`People Who Vindicate the Species'

On Sunday I remembered the Pearl Harbor survivors I’ve interviewed, already old men by the time of those earlier anniversaries, the 40th and 50th. For each, the Japanese attack was the vortex around which they forever navigated. Everything in their lives – marriage, children, jobs – was calibrated against what happened in Hawaii when they were young. With one exception, what I remember is their ordinariness. They were my father’s age, with the values and prejudices of working-class Americans who lived through the Great Depression, the war and the unprecedented prosperity of the postwar years. Both of my parents had brothers at Pearl Harbor.

The exception was Babe, a retired barber and mail carrier. He was compact like a jockey and tightly coiled. Babe was ordinary but for his anger. It fueled him and he worked it like an artist – 50 years on and longer. “Japs” was inevitably preceded by a profanity. In his car he kept reams of ticket-sized paper slips printed with “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and a thesaurus of obscenities. He placed them under the wiper blades of Japanese-built automobiles, which by the early nineties were ubiquitous. I drove a Toyota and always parked down the block. His best friend, another Italian kid, had enlisted in the army the same day as Babe and was killed at Pearl Harbor. Babe detested Frank Sinatra, a fellow Italian but a “draft dodger.” He chastised fellow survivors for insufficient reverence. I met his wife briefly but she was a cipher. They never had children.

Normally, angry people are tiresome but for some reason I liked Babe, enjoyed his company (he was an excellent storyteller) and wrote about him three times for two newspapers. Each time, despite my ethical objections, he mailed me a five-dollar bill after the story or column appeared. In his own crabbed way, he was generous and funny. About 10 years ago I read his obituary and waited a few weeks before calling his wife to offer condolences. She hung up on me.

After that I wrote about Babe for the last time, in the newspaper column I described here. A reader of that October post, Philip Walling, wrote to say it reminded him of a poem by Louis MacNeice, “The Kingdom.” I’ve read MacNeice only spottily and this poem, written during World War II, was new to me. It’s a hymn to democracy and decency that celebrates “the Kingdom of individuals.” Many lines remind me of Babe and other Pearl Harbor survivors I’ve known:

“…these are humble
And proud at once, working within their limits
And yet transcending them. These are the people
who vindicate the species. And they are many. For go,
Go wherever you choose, among tidy villas or terrible
Docks, dumps and pitheads, or through the spangled moors
Or along the vibrant narrow intestines of great ships
Or into those countries of which we know very little –
Everywhere you will discover the men of the Kingdom
Loyal by intuition, born to attack, and innocent.”