ANOTHER VERSION UNTOLD—YET

Funny how things happen, no? No sooner had I posted the introduction to my desire for a new version of part of the past, than the present and future caught up to me.

That is to say, the very next day two new projects appeared in my inbox that I can’t really turn down and, as these matters go, they require me to be responsible for my time to others. Then, too, I found myself avoiding the unpleasant (if I call myself a writer) evidence that I don’t really know how to tell the story I want to tell—an absence of technique, an inability to control tone, something.

Most problematic has been the problem of memoir’s effect on those involved in it. The issue is that although my wife told the story as she experienced it eight years ago in print, the idea of me writing about those days too painful for her even now. I’m not sure what I think about this kind of problem. I can understand an argument that holds that her writing was cathartic for her in difficult times (obviously true) but my writing is simply a reminder of those painful times. Her telling of the story her way serves to, if not erase, then mitigate the consequences of decisions I made, while my writing about those same decisions do not mitigate their consequences at all but are experienced as actions, as if saying what I did, and why, is the same as doing it all again.

Some of you have written to encourage me to keep going with my attempt; some of you praised my candor. I really appreciate those notes and so let me try to live up to their point: I am glad I don’t have to write this. Living it was hard and painful for many people I loved; for others, and for me, it was that but it was also liberating. Writers are supposed to know how to live with pain, to own it, as I have written before in this space, but I am not sure that the pain we cause others can or should be embraced or celebrated, even in pursuit of our own growth. Oh, in the abstract, as a matter of principle that we can sometimes pass off as necessity, yes; but not really in the lives of people we know and love.

Well, that’s it. I won’t write it. A friend of both of ours (maybe more a friend of mine, though she is very fond of Nan) has written saying she wants to write it. Maybe she will. I have no idea what she understands. If she does write the story, I’ll be interested to see what she thinks happened. Meanwhile, you can all go to Nan’s book for the most current version.

So, thank you and I hope I can keep up with this space while I get these other projects underway. If I skip a week, I know many if not most of you won’t really miss it, but if you do, just check back in from time to time. I’ll catch up.

ANOTHER VERSION

Version One: In June, 2002, after twenty-two years of marriage, I began dismantling it. Over the next two years, in fits and starts, I left my wife, alienated my children, and made most folks around me miserable; those that weren’t miserable were uncomfortable, to say the least. Then, in the spring of 2004, I came to my senses, left the young woman (37 years younger) for whom I had created this mess, and began a process of reconciliation with my wife that her best friends thought, I am sure, ill-conceived. This version is basically that described in my wife’s powerful essay, “Chapter Four You Break up: A Journal,” which she published in the book she edited in 2006, Cut Loose: (Mostly) Older Women Talk About the End of (Mostly) Long-Term Relationships (Rutgers University Press). I recommend that you get the book, not only for her essay but for the others therein.

Version Two: This version has yet to be written but will be pursued here. I undertake to do that because 2014 is the tenth year since my wife and I came together again after the events sketched out (somewhat one-sidedly) above. We have stayed together and it looks as though we will make it to the “natural” ends of things as we are both now in our seventies. I have wanted to give an account of those two difficult years from my perspective, not so much to correct “the record” (although some of that will be done) as to examine some assumptions and to give voice to experiences that have not, to my mind, found their way adequately before an audience.

 Preliminary: Before I start, I have to admit to some reluctance to take this on, for several reasons. One is that this blog has been considerably more personal already than I had intended it to be and I don’t want to seem self-indulgent or solipsistic. Another is that my wife’s essay is so well-written, so pitch-perfect in tone, and so painful (for me) to read, that I need to avoid any suggestion that I disagree with its fundamental evocations of loss and fear. How to write my own account with as much skill without seeming to be “answering” hers is daunting. And finally, I don’t know how much I want to say. I don’t want to open old arguments now long settled. I don’t want to force unwanted memories to the surface for my wife or my children (at least two of whom read this from time to time). Nevertheless, I want to try to do justice to those years, so let me begin, actually, near the end. One scene and then we will begin in earnest at the very beginning next time:

On the afternoon of March 9, 2004, Sue (a pseudonym) put the last of her things in the car she had borrowed from her brother. She took the comforter her mother had made for her to bring into our shared apartment and she took the new rice cooker. Except for a few books and clothes we had boxed up together, everything else had been taken away by her brother days ago, while I was at work. It was raining slightly, I think. Memory is tricky. Maybe it wasn’t raining; in literary studies we are told to beware the “pathetic fallacy,” that unfortunate tendency of the less-talented writer to make Nature respond to the protagonist’s emotional state. As a young student I was told to appreciate Flaubert if for no other reason than he made the sun shine and birds to sing at Emma Bovary’s funeral. Rain or no, we cried and then Sue left, as I had asked her to do. I never saw her again.

The Past is a Foreign Country

“THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY….”*

(*L . P. Hartley, The Go-Between 1953)

The old year closes, a new year looms. I start my 74^th year thinking about the previous 73. I come across L. P. Hartley’s observation, above. If the past were, really, a foreign country, how might we get there. The technology may be within our reach, if the folks at CERN are clever enough. But what about the bureaucracy of travel into the past? Let us consider…

L. P. Hartley

Burrow House

Lancashire

20033

Dear Mr. Hartley,

Thank you for inquiring about travel to Hastings for 1066. We have attached a list of small Saxon H&Bs in the area but if a hovel is not what you are looking for, there are some keeps and a few wattle and stick single occupancy huts still available for April.

If you don’t mind, we’d like to know what interests you in southern Angleond these days. We haven’t had much travel, although there has been an increase in cross-channel day trips of late. Yours is the first inquiry we’ve had from the twentieth century. Let me remind you that a visa is required for travel from any date later than 1105. Forms may be requested from Harald, Scribe, Weir-next-to-the-Suge-Brush, Essex 20012.

Hope to see you soon,

Aethelred the Ready (lol)

 ****************************************

Hon. Anthony Scalia

SCOTUS

Washington, DC 20543

Judge Scalia,

Matters here are running ahead of our ability to keep account but your request to attend the Constitutional Convention has been forwarded to me here in Philadelphia. As you may or may not know (I see your letter is dated January 1, 2014), 1787 has been an hectic year and to tell you the truth, our “national State Department” exists in name only; the “states” are fairly jealous of the right to control traffic in and out of their borders. So, if you wish to come to Philadelphia from 2014, I will have to ask you to submit proof that you are a white male landowner born on the continent of North America (excluding Canada and not in any land claimed by the French or Spanish crowns).  And could you perhaps give us some account of the origins of the name “Scalia”? You are not a Papist, are you? It would be good if you are a Quaker or a slaveholder in 2014.

As trade relations between the twenty-first and the eighteenth centuries are still in negotiation, I have to ask you the extent to which you intend to engage in commerce or labor while in the state and whether you intend to reside permanently. If the latter is the case, please give the names and addresses and titles of three (3) white male landowners who can sponsor your residency here.

Please apply for a visa for Pennsylvania, 18^th Century, tour or guest worker as the case might be, at our office in the National Archives, your city (Washington? Really!?) and include the information and documents requested.

Please study the enclosed list of items not provided by the state and come prepared.

Hasbrouck Hollingsworth

Sec’y to the Undersecretary for Foreign Times and Places

Pennsylvania

The United States of America (more of less—lol)

********************************************************************

Phillip Roth

c/o The Wylie Agency

250 W. 57^th street

Suite 2114

New York, NY 10107

Dear Mr. Roth:

I’m afraid this office must deny your request for a visa to conduct research for a novel in Newark, 1933-35. We are aware that you have visited Newark in memory several times but that is just not the same thing, as I can imagine you already understand. Merely remembering a time and place does not establish permanent residency or right to re-entry. You are no doubt aware of the “Madeleine” case (documents attached). I am sure if M. Proust can make do, so can you.

We do not like to appear arbitrary, so let me remind you that certain protocols were established between the twenty-first century and the twentieth century, protocols that are designed to protect, in this case, Newark during the Depression, from exploitation and from unanticipated claims on our already strapped resources. It IS the Depression, after all, and if every son and daughter of old Newark rushed back here just as soon as technology allowed, how could an already distressed infrastructure manage the increase in demand for services?

On a personal note, let me just say that I know your folks and I remember you from temple and I was disgusted that day on the bus with you and the baseball mitt. I am sure you must have retired by now; you should leave well enough alone.

Elizabeth Slipmann (I’m not laughing)

Assistant to the Supervisor

Port of Newark

New Jersey

AS IT IS CHRISTMAS WEEK

As it’s Christmas Week, it seems fitting to tell as much as I understand about my parents’ changing relationship to Jesus or Christianity or religion in general. It’s an unusual odyssey.

 They were both raised as Protestants, my mother from a long line of Methodists who brought their somewhat dour practices from Maine through Illinois into pre-Civil War Kansas. My father’s people were more fundamental in their beliefs, foreshadowing today’s evangelicals. They were poor white southerners the rigors of whose trek from 18^th century Georgia to early 20^th century Texas were ameliorated by a more demonstrative, Bible-centered belief.

 When they married, my father followed my mother’s Methodism and when I was born, albeit somewhat problematically and in a Roman Catholic hospital at that, it was into Methodism that I was baptized. I grew up, then, in a church-going family; we went together to Sunday morning services, Sunday evening services, and Wednesday night prayer meetings. I spent even more time at the church, whatever town we were in, at Methodist Youth Fellowship.

 In Shreveport, Louisiana, we attended Mangum Memorial Methodist Church and my father served on the Board of Stewards there when I entered high school. My mother taught adult Sunday School there and much of our social life revolved around relationships formed there. In my senior year of high school, however, my parents left Methodism.

 I had already decided I was an atheist but my parents were not interested in my arguments about the existence of God. Theirs was a social problem, a very real social problem. Sometime in 1957, two Black families appeared at the church to worship. They asked to enter and to join the membership of the congregation. This was still the Jim Crow South and our church was made up of white, mostly lower middle class and working class strivers, men and women unsure of their own place in a changing America. The Board of Stewards met and denied the Black families’ request and added a section to the church’s bylaws that not only set down a rule of segregation but suggested in its rhetoric that African Americans were not fit for God’s love.

My father was angered by this and resigned. My mother was less incensed (she had voted for Strom Thurmond on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, but that sort of political and racial myopia was pretty much in her past by 1957; she had resisted efforts by the local White Citizens’ Council to organize teacher resistance to desegregation in the school for the deaf where she was, at that time, an uncredentialed but skilled teacher) but she supported my father’s decision even though it sundered almost all of their  social ties in the neighborhood.

They had other friends, however, John Wray and Margaret Mary Young in particular, who supported them. John Wray was the director of the local little theater group to which my mother had dragged my father two years previously as she rehearsed a small role she had got. As it turned out, they both became stalwarts of the theater and acted in almost every production for John Wray. They also became quite close to the Youngs and when Dad told John Wray and Margaret about his decision to leave Mangum Church, they, Roman Catholics, invited my parents to come to church with them. Before long, my parents began to take instruction in the Church and formally converted just after I graduated from high school. Their respective families were surprised and disappointed. My maternal grandmother told my mother’s siblings that my mother had “turned” Catholic.

 They remained in the Church for many years, as their fortunes ebbed and flowed. My father loved the ritual and the physical beauty of the church but my mother was only lukewarm. The reason, I have come to believe, was that the church was too institutional and too much focus was on the priest, not enough on my mother. I know that sounds like a harsh evaluation, but subsequent religious events may support my sense of things.

Many years passed and one year, when my parents were almost desperately poor and caring for my mentally ill aunt in Denver, my father decided to go up into the Rockies with some Jesuits for a retreat to seek guidance, to make a novena, a specifically targeted series of nine prayer regimens. When he returned, he had no precise plan but felt God had heard his request. My mother assured him that indeed He had and she knew just what was to be done. While he was gone, she had met a woman who introduced her to Buddhism and in a few short, intense days she had decided that their lives would change if they embraced Buddhism. That, she convinced my father, was God’s plan.

 My parents remained practicing Buddhists until their deaths. I told them that I hoped this would be their last conversion because the only step left was some sort of pure evanescence, some translation of selves into essential smoke. My mother did not think that was funny; in fact, she was quite angry with any of us (me, wife, children) who would not follow her into the Lotus Sutra and she would cry and express her sense of filial betrayal when I would refuse to teach my children her beliefs or let her do so. I know she did so despite my disapproval.

 My sense of my mother’s religious practice was its centeredness on her presence. Somehow she appropriated every part of the ceremony and it was her performance of it that was crucial to its authenticity. Every refusal to participate was not a loss to the reluctant one but a betrayal of her; if you did not accept her offering of this treasure, then she was diminished, invalidated. She was trapped and yet owned her own trap.

My father, I came to see, took the path of least resistance, as he often did, and practiced with her, celebrating her excesses of piety but shrugging ruefully to me on my visits home when I asked if he were happy in his belief. So when he came to die, I was not surprised that my father asked me to see to it that he had a Roman Catholic death—priest, last rites, a funeral mass. He missed the Church, he told me, had never lost his affection for it, and had tried to make my mother happy by following the forms she set for their Buddhism but at heart, at 84 he was the Roman Catholic he had become at 39. He told me he had told her this just that day and I promised I would talk to her about it.

 My mother assured me she understood my father’s feelings and so I left Kansas and returned to New York. A week later he was dead. I returned to Kansas with my family and found, of course, that there were no priests, there had been no last rites, and there was to be no funeral mass. She had no intention, my mother told me, of letting a priest anywhere near my father.

 I confess that I did not make an issue out of any of it. After all, as an atheist, I realized there were no consequences to any of these decisions. As my father was dead, he most certainly was not disappointed and the Buddhist ceremony was no more exploitive by my mother than many other of her religious impositions on us all. As for the competition among the gods for my dead father’s soul? It already belonged to my mother.

 Too grim, so let me say that I enjoy Christmas, enjoy the memories of crèches and carols and trees and I do not feel conflicted about having those memories. 

Race, Class, Family in the Movies

The closing a month ago of the Broadway stage version of John Grisham’s novel, A Time to Kill, as well as the recent wave of films starring the reconstituted Matthew McConaughey, bring to mind some strange correspondences between the dramatization of that novel and an iconic movie from the 1940s:

Those old liberal softies Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, were probably grinning in paradise as they read accounts of the attempts to make a stage vehicle out of John Grisham’s entry in the “sensitive white man in Mississippi saves the Negro race” narrative sweepstakes, A Time to Kill. Maybe there is a heavenly version of Netflix and they even got a chance to stream the 1996 movie version, anticipating each echo.

After all, the writers and producers of ATtK (both versions) simply took the premise, conflict, and climax from one of Gordon and Kanin’s finest comedies to build their own scripts. Give up? It’s Adam’s Rib, the 1949 classic starring Katherine Hepburn in the Matthew McConaughey role of liberal defender, Spenser Tracy in the role of the DA with political ambitions taken over by Kevin Spacey in ATtK, and Judy Holliday in the shooter’s role taken by Samuel Jackson in the film.

Those of you who are insomniacs will remember that in AR, Holliday shoots Tom Ewell who was cheating on her, Hepburn takes her case while film hubby Tracy is assigned to prosecute it, and in the film’s climax Hepburn delivers a clever summation that wins the day and the case. Along the way we learn that Holliday planned her assault and knew what she was doing, that Hepburn intends to plead her as temporarily insane, and that there is an issue at stake larger than the issues of fact in the case: the unequal treatment of women before the bar.

In ATtK, Jackson shoots two men who have raped and almost killed his 10-year old daughter, McConaughey takes the case although he is lined up against a spineless judge and a conniving DA, and in the film’s climax delivers a clever summation that wins the day and the case. Along the way we learn that Jackson planned his assault and
knew what he was doing, that McConaughey plans to plead him temporary insanity, and that there is an issue at stake larger than the issues of fact in the case: the unequal treatment of Blacks before the bar in Mississippi.

There are other fascinating little parallels, most of them attributable to conventions of film plotting: in both films the defense lawyer and spouse separate because of the stresses of the case; in both films a feckless and entertaining comic relief who drinks a lot provides companionship to the defense; in each film a brief romantic moment looms on the horizon but is rejected by the defense.

But the most fascinating parallel has the most interesting implications for the representation of how the law is portrayed in American popular culture. It involves a basic conflict in legal ethics: in any given case, may a lawyer place her belief in a cause over and above her client’s case. In AR, Hepburn comes to realize that she must find
a way to free her client. Originally, her interest was in the larger political implications of the case, which she saw as embodying the sexual double standard as it was applied in the law: no man, she knew, would go to jail for doing what her client had done. The case offered her an opportunity to showcase women’s inherent
constitutional right to all justice, however twisted it might be; if men could assault for love’s sake and go free, so could women. But although Hepburn’s cause could be served just as well, if not better by Holiday’s conviction, an argument by Tracy reminds her that as a lawyer, she cannot put a cause before the welfare of her client.

McConaughey’s problem in ATtK is identical to Hepburn’s and his position in the problem is similar but also different. There is a certain amount of bravado in both characters’ decisions to take the case, youthful in his and messianic in hers, and a certain affection for publicity in each’s early pursuit of their clients’ interests. But the over-investment in the cause Jackson represents is not McConaughey’s, despite the fact that he took the
case to expose the problem of justice for Blacks in Mississippi, but that of the NAACP and a local Black minister. Together, Jackson and McConaughey fend off an attempt by the NAACP to co-opt the case with its own lawyer, one who, it is hinted, would be willing to let Jackson get the chair if it suited the political moment.
Nevertheless, the cause has its own life and drives actions outside the courtroom that have effects on McConaughey’s efficiency in the  case as riots and racial conflict as well as motives of revenge bring the KKK into town and into the case. When both sides have rested, McConaughey, as was Hepburn in her case, is far from a victory and he has no new ideas. It looks as though the cause will be served by Jackson’s conviction.

Hepburn’s summation is clever and blithe, until she turns to the narrative device she has fashioned to win the case for her. She abandons the insanity plea; she abandons the apotheosizing of women every bit the equal of men in public and private life. Instead, she asks the jury to listen again to the story of the spurned and
heartbroken spouse, the heartless lover, the straying marriage partner but this time, she insists, the jury must look closely at the defendant and at the victim and at his girlfriend and imagine them changed! Imagine them, she insists, as a heartless male home wrecker, a bored, straying wife, and a jealous husband with too much honor and a gun. As she does this, film magic turns Holliday into a middle-aged man, Ewell into a homely woman, the girlfriend into a handsome rake. The lesson is driven home and the jury acquits Holliday because they have seen her as a man in their mind’s eye, with a man’s prerogative of honor.

McConaughey’s summation is absent any ornamentation. He declares that he is abandoning his prepared summation to tell a simple story. He asks only that the members of the jury close their eyes while he does so, and that they listen closely. The jury complies and McConaughey tells a story of brutal rape and torture of a small girl
by two men, of their attempts then to hang her and of her body thrown from a bridge to a creek bed 30 feet below. Imagine all of this, he asks, and then, imagine the child white. The lesson is driven home and the jury acquits Jackson because they have seen him and his daughter as white, for one moment, and realized that they would have done exactly as he had done, had they been in his place.

I have no insider’s knowledge that the writers and producers of ATtK dug up an old print of AR and sketched their outline from there. There may be good reasons why issues of inequality before the law almost cry out for race and gender border-crossings, for exercises in the development of moral imagination. It is certainly the case in
both of these examples that the judge would have been quite justified in criticizing the jury for its failure to adhere to the points of law he had laid out for them. Both films, it must be noted, leave a close observer with the impression that a lot of legal work can go down the drain in a hurry if one lawyer shows up for closing arguments with a better narrative hook than the other has at hand. And this is despite the common legal wisdom that most
cases are won or lost in the opening statement, not in the summation, Johnny Cochran’s performance in the “O. J. Case” notwithstanding.

The films do part company, however, at the point of just how much ambiguity the law will be allowed to tolerate. In the 1949 film, Tracy is allowed to lecture Hepburn several times on the absolute solidity of the law as a response to human behavior. Assault is assault, whoever attempts it. In one of the longest denouements ever filmed, after he has lost the case Tracy surprises Hepburn from whom he has separated as she is fending off the advances of their
feckless neighbor. Pulling a pistol from his coat, Tracy pretends to be on the verge of homicide when Hepburn argues that he has no right, that no one has the right to take the law into his own hands. Tracy smiles, places the weapon in his own mouth and… bites off the barrel of his licorice-flavored .38 police special. Having fallen into his trap, Hepburn still refuses to apologize for having lured the jury into what was patently an act of jury nullification and the couple squabbles on to the end of the film until tax law reunites them. But the forces of case law win
over those of cause law rhetorically.

In ATTK, however, the denouement is a simple visit by McConaughey to Jackson’s house for a cookout. There is no insistence in the film that McConaughey’s appeal to the moral imagination of the jury, causing them to ignore the legal definitions given them that would determine Jackson’s sanity under the law, is in any way to be deplored or guarded against. The “Tracy” arguments from AR are given early in this film to Spacey, in whose character’s mouth the very word “justice” must sit like a cheap cigar, and the film never even bothers to answer him, except with the verdict of the climax. Even McConaughey’s wife, in a partial “Tracy” space, returns to him and forgives him for spending too much time on the case, absolving him and the verdict itself by telling him that he took the case because if their daughter had been the victim, she knows, he would have killed those men himself.

What has changed in sixty years? Have we come to accept that the law is not what Tracy saw it to be, a rock of surety in a sea of complex social relationships, but rather another narrative of our life, with its own aporia, its own conventions, its own highly-developed tolerance for ambiguity? Gender/race, case/cause, law/fact, story/story, options and choices all the way around? But did we believe, sixty years ago, that gender was a social construction? Do we believe now that race is so? Do the dramatists, stage or film, rightly assume we accept race/gender transgressions for the right cause? If the story is good enough? Or maybe it’s something else.

Maybe the mechanism of AR were appealing to the producers of ATkK because the films are really about the same thing, seen through the lens of the law, but still seen the same. Maybe the films are both about family, for one. Both defendants were on trial for acts they undertook in defense of family; the subplots of each were about the
families of the lawyers, at the end of each film the defendants are reunited with the loving members of their families, just as, in the denouements, the lawyers are reunited with their families. And here the differences are informative. The gap between Hepburn and Holliday, class, is larger than their gender affinity can bridge. After the trial, Holliday, et al, vanish from the screen and we are treated to another quarter hour of Tracy and Hepburn making up. But the gap of race between McConaughey and Jackson, so carefully limned by Jackson when he tells McConaughey that he wanted him for his lawyer because McConaughey was one of “them,” a white man, and a
racist by default, may be bridgeable, if the film has its way. When Jackson says McConaughey and he aren’t friends, don’t live in the same part of town, that their kids don’t play together, he challenges the fiction of equality even under a system of law. He impresses us with the fact that law is just one more story about how folks live, and maybe not the most accurate one. So he wants McConaughey because he figures McConaughey knows what kind of story a white man would want to hear to let Jackson go free. And he needs McConaughey as a lawyer because it has to be a story told within the conventions the law privileges.

Jackson has no illusions, about whites or about law; McConaughey has no illusions either, but neither has he any insight, until Jackson explains things to him. So, in the film’s final scene, when McConaughey, his wife, and his
daughter drive up to the cookout going on at Jackson’s house, they are clearly not invited guests. There is some momentary confusion, but they have brought some strawberry shortcake for the table and McConaughey says he brought his daughter so she could play with Jackson’s. Families, smiles all around; pull back, fade out.

Class insurmountable in 1949; race transposable in 1996/2013; families reconfigurable always. Class in 1996/2013? The dead rapists were white-trash morons. The film doesn’t even make a half-hearted gesture to them or their families. Family ties there lead only to the Klan, violence, and lawlessness. McConaughey is “U” to be sure,
blond, fit, handsome, married to a sorority girl. And McConaughey has legal class as well; he’s the protégé of a famous old civil rights activist whose practice he has taken over and whom he considers to be his father in every way but blood. Even the mystery girl of the picture is upper-class. She appears out of nowhere, a
third-year Harvard law student, a genius whose father is filthy rich. She has come because she heard about the case and wants to assist, without pay, of course, because, has she mentioned it, her father is famous and rich. Needless to say, she is beaten by the worthless surviving brother of one of Jackson’s victims.

In Hollywood, and in at least some instances on Broadway, social justice is a zero sum game. Poor woman defendant, rich woman lawyer. They meet on the relatively level playing field of the court, but not outside of it. Poor white trash or poor Black worker. Rich white folks can’t save them both. So these are really two/three versions of the same film, and they’re not that different, even with sixty years between them. Americans still cling to family and class and still love to tell stories about both, in the movies, on the stage, and in the courts.

There are no Metaphors for Pain

There are no metaphors for pain

Pain is our cabin
our table
the paper we take up
the pen point
the so dark ink
the tear that falls at
the end of this line.

Our
words
ride on pain
harness it
force the bit into its mouth and
jerk its savage head
from side to side until it goes where we want it
to go.

We ride pain
late into the night
until it drops from
weariness
at our insistence that it talk to us
as it runs under our strong hands.

We need no metaphor for pain
we poets.

We own it

THAT NIGHT WE DIED (well, one of us)

THAT NIGHT WE DIED (well, one of us).

THAT NIGHT WE DIED (well, one of us)

Reading a book review in this Sunday’s New York Times (Jane Smiley on Ronald Frame’s Havisham), I was struck by the thought that I had almost killed my mother. What is compelling about the thought, for me, is not the expected; after all, I’m not talking about homicide. No, it’s the reversal. You see, I was born dead in a Catholic hospital. That’s the way I’ve always understood the story.

Her pregnancy had not been a particularly difficult one physically, but my mother had had a hard time emotionally over the nine months. She and my father had been married for two years before she became pregnant, unusual for young couples at the tail-end of the Depression. She had, by her account, enjoyed those two years; they were an attractive couple and had a good time going to dances and bars. (One night, three years before they were married, they had gone to a dance marathon over in Bossier City and found themselves sitting in the same bleacher seats around the dance floor with Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Later that night, Barrow and Parker were shot to death on a country road by deputies. My father told me he recognized Barrow because one of Barrow’s gang was the son of a friend of my grandfather and they would come by the house late at night to buy the bootleg hooch my grandfather made.)

My mother was what we might today call a narcissistic personality. She not only enjoyed being at the center of things, she was, as far as her sense of responsibility to the world around her was concerned, the center of things. Going from favored youngest daughter  to adored wife was just fine for her (although she didn’t enjoy having been upstaged by the baby brother that came along ten years into her reign, thirty-five years after my grandmother had given birth to her first child). Her own baby business was another matter and the build-up to my appearance was fraught with depression and anger. Physically, matters were complicated by a thyroid deficiency which added to her weight gain, no small problem for a vain girl just turned twenty, and a car accident in her eighth month scared both her and my dad.

But the real problem was the physical reality of me. Somehow, I got caught in the canal and my shoulder was misaligned. Even more dire was the fact that I had an unusually large head. That night hours went by and I am sure we both suffered a great deal. Finally, forceps were used with only one thought, to get me out in whatever condition. And they did. The forceps tore a long gash from my chin to my forehead on the right side, ripping through my mouth, my cheek, my eyebrow and into my skull. A similar path, somewhat smaller, was traced on the back of my head. My left shoulder was twisted toward my chest. And I was dead. The surgical nurse put my body in a basin and returned to the operating table. The problem was to stop my mother from bleeding to death or dying of shock.

At that moment, one of the nursing supervisors came in. She had heard there were problems. “The child is dead,” said the doctor. “We’re trying to save the mother.” The priorities here are important, I think. This was 73 years ago in a Catholic hospital. Policy was then, as perhaps now in some places similar, to concentrate on saving the life of the child, even at the cost of the mother’s life. Only when I was pronounced dead could attention be redirected toward my mother….well, I suppose at that point she wasn’t my mother because there was no “me” in specific terms.

I don’t know what was done to save her, but it was done. I was, for the moment, a footnote. But the nursing sister picked up the basin with me in it and walked out of the operating room to an adjacent one. There she slapped me around, breathed into my lungs, massaged my chest, and I came alive. The rest, as they say, is history.

But I’m intrigued by the possibilities for writing history that escaped us all that night. What if I had stayed dead and my mother had survived? Would she have eventually had a child? She never had another after me. And if she had died and I had lived? How would my father have coped with the loss and the responsibility? Who would have loved him, raised me? What if we both had died? What would he have done? Where would he have gone? It strikes me, for example, that without a wife and child he would have been moved up in the draft and instead of going off in 1945, arriving off the shore of Japan to await the invasion only to witness the cataclysms that were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he might have died himself at Normandy or in the Ardennes. And me, what about me, the one who died and came back to life? I’ve been pretty ok most of my life. I’m considered smart by some. But what about all those minutes (how many?) of no oxygen? How many brain cells did I lose? Would I have been brilliant? What did I forfeit? Or, maybe, the effect is the reverse. What if I am only as smart as I can manage to be because of some rearrangement of my brain cells that early morning of December 28, 1940, some synaptic reshuffling so I could play with a full deck, some lucky roll of the dice that came up seven, for the moment?

I’m not sure she ever forgave me for almost killing her, my mother. Then again, I’m not sure she ever forgave me for surviving. I think there is nothing a narcissist hates more that sharing the universe. But such thoughts might be unfair to her. “Hate” is probably too strong a word for what I think she felt over the years. I, and my father, were just obstacles in her daily struggle to reveal herself to the world, to have it pay attention. To her, adoration was a zero-sum game.

What I Owe Two Men

Thanksgiving’s here and some important things are going on. My son is getting married and he’s probably losing half of his business at the same time, closing one of his restaurants before he loses them both. It’s a dicey dance, the pivot from getting out to getting in. Meanwhile, I head toward my 73rd birthday. Despite the economic confusion and social/political anomie besetting the rest of the country entering 2014, I am ok. Not that I am without regrets, but they are of the woulda-coulda-shoulda varieties. If I choose, I can address some of them in the fifteen or so years I see ahead of me. If I don’t—well, that’s on me, isn’t it?

That I am in this position is a consequence of more than a few variables and one or two seemingly fixed properties. The fixed properties are something like a goodly store of basic intelligence and a surprisingly good memory. I did nothing to acquire them nor do I “deserve” them in any micro-or macro-historical sense. The variables are similarly arbitrarily factored in. For example, my second marriage, difficult as it has been, put me daily in the presence of a woman who is a model of discipline and rigor. These two qualities were obviously lacking from my makeup until I hit my late thirties and met her. I’d say, in passing, that I got the better of the deal on this because what now work as “virtues” for me were and remain obsessions in her. I wish I could lighten her load a bit, but after 30 years I see that’s just not in the cards.

But all that I have learned from her would be useless to me were it not for decisions made by two men. Each in his own way made it possible, most likely probable, that “history” would turn in my favor. I think each knew that.

In the summer of 1957, when I was sixteen, between my junior and senior years in high school, I served an apprenticeship with my father. He was forty, a veteran of the Second World War, who had turned down a commission and the GI Bill’s education benefits to get back to his job in the glass factory. By 1957 he was beginning to feel the consequences of those decisions. The job he had, industrial glass cutting, no longer exists, all the men so employed having long since been replaced by machines. It was a physically hard job and mentally exhausting. It was also dangerous. A glass cutter worked in an open stall roughly ten by eight feet “square.” In front of him was a waist-high table about eight feet long and almost two yards deep, covered in green felt. A rule ran the length of its near and far edges. To start the day carters brought a stack of ten to twenty plate glass sheets, each roughly ninety by forty inches, and stood them on end along the wall of the stall to the right of a right-handed cutter. On the table would be a sheet of paper with the orders for the day. The company might want 100 “lights” of glass 9 x 12 and 50  of 10×14 and so on. The cutter’s job was to extract from the raw sheets the sizes and quantities of the order. Besides the obvious visual imagination called for, the job required a kind of judgment that only experience could provide: each sheet of raw glass was flawed by stones left unmelted in the furnaces and blisters caused by an uneven draw. The cutter had to find those specific lights around and between the blisters and stones pitting the glass he was given. A very small stone here or one blister there might pass but the inspector, who came around regularly throughout the day, could reject some or all of a pack of ten lights, a fate called “rammycacking.” Since the cutter was paid on a piecework basis, he could ill afford a half-morning’s work thrown into the scrap bin at the left of his stall to be taken back to the furnaces and melted down.

This mental strain, the constant demands of instinct and judgment, was in addition to the physical strain.  Glass is heavy and a sheet of glass 90 by 40 is very heavy. The cutter would turn to his right, facing the stacked glass and take one sheet in his hands, about halfway up its length. He would lift the sheet and turn to face the table, the glass between him and the table edge. He would then turn the sheet ninety degrees to the right so that his hands were at the top and bottom of the now horizontal sheet. Lifting with his bottom hand, his right, and loosening the fingers of his left hand at the top of the sheet, he would then flip the sheet of glass into the air ever so slightly so that it would fall exactly flat on the felt top of the table. From there he could begin to cut.

Most cutters were wounded men. Everyone I knew had scars on their hands, faces, or arms. Some has lost an eye, a finger or two, a couple of toes. There was safety equipment but not everyone wore it and in my father’s day men of the generation prior to his had worked without much gear at all, through the Depression and the war and some even before that. The trade had come to America in the late 19^th century with Belgian glass makers and most older cutters had names like Desire and Hermes and LaBenne. Since this was a guild trade, most entered by serving apprenticeships with their fathers or brothers or uncles. A few, like my father, had been “adopted” by single men with no families. The man who took my father in had lost a hand to the glass and worked with a two-fingered metal claw that was fitted with rubber tips. A safety-conscious cutter wore a thick leather apron that covered him from his chest to just below his knees. He wore steel-toed work shoes, thick leather gloves, and padded cotton sleeves set with steel grommets that reached and covered his shoulders. Most wore a cap of some kind. You can imagine how hot this outfit was in the summertime. That we lived in Louisiana that summer made it even worse. That is why some of the younger cutters worked stark naked beneath the equipment. Walking down the workroom past the stalls where the men faced their tables and turned their backs on the world was quite an experience.

Once the cutter faced the glass on the table, the game was on. The cutting tool was an industrial diamond set to the precise angle in the tip of a cartridge held in a beveling clamp at the end of a small rod. The length of the rod and the swiveling clamp allowed the cutter to set the right attitude of his draw down the glass, from the far edge of the table toward him at the near edge. And so it went, for eight hours a day: lift, turn, turn, flip, measure, cut, pray for the best. Radios played, men sang, told jokes and stories, cursed the inspector. This was the world I thought I wanted to enter.

It took some convincing to convince my father to take me on, as he had done both his younger brothers in the past, but many of the sons of my father’s friends were starting, boys I knew from high school and from years of company softball games and picnics. It was almost a rite of passage, I suppose. My father eventually gave in and one morning in June of 1957, union card in my pocket, badge on my ball cap, apprenticeship book in hand, I walked with my father through the factory gates. I have to tell you that I loved it, for all the boyish-mannish reasons you can think of. I loved watching my father work. He was a patient teacher by example and instruction. He was well-thought of by his comrades and moved with ease through the factory. We sweated through the summer together and as school approached I asked him how the apprenticeship worked in the school year. Only then did he tell me that I would not be coming back. He had let me work with him because he knew it was necessary for my growing up, but he said it was not necessary that he deceive me. He told me that he knew I thought glass cutting was a good job but he wanted me to know that it was not.  Piece work pay for a dangerous job was the worst kind of life. The job was seasonal, as well, a fact that I had understood as we moved around the country year after year, from factory to factory, chasing open furnaces and unfilled orders, but I had no idea what that meant financially, he said. I remembered nights we had slipped out of town a car length ahead of the landlord—or the sheriff, probably. There had been a few flush periods, a few months at a time. Once we had owned a house, but once we had lived in a three-room shack with no hot water and a bathroom shared with the people next door. I don’t know if my father thought of himself as a happy man, a fortunate man. He seemed so to me. But by many measures his life was hard and worrisome and unrewarding. Whatever was the case, he did not want any of it for me. “You’re going to college,” he said. And I did.

In the spring of 1972, George Worth called me into his office. George Worth was chair of the English Department at the University of Kansas where I was a graduate student. That semester I had finished my orals and writtens and had drafted the prospectus for my dissertation. My plan was to refine the draft and start researching and writing in the fall while I taught Freshman-Sophomore English as a senior assistant instructor. It was how it was done there. Three, maybe four years stretched out in front of me, years of teaching and writing and enjoying one of the best kept secrets of academia: the pleasures of life in Lawrence, Kansas, university town par excellence. Then, as the script went, I would apply for assistant professorships all over the country, take just such a job somewhere in a small town, start smoking a pipe, and settle in to a storybook life. I was already married and had three kids and a house. Like my father, I was a veteran. I had gone to college, married, joined the Air Force, gone to war, got out and, unlike my father, had taken the GI Bill and headed off to graduate school in pursuit of a PhD. While in graduate school I bought a house and we adopted a son, a young prince to be spoiled by his two sisters who had come along biologically some years before. My daughters were in grade school and my wife worked at the university library. Lawrence was inexpensive, safe, and comfortable. One could live there on two small salaries and, in fact, many doctoral students stayed forever, never completing their formal work toward a degree, content to be of the university and the town.

So, my father had been right, although I missed the masculine world of the factory; the Air Force had filled that gap a bit, but the Officers’ Mess is not the same as the factory floor. Neither was my carrel in the stacks of the library anything like my father’s work stall; it was smaller and darker and lonelier. Academic life is an exercise in delayed gratification; its pleasures are a long time coming and even then are few and far between. But if you are fit for it, its rewards are satisfying and the excitement of ideas is every bit equal in value in the search for a good life as the sense of a cut well-placed across an expanse of clear glass or the feeling of release that comes on disconnect after a mid-air refueling at 35,000 feet. What separates a life of scholarship from the factory and the flight line is its solitude. In the humanities, ironically, the creation of new knowledge is undertaken alone, in isolation from your peers for hours every day. Decisions are made alone, attempts at meaning are crafted alone, failure is absorbed alone. So it was that George Worth’s act of singular kindness stands out for its very performance.

Professor Worth had just returned from a national meeting of chairs of departments of English when he asked me to drop by his office. I did not know him well, had taken no course from him. Because I was a bit older than the other students, I had chaired the graduate student organization and sat on a few committees in the department, this, of course, being the new egalitarian Seventies on campuses everywhere. As a consequence of all this, I knew him, but only at a distance. Graduate students were, then as now, still mendicants, seeking knowledge and comfort where they could, one course after another, until finally they were allowed to form a dissertation committee. This group of faculty would, in theory, guide the student through the writing of his dissertation. In fact, it was usually only the chair of the committee who had anything like a real power to shape the thesis. This person was usually the man or woman with whom the student had taken the most courses or the latest course in a given specialty. Some such relationships were good, and some, too many, were not. But George Worth was not on my committee and I had never been in his office on personal business of any kind. I had no idea what he wanted to see me about.

The gist of his desire to see me was simply that he had become convinced that there would be no jobs for new PhDs in our field for years to come after the next year. He had never, he said, wanted to send his department’s students on to the job market without their having finished their dissertations but he was, he said, almost certain that these were extraordinary times. I haven’t any idea how many of us he warned, I think none but me, actually, and I am not sure why he singled me out. It was clear to me, however, that I was at risk. I had three children and I had not written one word of my dissertation. What if I never found a job?

That semester I sent out 150 letters of application. Some of the jobs I applied for seemed to fit like a glove, if I had actually had a degree, but many were shots in the dark. The return on my effort was startling. Without a word to show except a hastily drafted proposal, I got seven interviews and three and ¾ job offers. I took one, the one in New York. (The fractional offers—not part-time positions but offers tendered yet at the same time withheld—deserve their own little stories). The next year, and for almost a decade thereafter, the market for PhDs in English dried up and half  of a generation of scholars was lost.

I went to New York, stayed there, got tenured, got promoted, eventually retired. Had it not been for George Worth, none of that would have happened, I’m sure. The strange thing is that, except for formal occasions and the annual holiday party, I never spoke to George Worth again. We would pass in the hallway during the year before I left and he would smile and nod and I would smile and nod. He was a pleasant man but unknown to me, really. And me to him, I am sure. What kindness prompted him to call me that day?

So, two men told me, don’t stay; go. Go now while you can. Knowing when to leave seems to be the trick. But then, knowing when to stay might be harder. I wish I really knew. I’m thankful, nevertheless.

Setting the Record Straight

There was an email/post/blogpoint going around for a while that captured the essence of the Culture Wars. It purported to be a history of the world in the telling of which “conservatives” had done or invented everything of value and “liberals” had contributed only the irrelevant or the exploitive. When it first appeared, many “liberals” tried to argue with it, point by point, saying, “No, we didn’t!” But there is no point arguing with satire. I mean, one can just state the truth and hope for the best. For instance, here is how things REALLY happened:

WORLD HISTORY 101

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:

1. Liberals, and

2. Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement. To wit, after drinking a lot of beer and eating a lot of meat, many men would pass out or throw up and then pass out. When they woke up, many found that other men had taken their stuff and run off with their women. So, they founded “conservatism,” a movement to conserve what they had got while they drank and passed out. “Property” became the foundation of this movement–what I have is my property and must be conserved. What you have is potentially my property and when I get it from you, it must be conserved as mine, especially if I got it while you were drunk and passed out.

Other men who had stronger stomachs and were better drinkers (as evidenced by their rapid evolution from relatively weak beer, which even at 3.2% has the capacity to render Conservatives stupidly drunk within minutes, to wines and Scotch whiskies, neat) realized that by offering enough beer and a warm place to lay down, they could get the Conservatives to bring all the meat to a central place. Then, while the Conservatives drank beer, threw up, and passed out, these guys made lists of the poor and ill and defenseless and made sure that they got their share of the meat in return for doing the sewing, fetching, and hair dressing that so fascinated the Conservatives when they were awake and/or sober. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some noteworthy Liberal achievements include the domestication of Conservatives, the invention of the individual, face-to-face sex, and the concept of Democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that Conservatives provided.

Over the years Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most destructive land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the mule, the animal whose ability to pull the plow that broke the plains so grain could be planted and more beer could be brewed and civilization ensured, has been enshrined in the literature and art of the ages, including a magnificent series of films.

Modern Liberals avoid beer so as not to be confused by Frenchmen with Conservatives but will, if pressed, sip an imported beer (with lime added). They eat raw fish but like their beef well done and in very small portions called “medallions” (Conservatives prefer meat to come in slabs; most Conservatives are overweight, have high blood pressure, and die young, which is what makes them so testy; advocating a life style that provably leads to the premature extinction of your own kind is intellectually hard to reconcile). Liberals also like sushi, tofu, and French food including lots of red wine and are invariably slender, well-groomed and live very long happy lives with many serial wives and mistresses. Another interesting evolutionary side note: most Liberals have much higher testosterone levels than Conservatives as evidenced by the higher incidence of baldness among Liberals and African American basketball players. Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are Liberals. Liberals invented the rule that a fly ball behind third base belongs to the shortstop to prevent Conservative infielders from injuring themselves and losing the game in the last of the ninth.

Conservatives drink domestic beer, mostly Bud or Miller Lite. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, members of the military, airline pilots and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other Conservatives who, not being Liberals and so not having careers but needing jobs, have to work for a living, and they pay them as little as they can, thus “conserving” their own wealth.

As much as Liberals would like to spend their time producing stuff, they realize that making it is only half the battle, so they take on the thankless task of governing the producers and deciding what to do with the production. Otherwise, while the Conservative producers, having drank, thrown, up, and passed out, were unconscious, other guys would come steal their stuff.

Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans and so work very hard to protect their Conservative friends from Europeans. It is this impulse to protect their Conservative friends that constitutes the basic weakness of Liberals, since Conservatives seem to have little more on their minds than the absolute eradication of Liberals from the earth and their embedded-ness in Hell (which, by the way, is also another Conservative invention worthy of notice; see, for example Alighieri, Dante and Santorum, Rick) or in Europe, not really part of Earth, actually.

Finally, this note: because Conservatives privilege action (or speech; the US Supreme Court says they are the same, which is why donations of millions of dollars from rich white men to conservatives is not unconstitutional; what looks like an action is really a speech) before thought, it is hard to know what Conservatives really think, or if they do. One can only watch their actions. In fact, if you are in the presence of Conservatives, it is always good to watch their actions—and your back.

 

Here ends today’s lesson in world history:

It should be noted that a Conservative may have a momentary urge to angrily respond to the above.

A Liberal will simply laugh and order another scotch and text message his secretary to remind him to send his Conservative brother-in-law two tickets to the ballet, just to piss him off. And there you have it.