oceans, across cultures. From the naïve and rural to the sophisticated and urban (and onward, somehow, one assumes), the book reminds me of how rich and rewarding family history can be.

And how little I know of my own.

The family story I shared earlier is rich and custardy. But then, it’s fiction. There was no shadowed flight from coming pogroms, nor any surreptitious falsity of name and religion. But if asked how things really went, why and when my uprooted ancestors left their homes for America, I couldn’t tell you.  In fact, if I go back just a couple of generations, I can only provide a few hints here and there of anything true. I know, for example, that my patrilineal great-grandfather owned a sweets shop in Jersey City, and that he made his own chocolate. At one point he was offered partnership from another local chocolatier, but my great-grandfather opted to decline Mr. Hershey’s offer.

It’s a great story (if bittersweet), but it’s the only one I know. The only one. I could not even tell you my great-grandfather’s name. Nor if he had any siblings. Nor when he arrived or exactly where he came from. Whom he married. I do know he had at least three children—my grandfather, Harry, my Uncle Bill, and my Aunt Elsie, but I know nothing else. Not a single tale.
 

Perhaps knowing so little three generations back can be excused. But moving forward in time helps me very little. Of my grandfather I know little before I was born, except that he was a musician during the Big Band era, and spent time in Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra when the vocalist out front was a young crooner named Frank. I know that he and my grandmother stayed close with the Sinatras right up until the Blue Eyes closed. 

But I don’t know how my grandfather met my grandmother, nor how they courted. I don’t know if he was in the military. I don’t know if he graduated high school (though he was inarguably intelligent—scarily so), and I know less of my grandmother (though she tended toward the intentionally mysterious; none of us were even sure of her age.)

My father started high school in New Jersey and finished in California, so I know roughly when they abandoned the east for a snowless lifestyle, though I’ve not a clue as to why they made that decision. Neither do I know how my mother and father met, nor what they found so attractive in each other. I know why they divorced, but not why they remarried. I know why they divorced again, this second time when I was five. That is the point where a family history first feels like my family history, something that informs me. But there is a place of emptiness behind that feeling, an almost-consciousness telling me that earlier, much earlier, is where the true information lies, the mortar between the building blocks; for me, mostly, that is mere space.

One of the reasons I find myself so taken with The Stone Diaries lies in the way that Shields often echoes my own sense of the missing, moving from one deftly drawn memory to another through gaps archeologically wide, just the way our real memories travel. In the following two paragraphs, note how the narrative jumps from her getting off the train to visit an older man, a friend she hasn’t seen in many years, to the inevitability of the chapter’s title, “Love”:

Her knees are shaky after so many hours on the train. The sudden light of the station unbalances her, and she can think of nothing to say.

“Daisy?” he murmurs across the combed crown of her hair, making a question of it. Almost a sob. He forgets what he said next.

And then there’s a break, whitespace on the page, followed by this:

At his age he could not face the fret and fuss and jitters of a full-scale wedding, and so they were married quickly, quietly, in a judge’s chambers.

How many of us remember our own histories in just that way: the preface, the dénouement, yet little in between? Shields tell us that “biography, even autobiography, is full of systemic error, of holes that connect like a tangle of underground streams.”  And with waters too quickly displaced, yet filled with currents on which we continually float.

It’s too late for me to find out much of what I wish to know, and I’ve resigned myself to that fact. Family history has always seemed to me irrelevantly important, something that should be known, yet without purpose. But then the things that touch us most are often seemingly without purpose; we don’t really know for sure until that touch comes. Or doesn’t.

Read since last post:

• American Pastoral, Phillip Roth (1998)
• Elbow Room, James Alan McPherson (1978)

Currently reading:

• The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields (1995)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 35 read, 52 to go.

Chapter 8: Gaza

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest.

As a child I had a toy rifle, an impotent half-length weapon that triggered only imagination: days of The Wild Wild West, of Gunsmoke, of The Rifleman. I would sometimes stand alone in my bedroom, casually poised before a mirrored enemy, and would raise the rifle up, quickly, cocking the loop lever and firing just the way Chuck Connors did in all those nineteen-inch reruns. Only from mine there was no recoil nor puff of smoke: just the simple click, a sound that reminds a small middle-class American boy that violence is merely amusement.  Yet not so, not everywhere.

*****

Gaza

Every child questions the rain

sooner or later,

wonders what it means, where it comes from--

“Those are God’s tears,” we’re told,

(though never wondering at the sadness that

makes

God

cry).

 

A rite, these tears: like abandoning the breast

or walking to school alone

or staying out late with the third-most beautiful girl you know.

Or leaving home… 

A rite: like any other circumcision that reminds

you of what you are in ways not always pleasant. 

And halfway around our world

(and isn’t it ours, after all?)

children live who

cannot walk to school

or stay out late

(though they do leave home, and may again tomorrow). 

Surrounded by killer angels

we struggle to understand how people can revere the same history,

claim the same home,

disbelieve the others’ same God;

how people can revisit Abel’s Cain mutiny with such cyclicality

And such—yes—reverence.

(It is the only word, after all, which justifies.) 

Those truly embattled are those who

do not yet understand siege,

or enemy,

or amputate,

who have not yet been taught to hate.

A rock is a rock to them;

a stone, a stone:

something over which small feet stumble when running for mothers.

Those truly embattled only understand

the visceral knife-stab of fear.

For the rest, there are no sharp edges,

no clean blades,

nothing to measure success or failure.

Only body counts until the next time that

wizened and shattered men pretend détente when

(really)

all that is happening

is a re-arming respite

 

while, in the mean time, these children will

sooner or later

come to question the rain and be told:

“Those are God’s tears.” 

But there, just there, a child asks, too:

“Then what is the thunder, omma, and what is the lightning?”

 

 

 

 

Read since last post:

• The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk (1952)
• The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara (1975)
• A Bell for Adano, John Hersey (1945)
• The Reivers, William Faulkner (1963)

Currently Reading

• American Pastoral, Phillip Roth (1998)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 33 Read; 54 to go

NOTE: For additional insights and conversations about our current international conflicts (and other important political topics), I recommend CoffeePartyUSA's Facebook page.

Chapter 7: In Which I Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About What We’re Not Supposed To Talk About

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archive list on the right sidebar, going from the oldest to the newest. 

 

Some books are more uncomfortable to read than they should be, and while I acknowledge the typical therapist’s command to “own my feelings,” I can’t help believing that it’s not just me this time.

The 1930 Pulitzer Prize went to Laughing Boy, a novel set almost entirely in the early 20th century universe of the western Navajo nations. It’s a generally unremarkable coming-of-age story involving the titular young man, a man with a penchant for horses, jewelry making, and the occasional interesting wager. At a days-long tribal event he meets another young Navajo, Slim Girl, and the attraction soon grows. Slim Girl, though, isn’t quite the type one brings home to amá. Having been taken from her tribe as a child and raised in one of the American-run “Indian schools,” she remains ensnared between the proverbial two worlds, a situation which drives the novel’s central conflict. (Such schools, by the way, are historically accurate. Pioneered by Christian missionaries, the idea of removing the “native” from Native Americans soon bore the imprimatur of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and lasted, sadly, until the 1970s.)

Laughing Boy ebbed from the pen of Oliver La Farge, an uppercrust-ian born in New York and raised in Rhode Island. Oliver’s father was an architect, his grandfather claimed fame for stained glass, and the family tree was not without the occasional Commodore, Governor, and Plymouth Colony resident. Oliver unsurprisingly graduated from Harvard. Twice.

When I first picked up Laughing Boy I had what I imagined was a relatively conventional thought: Is this going to be just another pseudo-ethnographic novel written from a decidedly white point of view?  One that, because of the time and culture in which it is set, I might even find slightly embarrassing?

I then did something I can’t imagine ever having done a couple of decades ago: I checked the author’s bona fides. I realized even while checking that it was an odd thing to do, but also realized in the same instant that today’s world demands that we think this way; if a white male wants to write a book about a different culture, we wonder immediately whether he has the right to do so.

And then came the important thought, the one we’re not even supposed to think (though many do), a thought much less conventional: Is it just me, or have we reached a point where a white male can’t discuss anything non-white without his point of view called into question?  

I’m pretty sure it’s not just me. In fact, I’m damned sure of it. I recall having a discussion following George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. At the time I was part of an online media team that focuses on political and social issues. The team was “diverse” (to use the modern and, to my mind, somewhat cryptic, terminology) and there were a variety of opinions. The part of the discussion that most adheres, however, came from an African-American in the group, who informed me that I “couldn’t possibly understand” what Trayvon Martin had gone through because I “wasn’t black.” While my ability to understand might suffer restriction, in reality his comment wasn’t at all about that; it was a way of shutting down my opinion, a way of telling me that not only were my opinions automatically invalid, but that I should perhaps reconsider even having an opinion in the first place. And If I did, I should at least have the decency to refrain from speaking it aloud.

Where does one take a conversation from there?

Examples abound: Men are routinely chastised for having an opinion on abortion or wages; heterosexuals for not having lived in constant fear of being outed; whites for never knowing what it feels like to be followed around a convenience store. And if someone does attempt a cross-cultural thought? Well, such people may suffer instruction, commanded to “check their privilege at the door.”

Laughing Boy isn’t the only Pulitzer book that’s made me feel this way. I also recently read The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s brilliant epistolary novel. Reading it wasn’t a totally comfortable experience, though, since modern culture has implanted a sadistic homunculus, one that suggests I might not even have the right to enjoy it or, if I do, that I’m probably enjoying it for all the wrong reasons—as if such a thing were possible. In some ways my experience with The Color Purple was even worse than with Laughing Boy because Alice Walker is black, female, and bisexual, a constant meta-reminder that I am so very much not any of those things. So even if I think I understood her book, how can I know if I did, or if she would think I did, or even if my thoughts are any longer valid on this inevitably larger social scale?

I get that I am, inarguably, privileged. I know this. As Pearl Jam once wrote in an otherwise forgettable song about white, male Americans, I “won the lottery" when I was born. But this idea that I need to somehow “check my privilege” (and, no, I’m not making up that phrase), or that my opinions and emotions are irrelevant because of it, strikes me with the greatest irony; those who dismiss me with such simplicity are merely exerting their own privilege, one self-proclaimed and, worse, one that builds walls.

There’s another unintended consequence here, one that is subtle yet impactful, one that accepts—in fact, relies upon—that a reading experience exists in the space between the reader and the author. Given that those spaces have changed—culturally, historically, politically—it is fair to say that the book, too, has necessarily changed. Were I Native American (or, perhaps, the even more au courant “First Nation”), the experience of reading Laughing Boy would be different than it is for me now.  Were I living in 1929 and reading the book’s first edition the experience would again be different. 

This has always been true, of course. Anyone who has gone back to a favorite book decades later knows that even personal histories change a book’s meaning. But it feels different, amplified somehow, to enter a reading experience with these changes foisted upon you by others.

I much prefer the days when I could sit down to read a book without having all those ghosts in the room with me, but I fear they’ve settled in for a good long stay….

 

Read since last post:

• The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson (2013)
• Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge (1930)
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2007)

Currently reading:

• The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk (1952)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, H.L. Davis (1936)

Count: 29 read; 58 to go