'The Struggle Continues'

The annual Christmas haul is in, and already well-thumbed and shelved. My oldest son and his wife gave me a fifty-dollar gift card to Half-Price Books and the final shooting script of Martin’s Scorsese’s The Irishman, the best new film I’ve seen in years. Among other things, it captures the sensation of being in a large hall with a lot of angry union guys. My father was a longtime member of Ironworkers Local 17 in Cleveland. From my middle son (minoring in Russian at the U.S, Naval Academy), Political Memoirs 1905-1907 (trans. Carl Goldberg, University of Michigan Press, 1967) by Paul Miliukov, a complicated, in some ways pitiable, in others ways contemptible figure in Russian and Soviet history. He writes of 1917:

“At the beginning of April, Lenin arrived with his suite, via Germany in the ‘sealed box-car.’ Before his departure from Zurich, he declared Kerensky and Chkheidze to be ‘traitors to the revolution,’ and on April 4, at a meeting of the Bolsheviks, he invited the Social Democrats to ‘throw off their old linen’ and assume the name ‘Communists.’”

My father-in-law was typically generous: The two-volume boxed set of Peter Taylor’s Complete Stories, published by the Library of America, and an attractive little volume, Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin, by the late Clive James. In his introduction he writes:

“[T]he struggle continues. People of surprisingly high intelligence have managed to convince themselves that Larkin’s poetry didn’t amount to much at all. And presumably, to them, it doesn’t, although their dismissal of him makes you wonder whose poetry they think does matter, if his does not.”