'Some Bloodless Snippet of History'

Since he was a little boy my middle son has been a serial enthusiast. Back then it was rocks, carnivorous plants, Dmitri Mendeleev and the periodic table, coins, electronics – one focus of interest after another. He wasn’t fickle or easily distracted by the next shiny thing. Rather, he is blessed to find the world filled with interesting things, and it would be a shame to neglect any of them. Guy Davenport might have been writing about Michael in his introductory note to The Hunter Gracchus (1996): “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” 

In our most recent telephone conversation, the topic was the Byzantine general Belisarius (c. 505-565 A.D.), who served under Emperor Justinian I. Belisarius reconquered much of the territory formerly part of the Western Roman Empire, including North Africa, that had been lost less than a century earlier to the barbarians. Belisarius is judged a military tactician of genius, rivalling Alexander and Julius Caeser. Michael is a first lieutenant, a cyber officer, in the Marine Corps, so the appeal is obvious. What we know of Belisarius’ life is a mingling of history, rumor and legend. Edward Gibbon’s account in Chap. 41 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire makes compelling reading. Here he describes the defeat of the Moors in 535:

 

“The formidable strength and artful conduct of Belisarius secured the neutrality of the Moorish princes, whose vanity aspired to receive in the emperor's name the ensigns of their regal dignity. They were astonished by the rapid event, and trembled in the presence of their conqueror. But his approaching departure soon relieved the apprehensions of a savage and superstitious people. . . . and when the Roman general hoisted sail in the port of Carthage, he heard the cries and almost beheld the flames of the desolated province. Yet he persisted in his resolution; and leaving only a part of his guards to reinforce the feeble garrisons, he entrusted the command of Africa to the eunuch Solomon, who proved himself not unworthy to be the successor of Belisarius.”

 

For amateur readers and non-scholars, history can be frustrating. How do we sift myth from reality when original sources are scarce and authorities disagree? Who do we trust? And what of those with no historical rigor who settle for complacent legend and contented ignorance? Maryann Corbett considers such things in her poem “Late Night Thoughts While Watching the History Channel” (which a friend of mine always calls the "Hitler Channel"):

 

“Is it by God’s mercy

  that children are born not knowing

  the long reach of old pain?

 

“That the five-year-old, led by the hand

  past the graffiti, cannot fathom

  his mother’s tightening grip,

 

“or why, when a box of nails

  clatters to the tile like gunfire,

  his father’s face contorts?

 

“So slow is the knitting of reasons,

  the small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel

 

“as a cousin’s offhand story,

  or a yellowed clipping whose old news

  flutters from a bottom drawer,

 

“or some bloodless snippet of history

  dully intoned as you doze off, in the recliner—

 

“so slow that only now, in my seventh decade,

  do I turn from these sepia stills,

  this baritone voiceover, chanting

  the pain of immigrant forebears,

  my thought impaled on a memory:

 

“my twelve-year-old self, weeping

  on Sundays fifty years ago

  when my father drove us to mass

  but stood outside, puffing his Chesterfields,

 

“doing what his father had done,

  and his father’s father before him,

  wordless to tell me why.”

 

History is more than academic. It overlaps the personal. We all dwell in history, even Americans. Not long before his death, my brother learned that our mother’s side of the family – the names are Hayes, McBride, Hendrickson – was once Roman Catholic. How did he learn this? Why hadn’t we known this before? What caused the severance? With his death, what he learned sinks again into the gloom. “The small mind’s patching of meaning from such ravel.”

'Style Is the Forgetting of All Styles'

“I recall admiring the calmly expository flavor and simple, nonjudgemental humanity of profile stories Patrick Kurp contributed to the Gazette, years and years ago.” 

After three decades, I’ve heard from a former newspaper colleague, a music writer, Mike Hochanadel. A retired photographer and newspaper alumnus, Marc Schultz, alerted me to Mike’s blog, “Hoke’s Jukebox” (“Quiet reflections on a loud life”) devoted to happenings in upstate New York, where I lived and worked for nineteen years.

 

Mike refers to the features I wrote for The Daily Gazette in Schenectady from 1994 to 1999. In particular, I wrote a weekly series about “hamlets,” mostly in Saratoga County. I use quotation marks because these are not places that officially exist, at least according to any government, including the post office. Often they were rural crossroads without signs, phantom places from the nineteenth century.

 

I would consult old maps, identify a promising defunct community, perhaps do a little research at the library and spend the day tramping around the hamlet. Usually, I would visit the cemetery, reading the stones that hadn’t been erased by acid rain, then knock on doors. Once I happened on a burial, in a grave dug by hand by the cemetery caretaker, a garrulous old man. Most people would talk to me, though often they were puzzled that anyone was curious about the place. Sometimes their families had lived there for generations. Others were newcomers. Slowly, over the course of the day, after many interviews, I formed an impression of the place. Then I drove back to the office and wrote my story. I remember Koons Corners and Porters Corners. All the stories are clipped and buried in a file cabinet. The novelist William Kennedy once asked if I was trying to be the Charles Kuralt of the Capital Region.

 

I used to tell journalism students that I worked in two media – words and people. I was seldom interested in most conventional journalistic beats – government, business, politics, courts – though I had to cover all those fields and I’m grateful for the experience. I just never had much interest in “news,” and still don’t. People interest me, as does the quality of the writing. Mike’s description of my prose above is pleasing to hear. I worked hard on my copy to avoid clichés but at the same time to avoid purple language. In other words, I tried to be concise and precise.  

 

On this date, April 7, in 1891, Jules Renard wrote in his journal: “Style is the forgetting of all styles.”

 

[The quoted passage is from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'I Took Off My Hat to This Little Fool'

“Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes? -- that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque?” 

The Battle of Shiloh started in southwestern Tennessee on this date, April 6, in 1862. Casualty estimates total almost 24,000 in two days of fighting – the bloodiest engagement on American soil up to that time. Union forces, though victorious, lost more men than the Confederates.  

 

Among the combatants was Ambrose Bierce, a first lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. He was nineteen years old. In 1881, Bierce published his nonfiction account of the battle, “What I Saw at Shiloh,” from which the passage at the top is drawn. It’s the source of the title of an excellent volume, Phantoms of a Blood-Stained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (eds. Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster, 2002).

 

Bierce’s account is typical of his prose, fiction and otherwise – terse, utterly unsentimental and often witty. His eye, as usual, is focused on the odd detail, not the wide-angle scene:

 

 “There was, I remember, no elephant on the boat that passed us across that evening, nor, I think, any hippopotamus. These would have been out of place. We had, however, a woman. Whether the baby was somewhere on board I did not learn. She was a fine creature, this woman; somebody’s wife. Her mission, as she understood it, was to inspire the failing heart with courage; and when she selected mine I felt less flattered by her preference than astonished by her penetration. How did she learn? She stood on the upper deck with the red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the twinkle of a thousand rifles mirrored in her eyes; and displaying a small ivory-handled pistol, she told me in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great guns that if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man! I am proud to remember that I took off my hat to this little fool.”

 

Bierce romanticizes nothing and sounds remarkably modern, almost contemporary:

“At Shiloh, during the first day’s fighting, wide tracts of woodland were burned over in this way and scores of wounded who might have recovered perished in slow torture. I remember a deep ravine a little to the left and rear of the field I have described, in which, by some mad freak of heroic incompetence, a part of an Illinois regiment had been surrounded, and refusing to surrender was destroyed, as it very well deserved. My regiment having at last been relieved at the guns and moved over to the heights above this ravine for no obvious purpose, I obtained leave to go down into the valley of death and gratify a reprehensible curiosity.”

Bierce served for four years during the war and saw action at Stones River, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Kenesaw Mountain (where he was severely wounded), Franklin and Nashville. I shared my appreciation for Bierce with R.L. Barth, a poet and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, who replied:

“‘What I Saw at Shiloh’ is indeed a great piece of nonfiction. I think he’s one of America’s greatest writers on the subject of war, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a reputation as one. For the most part, if I see him mentioned it’s for his life, his attitude toward life, his spooky stories, or of course The Devil’s Dictionary. And yet, the best of his Civil War stories are extraordinary explorations of aspects of war.” 

For a strategic account of the battle, see what Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote about Shiloh in Chap. XXIV of his Personal Memoirs (1885-86):

  

“Ifs defeated the Confederates at Shiloh. There is little doubt that we would have been disgracefully beaten if the shells and bullets fired by us had passed harmlessly over the enemy and if all of theirs had taken effect. . . . There was, in fact, no hour during the day when I doubted the eventual defeat of the enemy, although I was disappointed that reinforcements so near at hand did not arrive at an earlier hour.”

'Livelier in Pleasant Weather'

Magazines have long been fond of asking well-known writers to recommend books appropriate to certain times of year, usually as Christmas gifts or so-called “beach reading.” The results tend to be surprisingly conventional and unrewarding, with pleasing exceptions. Consider this:

 “Since I long ago gave up reading for any reason except pleasure, my literary diet does not vary much by the season. If anything, I find I am apt to indulge myself in less trivial fare during holiday months than in the winter -- I have more leisure for savoring and less need to drug myself to sleep with something uncerebral.”

 

The writer is the much-underrated American poet Phyllis McGinley (1905-78) responding to the “Recommended Summer Reading” feature in the Summer 1962 issue of The American Scholar. Among her co-respondents are other members of the journal’s editorial board, including Alfred Kazin and the historian of the South, C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Carrer of Jim Crow). Sorry to say, most of the responses are dull. McGinley distinguishes herself by enthusiasm, good taste and no evidence of showing off.

 

Like her, I’ve never understood how reading in the summer differs from any other time of the year. The choice of reading matter is an internal affair, not subject to the influence of sunlight, warm temperatures and other external factors. McGinley makes an exception for travel:

 

“On a motoring trip, for instance, my husband and I always carry along A. E. Housman. You have to be young to enjoy Housman, and young is what one is inclined to feel while driving happily along strange roads. Enclosed, insulated from real life by speed, movement and the abandonment of domestic duties, the adolescent pessimism, the pseudoclassic despair and the impeccable music of that verse seem satisfying as they did when we were college freshmen. It does not do for bedtime reading but it is delightful to chant aloud en route.”

 

I’m charmed by the scene of a middle-aged American couple, sometime during the Kennedy administration, reciting in tandem one of Housman’s lyrics while touring the country. McGinley recommends other good titles – Kim, Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford, Austen’s Persuasion, H.D.F. Kitto’s The Greeks, Adam Bede, Trevelyan’s History of England. That final three-volume work is, she writes, “as romantic and satisfactory a book as one could ask. In fact, a vacation is a natural and proper time to renew one’s friendships with early enthusiasms. The wells of joy are apt to be livelier in pleasant weather.”

 

In his introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, in 1892, Housman says: “The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.”

'People Who Just Love the Proximity of Books'

Left in a hefty anthology titled The Faber Book of War Poetry (ed. Kenneth Baker, 1996) was a postcard from O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd. Booksellers in Chicago. More than forty years ago I visited that shop near the University of Chicago and purchased a partial set of Conrad for a decent price. They bundled the books and I carried them back to Ohio on the train. The card suggests a seriousness of purpose often missing from bookstores today:

 

“Chicago’s Oldest Bookstore

Established 1882

200,000 Titles in Stock

Used Books Bought & Sold

Small Collections or Complete Libraries

No Quantity Too Large – House Calls Made”

 

Smaller copy says O’Gara & Wilson carries books “in almost all fields, but we are especially interested in American history, art, Balkan and Central European history, English and American literature, Greek and Latin classics, medieval history and literature, military history, philosophy, religion & theology.” In other words, a serious bookstore for serious readers. This is not Harlequin Romance country.

 

Joseph Epstein’s great friend, the late sociologist Edward Shils, who taught at the University of Chicago, published “The Bookshop in America” in the winter 1963 issue of Daedalus. In it, Shils calls bookshops “an almost indispensable part of life. Like libraries, one goes to them for what one knows and wants and to discover books one did not know before.” He continues:

 

“I have gone to bookshops to buy and browse. I have gone to them to buy books I wanted, and because I just wanted to buy a book, and much of the time just because I wanted to be among books to inhale their presence.”

 

He speaks for me. I have gone to bookstores I knew from prior sad experience were lousy, just to wander among the shelves, hopelessly hoping for treasure. In such places, I have been tempted to buy books I already owned just to salvage something tangible out of disappointment. Shils formulates a theory of good bookstores contrary to conventional economic sense:

  

“A bookshop, in order to be good, must have a large stock of books for which there is not likely to be a great demand but for which there will be an occasional demand. This means, unlike the retail trade in groceries, or the practice in industry to produce on order, a bookshop must render its capital inert by putting a lot of it into slow-moving lines.”

 

Shils is writing, of course, long before the Age of Amazon. I looked online to see if O’Gara & Wilson is still in business. It is, but relocated to Chesterton, Ind., fifty miles southeast of Chicago. I wish I could visit. More power to the new owners Doug and Jill Wilson. Shils writes:  

 

“The wonder is, given the unremunerativeness of the business, that bookshops exist at all. It takes a special kind of person, somewhat daft in a socially useful and quite pleasant way but nonetheless somewhat off his head, to give himself to bookselling. Why should anyone who has or who can obtain $10,000 or $20,000 invest it in a bookshop to sell serious books when, if he were an economically reasonable person, he would do better to open a beauty parlor or a hamburger and barbecue shop, or put his money into the stock market? The bookseller must be one of those odd people who just love the proximity of books.”

'After So Many Deaths I Live and Write'

One needn’t be a fetishist or even a book collector – reader is close enough -- to prize an “association copy,” a term neatly defined here: “A book that belonged to or was annotated by the author, someone close to the author, a famous or noteworthy person, or someone especially associated with the content of the work.” The full title of the volume in question is The Poetical Works of George Herbert. With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes, by the Rev. George Gilfillan, published by D. Appleton & Co., N.Y., in 1854. The front end paper is signed in black ink: “Helen A. Pinkerton 12-1945.” Poet, scholar, one-time student of Yvor Winters and J.V. Cunningham, Helen gave me the leather-bound volume in 2015 and died two years later. 

The only marks Helen left in the book are minute dots and checks beside the titles of eleven poems in the table of contents, including my favorite Herbert poem, “The Flower,” with the beginning of the sixth of its seven stanzas:

 

“And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write.”

 

Herbert renders encouragement to late-bloomers and anyone else who has been stalled, tired, sick, preoccupied or otherwise blocked by life. In 2019, just months away from his death by cancer, Clive James was introduced to “The Flower” by a friend, a gift he wrote about in an essay:

    

“[B]ack there in the middle of the 20th century I somehow missed it, when I was first reading Herbert in the Albatross Book of Living Verse, which we used to call the ‘Book of Living Albatrosses.’ How I ever missed anything in Herbert’s prolific output is a puzzle. He fascinated me from the jump, almost as much as Marvell. I blame Herbert for not calling himself Marvell every time. A poet called Herbert will occasionally be overlooked; call yourself Wonderful and everything will get into the list of contents.”

 

Herbert was born on this date, April 3, in 1593 and died in 1633 at age thirty-nine.

'To Guide Him in the Real World'

In 1899, Edwin Arlington Robinson read Thoreau’s Walking, a work based on an 1851 lecture published posthumously in 1862. Robinson was not impressed by his fellow New Englander. He condemned Thoreau’s “glorified world-cowardice” in a letter to his friend Daniel Gregory Mason: 

“For God’s sake says the sage, let me get away into the wilderness where I shall not have a single human responsibility or the first symptom of social discipline. Let me be a pickerel or a skunk cabbage or anything that will not have to meet the realities of civilization. There is a wholesomeness about some people that is positively unhealthy, and I find it in this essay.”

 

Starting as a teenager I idolized Thoreau. I read Walden many times and almost everything else he wrote, including the two oversized volumes of his Journals as published by Dover. I still think he sometimes wrote excellent prose (the poetry is refried Emerson, often unreadable) but his hippie ethos mingled with snobbery cooled my enthusiasm, beginning about fifteen years ago. His temperament was chilly. I suspect Thoreau is best read when we’re young and don’t yet understand our civil obligations. In 1844, when he accidentally started a forest fire and burned some three-hundred acres of woods in Concord, Thoreau expressed no remorse and never apologized to his townsmen. In his Journal in 1850 he wrote about the incident:

 

“Presently I heard the sound of the distant bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself, ‘Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.’”

 

An impressive act of stiff-necked rationalization. “It has never troubled me,” he goes on, “from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it.” Scott Donaldson in Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (2007) contrasts Thoreau with Robinson:

 

“Robinson required a commanding and fortified purpose to guide him in the real world. For him, there could be no worthy calling that did not help others. As a poet, he might not serve as overtly as a pastor comforting parishioners or a college professor mentoring students. Nonetheless he wanted desperately to believe that by writing poetry he would do some good in the world. . . .Time and again, as he was shaping his career, Robinson explicitly made the link between a life of poetry and a life of service.”

 

Trying to be a decent human being is a fulltime occupation that starts with our personal relations – family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Grandiose schemes of improvement are delusional. In an April, 2, 1897 letter to his correspondent Edith Brower, Robinson writes:

 

“I am doing what I can for myself and a little for others; and I am very glad to know that I have been to some slight service to them. There are two or three fellows whom I have really helped. I know it; they have told me so; and their actions prove the truth of what they say. And now you—a total stranger—tell me that  I have helped you. What more can I ask?”