Category: Literature

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‘A Horror Story’

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Pictures that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. The images are haunting in themselves. There is a long and equally haunting story that goes with them. The man pictured was Isaiah “Cy” Oggins, Born in Connecticut in 1898 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and educated at Columbia. At some point he became a Soviet spy, was arrested in Moscow in 1939 (the occasion of the top photos), spent eight years in a prison camp, and was executed (on the day the bottom photos were taken).

The Times story focuses on Oggins’ son, Robin, a history professor in upstate New York. He was about seven years old when he saw his father for the last time, in the late 1930s. The second set of pictures above appeared only when a reporter for Time began researching the Oggins case. (That investigation led to the publication earlier this year of “The Lost Spy,” an attempt to reconstruct Oggins’s fate; the book got an uncharitable review from the Times, and much more favorable attention from the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. NPR reprinted the first chapter a couple months ago).

The Times piece Saturday focused on Robin Oggins’s hopes to learn more about his father’s fate. The story concludes:

Seeing the final photographs for the first time, Robin wept.

But the photographs arrived late in his life. His wife was ill with Alzheimer’s disease, his mind occupied by his own academic research. He had no means or experience to press the Russian government for help.

“I am a full-time caregiver,” he said. “I do not speak Russian. Practically, I cannot travel. To work on this, I would not know where to begin.”

Still, the photographs raise questions. What did a man, caught at the crossroads of history and reduced to such a state, know? “Abstractly, I want more,” Robin Oggins said. “Practically, it changes nothing. It is still a horror story.”

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Guest Observation: St. Matthew

Chapter 25

31 ¶ When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

32 and before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

33 and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35 for I was ahungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36 naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee ahungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

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Guest Observation: Marx and Engels

What with the socialists hungry to spread the wealth around (and probably force us all to wear Mao jackets–but that plan won’t be made public until after inauguration day), I picked up the copy of The Communist Manifesto that I alway keep at hand (though have never until just now managed to open). Anyway, we all know that socialism and its forefathers have long since been consigned to the dustbin of history. But there are a few things in the opening pages of the Marx-Engels tract that you kind of have to admire. If not for their political insights, at least for their abilities as reporters and interpreters of the world around them. Take note of the fact they were writing in 1847. The Industrial Revolution was already mature in Great Britain, but in much of the rest of Europe and in the United States, it was still an incipient development. So Marx and Engels were describing a world they saw coming into being, not one that was even close to fully formed.

And there’s a surprising durability to their description of that world. If you let yourself substitute more modern terms for “bourgeoisie”–the word grew out of a term meaning “people of the town” (bourg, in French), representative of the first non-heredity, non-aristocratic mercantile and moneyed classes as Europe emerged from feudalism–the Manifesto actually describes a process that many pundits and prognosticators of global capitalism might approve of today; although most all of them would likely go out of their way to tell you that Marx and Engels were stunted and short-sighted in their thinking.

Here are a couple passages (my copy is the Penguin Books “Great Ideas” edition; you can also find the complete text on Project Gutenberg):

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. …

“… The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. … [I]t has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. …

“… The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

I’ll stop before I get to the genesis of the proletariat. I’m not ready for that yet. And if you need to clear your palate, I offer this musical aperitif (you’ve got nothing to lose but your chains).

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Sunday Matinee

I heard the other day that the Druid Theatre, from the city of Galway on Ireland’s west coast, was in Berkeley presenting “The Playboy of the Western World.” This morning, Kate and I talked about going. Tickets were $75, and even as I like a good play and love Irish storytelling, that seemed steep. I took a look at the website of the outfit presenting the play, Cal Performances at UC-Berkeley. There was a mention of discounts. Students–and I have a current ID–could get in for half. Good deal. Then I noticed a mention of “rush tickets.” If seats are still available, the box office will tell you two hours before curtain, and you can purchase them at a steep discount beginning an hour before the show. It turned out rush tickets were available, and I wound up sitting front row center, close enough to wonder whether the four actor balanced on a flimsy-looking wooden table might topple over into the audience.

I went alone since my would-be matinee companion decided other business pressed too hard to give up the entire afternoon to a gaggle of very thick Irish accents. After buying my ticket, we walked through downtown Berkeley running an errand or two before the show started. And that gave me the chance to hear a young guy selling a demo recording say to passersby, “Free CDs … free CDs. I’m trying to expose myself.”

The play? It was great to the point I hated to leave the theater afterward and stood watching the stage crew begin cleaning things up. (I had once wistfully thought of going to Ireland to see this company do the play after reading they were visiting the town in County Mayo that Synge visited before writing it. It was worth waiting for.) The production goes to Los Angeles now, and then to the Kennedy Center in Washington and the University of North Carolina. If it shows up in your town, go.

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Man for Our Times

Kate picked up an old copy of Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” from the Berkeley Public Library. She wants to read it because it’s the basis of a play a local group is putting on–“Ubu for President.” She was struck by the opening description of the title character. After a description of a marvelous American city called Zenith, a place “built … for giants,” Lewis introduces his protagonist:

“There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.

“His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay. ”

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Guest Observation: Tom Kettle

Two or three weeks ago in my Irish history class, we were going over the World War I years. One of the things the professor does is weave in poetry and song; he has even sung a song or two despite the palpable discomfort of many of his auditors. For the poetry, his habit is to declaim a stanza or two unless the piece is quite short. During the World War I lecture, he brought in a sonnet by a man well-known in Ireland but little known elsewhere: Tom Kettle.

Kettle was an Irish nationalist of the Home Rule stripe. Meaning: He hoped for an independent Ireland, but supported a campaign to create an Irish government that would still be part of the British Empire. Just as that goal was about to be realized, the European war broke out. When the fighting began, in August 1914, Kettle was in Belgium trying to buy guns for Irish nationalist militias. Instead, he spent several months helping the Belgians in their futile bid to hold off the German onslaught. Prompted largely by what he had seen, he volunteered for service in the British army when he returned home and recruited fellow Irishmen into the ranks. Among radical nationalists, who held to the age-old position that England’s difficulty was Ireland’s opportunity, Kettle’s position was akin to a sellout. When the nationalists launched the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Kettle was devastated; though in poor health, he asked for a front-line combat position. He was sent to France to join an Irish unit in the Battle of the Somme.

It was there that he wrote “To My Daughter Betty, The Gift of God”:

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime,
In that desired, delayed incredible time,
You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby’s throne
To dice with death. And, oh! they’ll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

The poem’s postscript reads: “In the field before Guillemont, Somme. September 4, 1916.” Kettle died leading his troops into action five days later.

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Guest Observation: Walt Whitman

From “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (part 6):

“I too lived—Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,

In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,

In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me.

“I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution;

I too had receiv’d identity by my Body;

That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body.”

***

That’s it. Except to say this passage has always said something to me about the purely physical part of our identity, the part that engages on a level that we’re only dimly aware of, the part that finds joy in something like running or cycling or walking long walks. The cognitive linguistics course I’m taking this spring, one of the ideas it promotes is that the language we use–especially the metaphorical language we use, sometimes to describe complex and abstract thoughts, experiences, and objects–comes straight out of our physical experience on a very basic level–both what we see and feel in the world and how our brains process it. Those last three lines from Whitman seem to come from the same place: He recognized his identity not just as his mind and thoughts but as something arising from the fact of his physical being amidst all the beings and things in the world.

***

And one last thing: Happy birthday, Ann!

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Guest Observation: The Vulnerable Spot

“The report of Ross’s death came over the telephone in a three-word sentence that somehow managed to embody all the faults that Ross devoted his life to correcting. A grief-stricken friend in Boston, charged with the task of spreading the news but too dazed to talk sensibly, said, ‘It’s all over.’ He meant that Ross was dead, but the listener took it to mean that the operation was over. Here, in three easy words, were the ambiguity, the euphemistic softness, the verbal infirmity that Harold W. Ross spent his life thrusting at. Ross regarded every sentence as the enemy, and believed that if a man watched closely enough, he would discover the vulnerable spot, the essential weakness. He devoted his life to making the weak strong–a rather specialized form of blood transfusion, to be sure, but one that he believed in with such a consuming passion that his spirit infected others and inspired them. Whatever it was, this contagion, this vapor in these marshes, it spread. None escaped it. Nor is it likely to be dissipated in a hurry.”

–E.B. White, “H.W. Ross”

In “Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976”

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Tree, Lights, Bells

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We’re late with the tree this year. Kate and I went out and bought it yesterday from a place on University Avenue run by a San Francisco outfit that tries to help our burgeoning population of ex-convicts stay straight. We didn’t decorate until tonight, though — late tonight.

(And now, it’s tomorrow already. Christmas Eve. On Saturday evening, I turned on an acoustic music show on one of the local FM stations, KALW, and there was a song about bells playing. Kate, hearing the word “tintinnabulation” recognized right away that the lyrics were from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells.” I thought, but didn’t say, that the singer sounded like Phil Ochs. We were both right. The poem and the song start with a lightness not often associated with Poe:

“Hear the sledges with the bells, Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars, that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells— From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

The poem gets darker as it goes along. The song is on iTunes. I want to say “amazingly, it’s on iTunes, but I guess it’s not so amazing anymore.)

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