Category: Literature

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‘Inimical Forces’

A while back, I mentioned a book I’d like to read: “The Greatest Battle,” by Andrew Nagorski. It’s an account of the battle for Moscow in World War II. Although several of the blurbs on the back cover describe the book as gripping, I’d say it’s deliberate and workmanlike, almost plodding. But Nagorski does a thorough job relating the story of the German invasion, the Soviet defense, and Hitler’s and Stalin’s roles in the disasters that befell both armies and the calamity that was visited on the Soviet Union first through Stalin’s policies of purge and terror and second through Hitler’s determination to destroy the nation and its political system. I’d say go find it used or borrow it from your library if you like military epics.

Nagorski does talk a lot about the scale of the killing in the German-Soviet fighting. Of course, the entire war involved killing on a fearsome scale. You can read through the numbers, but I don’t think there’s any way to comprehend them. I always find myself thinking about the events that led to the catastrophe, and my thoughts always settle on Hitler and how he was able to move an entire nation to start in on such an enterprise.

Earlier today, Kate was reading a book of short pieces E.B. White wrote for The New Yorker. She read several of them, all from the 1930s, aloud. Here’s one — The New Yorker holds the copyright — published two months or so after Hitler came to power in 1933. It was titled “Inimical Forces”:

“Einstein is loved because he is gentle, respected because he is wise. Relativity being not for most of us, we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison, who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult dark and the hope of penetrating it. Not long ago Einstein was here and made a speech, not about relativity but about nationalism. ‘Behind it,’ he said, ‘are the forces inimical to life.’ Since he made that speech we have been reading more about those forces: Bruno Walter forbidden by the Leipzig police to conduct a symphony; shops of the Jews posted with labels showing a yellow spot on a black field. Thus in a single day’s developments in Germany we go back a thousand years into the dark, while a great thinker, speaking not as a Jew but as a philosopher, warns us: these are the forces inimical to life.”

[The book: “Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976.” At Amazon and many other fine retailers.]

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Guest Observation: The Names of Things

From the “I Should Really Go to Bed” Department (Kate and the dog have gone off to sleep, and I’m sitting up here alone), there’s this nugget from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Too Many Names”:

“… When I sleep all these nights,

what am I named or not named?

And when I wake up who am I

if I wasn’t when I was asleep? …

“… I intend to confuse things,

to unite things, make them new-born,

intermingle them, undress them,

until the light of the world

has the unity of the ocean,

a generous wholeness,

a fragrance alive and crackling.”

The translation? It’s by Stephen Mitchell, who lives a few blocks from us, I hear. It’s in his book of selected Neruda poems, “Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon.”

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Today’s Top Research

My foray into matters of Irish Americana tonight has me reading about the Irish community, German Americans, and World War I. Yes: Irish Americans and German Americans made common cause to try to keep the United States out of the war. Ireland’s longstanding grievances against Britain motivated the Irish; support for the Fatherland inspired the Germans. I’ve found lots of interesting and informative stuff on the topic, but I wound up searching the New York Times archives for stories about William Jennings Bryan’s role as an advocate of U.S. neutrality.

I found one precious item from June 1915, a week or so after Bryan had resigned as secretary of State because he could see by President Wilson’s reaction to the Lusitania sinking that his argument didn’t stand a chance in the administration. The item is about a speech that Bryan was supposed to make in Chicago to the Sons of Teutons. The group had invited Bryan, thinking he would inveigh against U.S. ammunition shipments to Britain and France and renew his call for an embargo. But when the Sons of Teutons found out that Bryan instead intended to urge the warring parties to enter peace negotiations, they met him at the train station and said the speech was canceled. At least that was the Times’s version of events.

I came across a more recent item, too: a March 1967 piece by historian Barbara Tuchman (“The Guns of August,” etc.) published in The New York Times Magazine and titled simply, “How We Entered World War I.” I haven’t read Tuchman’s books for decades, but this article is a reminder of why her histories are so accessible: she was a great writer (and yes, a capable historian, too). I found this in her description of the American and German diplomatic struggle over limits to submarine warfare: “Each time during these months when the torpedo streaked its fatal track, the isolationist cry to keep Americans out of the war zones redoubled.”

“… The torpedo streaked its fatal track.” I’ll remember that one for awhile.

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Liberal Arts Tuesday

Ancient advice

Athena — “clear-eyed,” “her eyes glinting,” “brimming with indignation,” and in disguise — to Telemachus at the opening of “The Odyssey”:

“For you,

I have some good advice, if only you will accept it.

Fit out a ship with twenty oars,, the best in sight,

sail in quest of news of your long-lost father.

Someone may well tell you something

or you may catch a rumor straight from Zeus,

rumor that carries news to men like nothing else. …

Now, if you hear your father’s alive and heading home,

hard-pressed as you are, brave out one more year.

If you hear he’s dead, no longer among the living,

then back you come to the native land you love,

raise his grave-mound, build his honors high

with the full funeral rites that he deserves–

and give your mother to another husband.

“Then,

once you’ve sealed those matters, seen them through,

think hard, reach down deep in your heart and soul

for a way to kill these suitors in your house,

by stealth or in open combat. …”

— From the Robert Fagles translation (and for bonus points, the transcript of a 1997 Fagles interview on the PBS “NewsHour”)

Go Bears

“There’s an old folk saying, ‘Life’s a dream; please don’t wake me up.’ That’s how I feel about my life, my years at Berkeley. When I hear UC Berkeley denounced for lawlessness, debauchery, free thinking, subversion, harboring communists and radicals, exposing students to radical ideas— whenever I hear those charges made, that’s when you’ll hear me, wherever I am, shout: Go Bears!”

–Leon Litwack, UC Berkeley history professor, upon retiring from teaching last spring (and for bonus points, the alumni magazine, California, carried a couple nice pieces on Litwack this fall: one on his career and final lecture, one from a former student).

Book I Want Got

Greatestbattle

“The Greatest Battle.” A friend of ours once had a job that required him to travel to Moscow several times. He recalled a remarkable sight on the road into the city from the airport: a monument-sized tank trap, built to commemorate the Red Army’s last-ditch defense of the capital against Hitler’s army in World War II. The battle’s denouement is a martial epic, with the invaders on the city’s outskirts, below-zero temperatures, and a fierce counterattack by troops rushed thousands of miles from Siberia. I heard the author of the book on NPR today. He got access to Soviet sources, both documentary and human, that were off-limits to western historians until recently.

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Prose on His Birthday

A friend notes, by way of The Writer’s Almanac, that today is Dylan Thomas‘s birthday. If you’re not familiar with him, Thomas attracted wide notice at a very early age — he was barely 20 — and, thanks to radio, became something of a celebrity poet both in Britain and the United States. If for nothing else, you know him for the lines, “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage at the dying of the light.” But he was also a self-destructive alcoholic, and he drank himself to a very early grave. He wrote a poem marking his thirtieth birthday, and another marking his thirty-fifth; he was dead before his fortieth.

Anyway, my friend pulled out a copy of “Quite Early One Morning,” a collection of short Thomas pieces. She read a funny number he wrote about reading poetry aloud. She said it made her angry that he was just allowed to drink himself to death. Which made me think how his story might have played out today, assuming a poet of his stripe might still be considered a person of public note.

The picture that comes to mind is celebrity rehab; lots of relapses; lots of People and EW items on his case; maybe a feature or two cataloging the squalls between him and his wife, Caitlin (who wrote a memoir that has the aggrieved and enraged title, “Left-over Life to Kill”); you could even imagine the tabloid headlines: “Dylan: Blotto Again!” or “Caitlin Says, ‘I Hate You!’ ” But Dylan might live through all this, at least long enough to go on a fortieth or fiftieth birthday reading tour or to embarrass himself with an attempted hip-hop turn on the “People’s Choice Awards” (a New York Times reviewer asks, “What do people still see in this bloated, flabby lump?”; the Post is more concise, “Fat, Not Phat”). He might survive the “has-been rhymester” headlines long enough for the rehab to finally stick; and then, unsurprisingly given his religious Welsh upbringing, he’s born again and puts out a volume of Christian poetry (“Songs of Praise to Him Who Made Me”; example first line: “Go ahead, go gentle into that good night/Jesus is waiting with a shiny new night-light”); the reception among the literati is scornful; hard-core born-agains distrust his history of dissipation and foreign accent; but Dr. Phil sees an inspirational story, welcomes him into the fold for “getting real,” and “Songs” is launched onto the lower rungs of best-seller lists along with the latest Dan Brown and Suze Orman offerings. Then follows a popular autobiography, “Singing in My Chains,” a children’s book, “A Wale of a Poet,” and a concert tour with Sting and Bono. Alas, even in the company of such spiritually attuned and clean-living rockers, the lures of the road catch up to him. He disappears from his hotel suite after a sold-out Meadowlands show. The next day, a fan sells TMZ a video of Thomas downing shots at New York’s White Horse Tavern and boozily denouncing “that wanker Dr. Phil”; the poet is arrested for public indecency after urinating in the doorway of a Manhattan fire station; from a Riker’s Island jail cell he apologizes to his fans and Dr. Phil. He goes back into rehab. And, after a tearful confession of error on Oprah, gets a new book deal.

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[Bracketed]

Homer was “a living voice in firelight or in the open air, a living presence bringing into life his great company of imagined persons, a master performer at his ease, touching the strings, disposing of many voices, many tones and tempos, tragedy, comedy, and glory, holding his [listeners] in the palm of his hand.”

Today’s Writer’s Almanac says Robert Fitzgerald, who grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and became one of Homer’s great translators, said that. I love the quote (and Homer, too) of course, or I wouldn’t have quoted it.

But there’s a catch. There’s that bracketed word, [listeners]. You see the bracketed or parenthesized word in publications that are trying to make quotes clearer for readers; typically, an editor might come along and replace a pronoun (or nonspecific noun) with the person or thing to whom it refers: “Obama said he wasn’t worried by her lead in the polls” might become “Obama said he wasn’t worried by [Clinton’s] lead in the polls.” Or: “We never doubted we could beat them,” might become “We never doubted we could beat [the Cubs].”

Sometimes this is helpful. But some publications — like the San Francisco Chronicle — seem to have a mania for this kind of “clarifying.” Others, like The New York Times, appear to rely on a different method: making the context of the quote clear enough that the reader knows what the speaker is saying without the editor’s helping hand. I don’t think it’s a hard thing to do; it requires some thought, and it requires some trust in the reader’s intelligence.

Beyond the matter of whether the reader needs the editor’s guidance to get what the speaker is saying, there’s a serious issue here: journalists and scholars are under an obligation to use quotes accurately. They run the risk of interfering with a quote’s meaning and integrity when they substitute their own words for those of the speaker. (And yes, if the writer or editor must clarify a speaker’s meaning, there’s a tried and true way to do it without bastardizing a statement in quotation marks; it’s called paraphrasing.)

Let’s go back to the Writer’s Almanac quote from Fitzgerald. I’m looking at the phrase “holding his [listeners] in the palm of his hand” and trying to figure out what in the world [listeners] is standing in for. It can’t have been a pronoun — ”holding his he/she/it in the palm of his hand.” It’s unlikely to have been a derogatory term or inappropriate slang “holding his hoes and homeboys in the palm of his hand” (though who’s to say Homer didn’t do all that and more?). Maybe it was an ancient Greek or technical literary term that’s so far out there that we poor Writer’s Almanac readers would be stumped if we encountered it.

Thanks to the miracle of the Web, I was able to find the original Fitzgerald quote, which appears in “The Third Kind of Knowledge: Memoirs & Selected Writings.” If you leaf through the portions of the book available online, you’ll find that Fitzgerald does indeed use plenty of phrases straight out of the Greek to illustrate his points. I don’t have a clue to what he’s saying because, among other handicaps, I don’t know the Greek alphabet. Homer this, Homer that — I need an editor’s help to get what Fitzgerald is on about.

Now, here’s the quote The Writer’s Almanac doctored:

“A living voice in firelight or in the open air, a living presence bringing into life his great company of imagined persons, a master performer at his ease, touching the strings, disposing of many voices, many tones and tempos, tragedy, comedy, and glory, holding his auditors in the palm of his hand: was Homer all of this? We can only suppose he was.”

First, and this has nothing to do with word substitution, there’s a real question here whether The Writer’s Almanac has misquoted Fitzgerald. His description of Homer is not a declaration — Homer was all these things — but a question: was he all these things? And it’s not a question he poses idly: He goes out of his way to say that if Homer is all he is imagined to be, the notion is “astonishing, and it is difficult to believe it.” But let’s skip a joy-killing consideration of using quotes in context and go on to the main event.

The horribly difficult and arcane word that needed to be excised in favor of [listeners] was “auditors.” As if readers would stumble on that and picture a crowd of IRS field agents with briefcases instead of an audience. One thing The Writer’s Almanac editors ought to keep in mind the next time they’re faced with a word they think is too hard: Their audience, by virtue of even looking at the site or newsletter, has declared itself literate and willing to do the brain work necessary to understand a few tough words — even ones that you wouldn’t find in “The Pet Goat.”

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My Rights, Ably Defended

It’s sort of like Mao said: Free speech grows out of the barrel of a gun. The latest reminder comes from General David Petraeus (a.k.a., the Lafayette of Iraq), who responded to a negative ad from MoveOn.org this way:

“I’m not so sure the infamous MoveOn ad was smartly done, but I found Petraeus’s reaction today interesting: “Needless to say, to state the obvious, I disagree with the message of those who are exercising the First Amendment right that generations of soldiers have sought to preserve for Americans.”

A friend puts it better than me: “I grow so weary of that refrain, heard from the military any time any civilian even hints at criticizing these sainted men and women. If this stunningly stupid war had ANYTHING to do with preserving my right to free speech, I’d be a little more forgiving of the rhetorical ploy. But please, General, don’t insult me and don’t embarrass yourself.”

And the same also sends this, from Slate — “Lost Voices“:

“On Monday, while Gen. David Petraeus prepared to testify before two House committees about the successes of the surge, seven of his soldiers died when their transport vehicle overturned in a highway accident west of Baghdad.

“Two of those soldiers, Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, 26, and Sgt. Omar Mora, 28, were part of another group of seven—the seven noncommissioned officers of the 82nd Airborne Division who wrote a brave, well-reasoned op-ed in the Aug. 19 New York Times, calling the prospect of victory ‘far-fetched’ and appraisals of progress ‘surreal.’ ”

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Guest Observation: ‘A Provisional Perfect Freedom’

Bicycles in another context:

“The Cycle of Their Lives”

Eamon Grennan

(From “What Light There Is & Other Poems“; Copyright 1989, by Eamon Grennan)

“All day, now that summer’s come, the children

Drift by my window on their bicycles. Hour

After aimless hour a small bright school of them

Circles the block, nonchalant as exotic fish

That barely ruffle the avocado depths

Of a home aquarium. For the most part

Their pace is regular–pedalling the rise,

Cresting the turn, then floating dreamy-eyed

Back down. Without warning one will break

The circle, flash off on his own, on her own,

The way they’ll leave at last the homes

They’ll home to. If they see me staring

Out at them from behind this glass

They wave in passing–one hand jerky in air,

Eyes colliding with mine an instant–then

Steadying a slight wobble they resume their

Instinct’s occupation, drawing order from

The tangle of their lives. Morning to night

They’re at it, while the gold-spoked sun

Rides the blue rim of sky, and light sifts

Through the hushed underwater web

Of leaves, altering the air they swim in–

Silvergreen, oriole, buttercup, verdigris–yellow.

Come mealtimes, their dreaming spell

Is snapped by the cries of mothers; names

Ring around the neighborhood like bells, bringing

Each one headlong home. Indoors, they fret over

Vegetables, their propped bikes glittering

Against the steps and porches, the road

A pool of light and silence, the spangled

Green crosshatch of leaves hangs still. Soon

They are back in their kingdom, lord

Of all its lit dimensions, circling perpetually

The square. Given our condition, they fashion

A provisional perfect freedom, beautifully doing

Nothing, unravelling and ravelling themselves

In time, being only motion alone, savouring

The sweet empty presence of themselves

In sunlight. My own son is among them

Until grey traces of air and muffled light

Cling to his white t-shirt and he glows

Almost chromium or wild white rose. When I

Call him in at last, he glimmers away for one

More turn in watery dusklight, then freewheels

Slowly toward the garage dark, dismounts, lays

His bike aside. Grounded, he trudges through

Ankle-deep grass, talking in low tone

To his friends, who know their own time is

Almost come and cycle on, flickering

The way I’ve seen seagulls flicker, who call out

To one another as they wheel round the infinite

High reaches off the evening sky.”

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Poet Laureate of Decomposition

Happy birthday to the only poet (I’m confident) to have a garden fertilizer named after him. Yes, it’s Walt Whitman‘s day; born 1819; and some time long after, honored by a former UC Berkeley English lit student who started a designer dirt business called American Soil Products (now located up the road in Richmond). One of the company’s offerings is Walt Whitman Compost. Years ago, when I had occasion to write a Sunday business feature on American Soil for the late, lamented (by me) Hearst Examiner, I asked the owner how the compost got its name. Simple. A poem from “Leaves of Grass” called “This Compost.” Whitman contemplates how the earth has disposed of the dead, all “those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations; Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?” Then he continues:

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.