Kathy Covid

 

            The past week brought us to a new plateau of optimism.  In large measure the explanation is rather obviously calendrical and meteorological.  We are very near the equinox.  The increment in the hours of daylight, the quality of the light itself, a dramatic if brief rise in temperature that has left in our field of vision only scattered patches of snow rather than deep snowfields.  We are threatened with some more cold days and even snow flurries, but we are surely past some tipping point.

 

            For us the specific day may have been February 19.  On that day we got our first injections of the Moderna vaccine.  I am fairly patient and stoical, but the moment I got the shot I realized that I had been much more concerned about the matter than I was willing to let on even to myself—or, perhaps, especially to myself.  The somewhat unlikely venue was the gardening section of a huge Walmart store in a shopping mall in North Brunswick, NJ, about fifteen miles north of us.  This may sound a bit dubious, but the whole set-up was brilliant—quick, efficient, and uncrowded.  The registrars were all friendly, courteous, upbeat young people, solicitous of  their elderly charges.  The hardest thing about it was walking from the registry desk at the pharmacy to the place where the shots were actually administered, a distance of about a city block, all of it of course through aisle after aisle of Walmart merchandise.  I deduce that the garden department had been chosen both for its peripheral location within the big box and because in mid-February there are few customers milling about among the large sacks of grass seed and turf-builder.  I suppose a sense of relief is what most people experience as they leave a Walmart,  but on this occasion the experience approached delight.

 

            But what I set out to write about was not that we got our jabs but how we came by them.  Many weeks ago I registered my sense of dissatisfaction at how vaccination was proceeding in the state of New Jersey.  The system was poorly organized and poorly explained, leaving one with the impression of a poverty of opportunities and an arbitrariness in their allocation.  I now realize this was, and to some extent still is, pretty much a national problem.  Elaborate websites featured impressive full pages of telephone numbers to call and forms to fill out, but none of this seemed ever to lead to actual vaccination appointments as opposed to endless referrals to other telephone numbers.  Once crucial medical workers and other “front-liners” had been addressed, the largest number of high priority candidates for vaccination were the elderly—and especially the already infirm elderly.  The press began to raise an unsettling theme.  Getting an appointment might depend less upon a theoretical eligibility than upon  digital sophistication and a persistent Darwinian competitiveness, characteristics for which the targeted population was perhaps not conspicuous.  Though there are more geezer computer whizzes and Tiger Greatgrandmoms than you might think, there was more than enough truth in this analysis to cause a bit of generalized elder distress.

 

            Then, out of the blue, I got a telephone call from a woman named Kathy.  She has a last name of course, but of course I didn’t take it in, neatly demonstrating that I was exactly the kind of person she had it in mind to call.  She is now preserved in my phone “contacts” as Kathy Covid—perhaps a poor repayment for her kindness, but an efficient way of differentiating her from  a surprisingly large number of other Kathies recorded in that registry.  Kathy was calling from somewhere up in the northern part of Somerset County.  She told me that she and a few friends had formed a group to help elderly people (the diplomatic phrase she used was eligible people) set up vaccination appointments.  Would we be interested?  You bet.  Within two hours we were able to schedule appointments.  I passed on her number to friends, and they had similar results.  When I called Kathy myself a couple of days later to thank her for her help, she was very gracious, though it seemed to me obvious that she hadn’t remembered my name.  By that time she had probably talked with, and aided, dozens of other elders.

 

            Most people who love poetry even a little are likely to have read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a poem which is about, among other things, recollected memories and their relation to the moral life.  In it the poet recounts revisiting, after an absence of five years, the beautiful countryside above the ruins of a twelfth-century monastery on the Welsh borders.  His earlier memories of the natural beauty are revivified, though they have never left him.  “These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love…”   Little, unremembered acts of kindness and of love…perhaps the most famous lines in a famous poem.  They hardly need glossing, though these days one should perhaps make an observation relating to linguistic history.  Wordsworth here uses man in its common eighteenth-century generalizing sense of human kind.  It is not, as we say now, “gender specific”.  What Kathy Covid did for us was indeed an act of kindness and of love, and indeed was also apparently unremembered after only a few days, or at least detached from memorial specificity amid a plethora of other such kind acts.

 

            It is now just over a year a since the plague fell upon the world, negatively affecting all of human social life, but especially the daily life of complex industrial and commercial societies like our own.  And in our country the effects seemed exacerbated by a threatening synergy of medical and political malaise culminating, in these parts at least, in the midst of the darkening cold of winter.  The lack of social cohesion made vivid at the personal level in the enforced isolation of so many of us, and more broadly in the inability of our government to get anything very serious done, has seemed painfully apparent.  Under these circumstances little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love can suddenly claim a great name and memorability, certainly, among those who have experienced them. 

 

Pompeii

                                                                       " Last Days of Pompeii" by Karl Pavlovich Bryullov (1833)

Years ago I found in an old book shop a cache of cheap portfolios of art reproductions, organized mainly by painter.  They were intended, I think, for home study or possibly even for framing, but I used several of them to make sets of table placemats as gifts for friends and relatives.  I remember particularly a Marc Chagall set for my son Luke; we ourselves have a set of Giottos, now a little worse for wear.  A recent deep dive in a glory-hole storage room came upon the preparations, two decades now in abeyance, for a set I had entirely forgotten: reproduced scenes from the famous two-thousand-year-old domestic murals in Pompeii.  This discovery became a link in a chain of Lockian associated ideas now yearning to blog forth in various channels, including the sex life of the ancients, old novels, random Internet correspondents, and the comparative cultural levels of chief executives in the United States and Great Britain—all joining, naturally, in a single symphony of commodious congruence.

Knebworth House

            Three years ago we—Joan and I and our good friend John Logan, one of the senior bibliographers in the Firestone Library—led an alumni tour entitled “Great Libraries and Literature of England.”  The title could have been supplemented by “and a Few Great Cathedrals and a Pub or Two”.  Our “Princeton Journeys” leader was a wonderful young woman who had worked with an enterprising travel outfit to supplement the itinerary with numerous extra sites of literary interest, such as the Dickens Museum in London and various specialized book sellers.  One or two of these were places I never would have dreamed of, such as Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, a stately country home in the league of Downton Abbey, and the ancestral domicile of the politician and wildly successful Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a contemporary and friend. of Dickens.  As you know from Downton Abbey such places are impossibly expensive to maintain, and the supply of American heiresses having dried up, most of them have been torn down or repurposed long ago.  But the current master of Knebworth, an enterprising and imaginative Bulwer descendant, has kept Knebworth going thanks to his energy and entrepreneurial skills.  His house is now a major venue for rock concerts, among other popular events.  I am sure that literary tours like ours are a very small part of the income stream.

 

 Edward Bulwer-Lytton in salad days

            I think it is safe to say that Bulwer Lytton is not widely read today.  To the extent he is known at all, it is probably unfairly in connection with a burlesque literary competition held each year to ascertain the worst opening line of a novel.   The opening sentence of one of his novels (Paul Clifford) begins It was a dark and stormy night, and staggers on for fifty more words.  Actually, I don’t think it’s all that bad a sentence; but when Snoopy from Peanuts launched his literary career with it, the die was cast.  I don’t know if any living soul has read Paul Clifford,  but I can boast of having read two other Bulwer-Lytton titles.  The first was Eugene Aram, which featured in a piece in my “Rogue Scholar” series.  The other, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), is probably his best and best-known.  It really is pretty good: intrigue, good guys, bad guys, lubricity, Christians, lions, and of course one hell of an awesome volcano.  Art engenders art.  Bulwer-Lytton had been inspired to take up his theme after viewing the huge, lurid painting, famous in its day, by the Russian artist Bryuillov.  Later, Hollywood would find inspiration in Bulwer-Lytton.  The Last Days of Pompeii has many elements favored by the makers of celluloid epics, and they gave it the full treatment.  In addition to the slave markets, gladiatorial combats, and over-the-top dinner parties, it also has a noble lover named Glaucus, and an even more noble lass of the servile class, the blind flower-girl Nydia, doomed, of course, to sacrifice her own happiness for the aristos.

 

Nydia, the blind flower-girl (statue in the Met)           

 

            But, back to the lubricity part.  The name of the city, Pompeii, has nothing to do with Pompey the Great, as I had witlessly imagined.  It derives from a non-Latin word for five, the number of the town’s ancient subdivisions; but it  might just as well have been called Phallusopolis, so copious are the surviving images of the aroused male member in paint, ceramic, stone, and ivory in both domestic and public settings to be found among the ruins--though not in my more chaste set of unfinished placemats, of course.  On this topic I recommend with enthusiasm a Youtube lecture by the eminent Cambridge classicist, Professor Mary Beard*.   She charmingly refers to this organ as the Willie, greatly to be preferred to John Thomas, the term of art in currency at the historically Welsh college I myself attended at Oxford.  So I suppose Williamsburg might also do. 

 

            Pompeii must easily be the most remarkable archaeological site from Roman Antiquity.  A heavy inundation in fire and brimstone does little for the living, but once things cool down volcanic ash can be a wonderful preservative of what remains.  Thus the whole city was in effect shrink-wrapped in the year 79.  One cannot consider the results a preserved slice of ordinary Roman life, of course.  Pompeii was a kind of strange amalgam of the Hamptons and Atlantic City, mixing private, elegant villas of One Percenters with a kind of honky-tonk coarseness in certain public venues.

         

   Edward Bulwer-Litton was a busy man, splitting his time between his London townhouse and his rural stately home, and frequently traveling abroad.  He was an active Member of Parliament for many years, and his talents by no means went unrecognized.  He had the distinction—rare, I should think, if not in fact unique, of declining an invitation to take up the throne of Greece.   Ah, those were the days!  In the 1850s he was Secretary of State for the Colonies, no minor position.  He made pots of money from his writing, but he lived the Victorian Nightmare as well as the Victorian Dream, as his wife went mad and, while not actually confined to the attic, was a cause of great difficulty and distress.

            I was already lamenting privately within myself that we in America probably do not have in in our elected legislative body or our presidential cabinets people who have published twenty novels and declined royal thrones when I accidentally came upon evidence of a dramatic  difference in what might be called the cultural profiles of chief executives on opposite sides of the Atlantic.  Still pursuing Roman archaeology, I came upon a televised debate in the“Intelligence Squared” format between Mary Beard and Boris Johnson, at the time the Mayor of London and now of course Prime Minister of Great Britain.  The somewhat whimsical topic was “Greece vs Rome”.  I offer no spoiler alert because I have no intention of spoiling anything.  I encourage you to watch it for yourself, if possible recalling in your mind as you do so the general tenor of the first debate between the incumbent Republican president and his Democratic challenger on September 30, 2020.   It was a dark and stormy night.

Pompeii: Fun from Wall to Wall

*Pompeii: Life and Death, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0zBG5R7TXU, recently drawn to my attention by Dr. Milo Sampson, an erudite Princeton alumnus who sends me no end of interesting leads.  Professor Beard has been described (admittedly by the Guardian) as “a celebrity, a[n English] national treasure, and easily the world’s most famous classicist”.  The lubricious elements of The Last Days of Pompeii which dates from the 1830s, are naturally somewhat subdued when compared with contemporary university lectures.  Victorian writers often reveal a kind of moral schadenfreude with regard to ancient sexual frankness; but Bulwer-Lytton’s real-life commerce with women suggests that he possibly might have fit in quite well with the morals of ancient patriarchy

 

BiblioWars

 

            People accuse me, probably rightly, of being out of touch, even antiquarian.  This is mainly because I have never had a Twitter account.  I did sign up for Facebook in a fit of temporary mental aberration, but since I forgot the password many years ago, you could not call me a heavy user.  The regular email inundation is sufficient.  On occasion the cause of my outofitness is attributed to my reading habits.  Although I read a fair number of books, not a lot of them have been reviewed in the New York Review of Books in the last couple of months.  I suppose that this fact can  indeed be explained in terms of temperament, but I would prefer to put it in the following terms.   Suppose you are a lover of many kinds of artistic expression, not only good literature but painting, sculpture, the theater, ballet, opera, music generally.  Indeed there is probably little need for supposition here.  The odds are that you quite keen on one or several of them.  Surely, no matter how eager you might be to keep up with recent developments, you would not want to limit your experience to works written, composed, or created in the last half decade?  Indeed the danger in some of these field (one thinks perhaps of classical music) is that the established repertoire is so rich as to lead to the neglect of contemporary experimenters.  Even with regard to popular music and the cinema, fields in which powerful economic forces encourage the hallowed American consumerist pattern (use/discard/replace) there emerge patterns of the admired “classic” and its slightly downstream sibling, the “vintage”.

 

            A lowball estimate puts the number of new books published in the U. S. last year at  a quarter of a million.  Call that Group A.  The Boston Public Library has about fifteen million old ones—meaning published before last year and in various parts of the world.  Call that Group B.  Group A is comprehensive and promiscuous, including a large number of valuable items on septic tank drainage and the true interpretation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that will not survive the selective principles and budget constraints governing Group B.  Even so I know for a fact that both groups,  even when on general principles of manageability arbitrarily reduced by, say, ninety-five percent, would contain many titles that I would want to read, need to read, benefit from reading.  But I could never read them all.  Ars longa, vita brevis est.*  One must, alas, be selective here as regarding so many other of life’s possible pleasures.  Under these circumstances book reviews are of some use, of course.  But much better than a single review is a general reputation built up over several years, decades, or preferably centuries.

 

            Novelty is often a virtue, but a lover of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or George Eliot is unlikely to consider it an omnipotent one.  To this end I must dust off a personal anecdote, possibly with a few rhetorical elaborations, that for all I know I have already published in one of these pages.  “Old men forget,” as Henry V says in his most famous speech.  There are now 599 of these essays in the continuing series, and I can’t remember even writing most of them, let alone what is in them.  But I remember the episode itself, and I can pin it down to a definite year, 1979, because of its association with a particular book published in that year.  The book was The Coup by John Updike, an author I greatly admire.

 

            The culturally conservative impulse long evident to historical scholars is a feature of literary history as well.  E. B. Tylor, one of the founders of cultural anthropology, whom his scholarly progeny have been killing off in classic Oedipal fashion for several decades now, has a memorable summary of the conservative principle: “Most things that exist in the world exist for the reason that they once existed.”  This is relevant to literature in many ways.  So powerful were the examples of what we often call the Latin classics that medieval poets like Dante, Jean de Meun, and Chaucer had to struggle self-consciously to present their vernacular works as worthy to be thought of in the same terms as those of Ovid and Virgil.   Even after the development of rich literatures in the European vernaculars,  after Shakespeare and Cervantes and Madame de Lafayette, the critics kept up the debate.  Literary historians describe an episode in eighteenth-century culture that they often call the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”.  One well-known product of the episode was Jonathan Swift’s satire, The Battle of the Books.

 

            A current version or echo of this ancient “battle” will be familiar to anyone like myself interested in trying to convey older literature to today’s students, with “older” here meaning something like “before Bob Dylan”.  To be really hip as a professor of literature, you will do well to study contemporary writers and, if possible, bob  around as much as possible in their cultural wake.  I tried hard not to be jealous of my modernist colleagues who were very much in the swim of the here-and-now and hung out with folks who didn’t even realize there had been a there and then.  These people were so au courant that their preferred mode of reading a novel was in the author’s spare set of proof sheets.  These people went to glamorous cocktail parties in New York.

 

            I was never at such soirées until, by a strange fluke, I found myself in an administrative position that required me to attend one or two, and this brings me to my anecdote.  My role as one of the judges for the awarding of a literary prize—a role into which I was thrust ex officio by a provision of the defunct prize-giver’s will—placed me in an elegant wine-sipping event in which I found myself in heavy literary dialogue with a glamorous youngish woman in publishing.  I actually didn’t have to say too much, because she was a great talker.  That was a good thing, because she didn’t seem exactly enthralled by what little I was saying.  Still I was able to fake adequately  until she asked me what I thought of the latest Updike novel.  I looked nonplussed, as though I couldn’t tell which latest Updike novel she had in mind.  “You know, The Coup,” she said.  I had to admit that I had not read The Coup.  (I don’t think I committed the further indiscretion of saying that I had never heard of it, as was probably also the reality.)  This admission seemed to have a dramatic and disconcerting effect on my interlocutor, as though I had just pleaded “No Contest” to a charge of pedophilia or, at the very least, released in her direction an epic halitosis.  All traces of the interest I had imagined I sensed drained from her expression.  “Oh,” she said, “what a pity.  You know, it’s been out for six weeks.”  With this she began that well-known type of cocktail party pivot,  occasioned by the sudden discovery on the part of one conversational party of the urgent necessity to go to the loo, grab a canape, feed a parking meter, in any event to be somewhere else doing something else.  Male fragility?  Medieval fragility?  I don’t know quite what to call it, but I knew I had suffered a most palpable hit.  Indignation trumped embarrassment, however, and I was determined to defend myself.  After all I was a man who had read quite a lot of Updike, mainly short stories, sure, but I definitely remembered having read Couples, and that couldn’t have been out for more than a decade.  So as she was in the very act of turning away, I said to her “Let me ask you,” as though oblivious to the obvious fact that our conversation was over, “have you read the Consolation of Philosophy?”  The question was sufficiently bizarre to stop her in her tracks.  “The What of Philosophy?” she asked.  “The Consolation,” I said.  “The Consolation of Philosophy.”  When she still looked nonplussed I added, “by Boethius….Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius”.  You need to be sure you’re talking about the right Boethius.  “No,” she finally admitted, though not without a hint of hesitation.  “What a pity,” I said.  “It’s been out for one thousand, four hundred, and fifty-five years.”  Then I made my own pivot.

 

*The Latin epitaph from the headstone of the infant John Longbottom (Nov. 17, 1742-Feb. 3,1744) in the churchyard of Saint Æthelbert, Rackover Magna, Worcs.)

 

 

Bowled Over

 

This will be an essay about exquisite literary bowls and granddaughters of the same quality.  It is also about the creativity of youth and the contemplation of age.  The Preacher of Ecclesiastes—I refer to the biblical book of that name--is gloomy, but what a poet!  His justly famous admonition to the young is best understood by the old.  Remember your Creator, he says, before it is too late. Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.  Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.  Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher: all is vanity  (Ecc 12:6-8).  Around the image of the broken golden bowl Henry James created one of the marvels of our literature.

 

            That’s the background on literary bowls.  Now for the background on granddaughters, or rather one in particular.  Lulu Mae Fleming-Benite, our Number Two granddaughter, is a young woman of parts.  Fulsomeness in pursuing this theme is a grandfather’s prerogative; but I shall be brief.   She recently turned eighteen, shortly after learning of her early acceptance at her college of choice, Barnard, where she will begin a course of study next fall.  Like her two lively sisters, Lulu has a wide range of interests and abilities.  A talented visual artist in several media and an aspiring musician, she also has a frank intellectual passion that reminds me (yes) of my own adolescent self.  In Marseille, where she spent a visiting semester of her high school junior year, she became interested in philosophy—philosophy being a high school subject in France.  She is now in fact working on the English translation of a book written by her philosophy teacher.

 

            At Christmas Lulu presented, us,  her local grandparents—those on her father’s side live in Jerusalem—a pair of gifts that exhibit some of the range of her artistic talents.  Working from a photograph taken in our yard last year, she painted for me a unique souvenir of an affectionate moment  during a family summer dejeuner sur l’herbe, quite the peer, in my biased opinion,  of similar efforts of Manet or Seurat.  And she poured her love for her grandmother into a remarkable work of ceramic art.  It is a beautifully proportioned bowl, three inches deep, with an eight-inch diameter at its top.  Its glossy, slightly curving sides taper down to a base with a diameter of six inches.  But it is its literary iconography that makes it so distinctive.

 

            My wife Joan, Lulu’s grandmother, studied English at Oxford and has been a life-long lover of good literature.  Among her admired modern authors is Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a writer of revolutionary importance in terms of the aesthetics of English language fiction.  Her early novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is on the face of it not about very much: Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-crust London society lady, throws a cocktail party for a group of friends, most of whom are as conventional as herself.  But what was not on the face of it—subtly shifting points of view, the examination of inner life, a bold prose lyricism—was akin to a literary explosion.

 

             I am an admirer of the fine ceramics one sees in museums, and years ago, when they were still affordable in England, I gathered a few old blue and white ginger jars that add a little class to the shelves that flank our hearth.  But in truth I know little of ceramic technique, and have no idea how one potifies an image of Virginia Woolf.  I do, I think, grasp something of the meaning of the floral decorations around the bowl’s exterior.  Lulu has captured a whole bouquet with botanical exactitude, and even I can recognize many individual species: pansies, dahlias, asters, hydrangeas perhaps, a rose certainly.  I seemed to remember that Mrs. Dalloway is full of flowers, but until I pulled it from the shelf I had forgotten just how full.  The novel’s first sentence-- Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself—contains but the first of literally dozens of obviously significant floral references.  One sees them everywhere, even in hastily skimming the book, as I did.  Roses—the one flower Mrs. Dalloway really approves for cutting--seem to be particularly significant.

 

            I am no expert on Virginia Woolf, but there are many such experts out there, and I was sure that even casual Internet research would turn up a few.  It took me approximately a minute and a half to find several promising titles, including an entire master’s thesis on the topic.  I promised myself when I retired that I would never again read a student thesis, but of course I’ve already broken that rule a few times.  Truth is, there are some very good student theses including one that  Betty I. Rychen presented to the faculty of the English Department at the College of William and Mary in 1982.  It is entitled Mrs. Dalloway’s Flowers: An Attempt to Define a Symbol.

 

            Mrs. Dalloway is a stunning work of art, but I find it immensely sad, as I think most readers, especially other elderly ones, might.  It is about many things, but one of them is how the promise and daring of youth can be stifled by caution and social convention. The saddest victories of convention are those that coerce love.  Oversimplifying only grossly, Clarissa Dalloway married the wrong man thirty years ago.  He is a perfectly nice and decent man, not without a certain worldly eminence, but he is the wrong man.   Right in the middle of the book there is a moment when Peter Walsh, the one Clarissa should have married instead of Dalloway, and for whom her decision has had consequences no less sad than for herself, is about to hail a taxi near the Regents Park tube station, across from which “a tall quivering shape like a funnel”, an old woman, a hawker of newspapers, stood singing in “a voice of no age or sex” a song as old as the earth.  “Through all ages—when the pavement was grass, when it was a swamp, through the age of tusk  and mammoth, through the age of silent sunrise” the woman “stood singing of love” remembering walking with her dead lover through long summer days.  The day he disappeared was  “flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters.”  Peter is moved to press a shilling into the crone’s hand.

 

            One of the marvelous qualities of great art is that it is so often midwife to other art.  For the rest of her days Joan will enjoy this bowl, uniquely original in its unique allusiveness, the gift of a delightful young woman  and a beloved granddaughter.  Lulu is now at about the same age as Woolf’s character Clarissa in what might be called the first movement of Mrs. Dalloway.  Many great decisions of her life lie ahead of her, but the nearly mystic bond of kinship, as much of character as of blood, is one which her grandparents will always cherish and will be brought to mind with floral drama whenever they sit down around the table.

 

 

 

Slaughterhouse Five, and Counting

 

            Recent bounty from the Library of America was a fine set of Kurt Vonnegut, and I am fresh off a much enjoyed reading of Slaughterhouse Five (1969).  By the late winter of 1944 the Wehrmacht, doomed yet still dangerous, was in retreat on both its eastern and its western fronts.  In the Ardennes the Germans had stunned the advancing Americans in the Battle of the Bulge and demonstrated quite clearly that the fight was not yet over.  This was the context in which from its bases in England Allied Bomber Command ordered and executed a massive air attack  on Dresden, an ancient “city of culture” that until then had been barely touched by the war’s violence.  The raid began on Shrove Tuesday, almost exactly seventy-six years ago.  Much of the ordnance was incendiary, igniting a firestorm that resulted in vast material destruction and appalling human carnage among the city’s civilian population, swollen by hordes of refugees from the advancing Red Army.

 

            For many historical commentators this event lives in infamy, to coin a phrase.   Military justification for the raid was at best highly questionable.  Any country on a “total war” footing, as Germany certainly was, could perhaps be regarded as having military targets everywhere.  There were indeed strategic light industries in Dresden, especially various lens-grinding ateliers producing  high quality optical instruments, and British propagandists made as much of this as they could.  The claim that the city was a major transportation hub with a complex ganglia of rail routes linked to all parts of Germany was undeniable.  But everyone also knew that it was a residential, not an industrial city; and anyone with access to military intelligence reports knew as well that it was practically bursting with a huge influx of non-combatant refugees —especially women and children-- fleeing before the Russian advance.  That Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda czar, presented it as a Massacre of the Innocents was to be expected; but his “take” was in essence adopted by the few journalists from neutral countries (Switzerland and Sweden) posted in Germany. Churchill, who had been a prime mover of the increasingly ferocious tactics of Allied Bomber Command, did his best now to protect his historical reputation, seldom entirely distant in his mind..  RAF Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris thought no special scruples were required when targeting an enemy whose V-2 rocket bombs were being fired randomly in the direction of the English capital, and Carl Spaatz, Harris’s counterpart in the US Army Air Corps, seemed nonplussed by criticisms of the raid.

 

            Slaughterhouse Five is a terrific novel, enriched by Vonnegut’s unique dark humor and relentless but measured irony.  It has a complex narration.  It begins as autobiography, with Vonnegut explaining how he came to write “my famous Dresden book,” implicitly presented as having been completed some considerable time in the past.  But the book’s first two sentences do not encourage a lot of biographical confidence.  “All this happened, more or less.  The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.”  The book is truly famous indeed, and among the critical commonplaces concerning it, two are prominent.  The first is that it is about the Dresden raid.  The second is that it is “an anti-war classic”.  The claims are not exactly wrong, but in my opinion they hardly do justice to the book.  The extent to which it is an anti-war classic has little to do with didactic intention or the book’s narrative posture.  What I shall call the empirical Kurt Vonnegut was at the beginning of 1945 an American infantryman captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, shipped all the way across Germany to Dresden in Saxony, and confined with other POWs in a makeshift prison in an old commercial abattoir.  There, with a morbid irony, the prisoners safely waited out the devastation that had turned a great city into a slaughterhouse for so many of its own inhabitants.  Though skating across a surface of obviously autobiographical experience, Vonnegut the novelist is steady in his effort to generalize, mythologize, and indeed fantasize the narrative.  A good deal of the book, perhaps too much in my view, is given over to its hero’s sci-fi persecution by space aliens from the Planet Tralfamadore.  Once past the first chapter, which ends by declaring the failure of the book still ahead for the reader, the narration switches to the third person and the “Vonnegut figure” is a very ordinary joe named Billy Pilgrim.  With this name  Vonnegut invokes a classic literary tradition of peregrine commentators on worldly folly that includes Pilgrim’s Progress and Candide.  That war is hell is not the point of the book, but its premise.

 

 

            The statistical comparison of hecatombs is a sordid business at best, but even atrocities can be characterized by degree.  Vonnegut actually cites The Destruction of Dresden (1963) by David Irving, who had not yet been branded as a “Holocaust denier” or accused of racist neo-Nazism.  The lowest plausible estimate of civilian deaths in the Dresden raid is enormous, about 25,000.  At various times Irving multiplied that number tenfold, and his own rock bottom was 135,000, one of the lower figures originating from the Goebbels propaganda machine and backed by fraudulent documents.  By fictionalizing it, Vonnegut also spread the canard that American fighter planes had strafed civilians in the streets.   One may wonder whether the  subtitle of his book (“The Children’s Crusade”)  is more comforting than “Massacre of the Innocents.”  Only when stimulated by this extraordinary work of fiction did I realize, with a start, that it was the probable source of what little I thought I had known and certainly believed about the Dresden raid for most of my life.  Novelists have equal license to use history, or abuse it.  Their obligation is to their art.  One serious military historian characterized my view of the matter, which is to say Billy Pilgrim’s, as one “absorbed by countless undergraduates for whom the book has been received wisdom since its publication in 1969”.*  Those are sobering words for an English professor.

 

            For me the absorption had not even been conscious, but a kind of accidental and unpleasant cultural transfer, like stepping on a gob of chewing gum.  The bombing of Dresden was simply criminal.  Why, then, do I continue to demur in face of the nearly universal opinion concerning Hiroshima and its yet more flagrant slaughter?  For the comparison seems obvious to all, as it certainly did to Vonnegut, who raises it with heavy irony in Slaughterhouse Five in a baroque episode of the post-War life of Billy Pilgrim, the same episode in which he endorses the work of David Irving.

 

            The condemnation of Truman’s decision to use the Bomb has now become nearly universal, but it is actually the fruit of generational change.   Few veterans of Guadalcanal or Tarawa found the bombing of Hiroshima obscene, but such men are now very thin on the ground.  Scarcely a person living today was a mature adult in summer of 1945, when the decision was implemented.  Japanese military policy was controlled by a fanatic medieval warrior code in which bloodless capitulation was unthinkable.  In the invasion of Okinawa, the Americans had suffered 50,000 casualties.  About 100,000 impressed Japanese civilians, some of whom had been armed only with pointed bamboo sticks, many of them compelled by their brutal army overlords to commit suicide, were dead.  Okinawa was a fairly remote place in the Ryukyus.  One could but imagine what would happen in invading the home islands, where the warlords declared there was no such thing as a civilian, and that every Japanese man, woman, and child must fight to the death for every yard of their native soil.  Truman’s decision might be justified on classical utilitarian grounds.  He made a bet that the Bomb could end the war, and he won.

                                                                       Kamikaze pilot dons the headband of death
 

          I was quite young during the War and unable to appreciate either the arduousness or the brilliance of the American naval war in the Pacific.  Certainly I was innocent of moral subtlety.  What I knew was that my Dad was there, in the thick of frightful things that made my Mother anxious, silent, and teary-eyed; and strange place names like Midway, “the Marshalls,” “the Solomons,” “the Marianas,” Iwo Jima, the Leyte Gulf, though lacking all geographical specificity, troubled my imagination.  I knew I wanted “us” to bomb the hell out of the Japs, and right away.  I suppose that had to be the way little British boys thought about Dresden.

 

            The past can be lamented, regretted, or even deplored.  Or it can be imaginatively remade in serious make-believe by a fine writer.  But it cannot be cancelled, as so many well-intentioned but misguided souls now pretend.  For what does not exist loses all pedagogic potential.  What does not live in memory can too easily revive by recurrence.  Obligatory oblivion likewise wars against human nature as expressed in a famous saying of the Roman writer Terence: “I am human, and I reckon that nothing human can be  alien to me.”  So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim might say.

 

 

*Marshall De Bruhl, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 278.

Robots at the Gates

 

 

            Everyone wants power, and they should.  Yet we need to think about it in ways rather different from those animating so much of our current political discourse.  My view is that the more we can increase physical power while encouraging equable distribution of metaphorical power, the better off we shall be.  One of the features of influential modern thought-systems generally has been their shared investment in the notion of dynamically interacting polarities.  Darwinian biology is a struggle for survival.  Freudian psychology is a foggy battlefield  where shadowy adversaries clash unseen.  Above all there is Marx: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”  We saw some results produced by this mode of thinking of “class war” in the hecatombs in the last century, in Russia, in China, in Cambodia.   I don’t know how much we learned, though.  In the post-modern synthesis now dominant in our academic institutions, two categories have been added, race and sex, providing a broader pallet for our “identitities” and larger battlefields for “power struggle”.

 

            In its physical sense power is the application of force to achieve  a physical end.  The sources of such power are finite, first of all the muscles of the individual human body, multiplied by the cooperation or coercion of other human or animal bodies and amplified by tools.  The only sources of supplementary physical power, in the past or in the future,  are the  four elements of the material environment as imagined by the ancients: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water.

 

            For a very long time the world’s human community, though never in stasis, ticked or staggered along  in a generally steady state of  population and of life of expectancy, both of them so low as perhaps to challenge our credulity today.  The bare necessities of human life—sustenance, shelter, and often raiment—were long the principal but unfortunately not the only  objects of the human exercise of power.   Our history is deeply stained by slaughter and destruction; yet human survival is the result of cooperation, especially the cooperation between men and women.  Such cooperation has been the absolute necessity for  survival, an irrefutable fact sometimes obscured in contemporary political theory.

 

            As a medievalist I insist on recognizing the dramatic exploitation of wind and water, as also the invention of powerful machines,  in many parts of the ancient world.  But for the unleashing of  power the European Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century is of unique significance, moving over a century from windmills to steam, through electricity, to internal combustion.  This was not renaissance, but new birth of power and, in effect, a new world.

 

            The development of agriculture in the mists of Antiquity had been a major revolution on its own,  Its necessary expansion  now required an unprecedented expenditure of power..  Can we even imagine the power required to transform eighty acres of old growth forest into arable fields suitable for commercial plantation?  You are doing this along the bank of a major tributary creek in ante-bellum Georgia.  The land is crowded with eighty-foot pines of two-foot diameter, each weighting about a ton.  Nobody has ever heard of backhoes or bulldozers, John Deere or the Caterpillar Corporation.  Still, you’re better off than your Yankee pioneer counterpart in Western Reserve of Ohio aiming for a arable field.  He’s facing some hardwoods of four-foot diameter, and closer to twenty tons.  The felling is still done mainly with axes, adequate two-man crosscuts still needing perfection.  And after months of grotesque labor you are left with a field of stumps.  Dynamite?  Never heard of it?

 

            Occasionally we have reminders of the efforts once expended on building the pyramids or moving the monoliths to Stonehenge in certain modern pharaonic undertakings of modernity in transition.  Read about the construction of Magnitogorsk, Stalin’s “magnetic mountain” steel center of the Five Year Plans.  When I was a boy I met a retired engineering officer who had spent some time in pre-War China supervising the construction of roads and an aerodrome.  He told me about the real “Asiatic mode of production” as he had experienced it, and it had little to do with Karl Marx.  Faced with a dire lack of heavy equipment, he was able to progress only because of  a nearly infinite supply of brute human labor fueled by a modest distribution of rice and bamboo shoots.  He distributed differing sizes of pebbles and gravel among hundreds of coolies with instructions to scour the hillsides and creek bottoms to gather small stones of similar size and shape.  Thus without mechanical crushers or screeners they piled up veritable mountains of graded stone, one pebble at a time, for compacting or creating aggregate.  The expenditure of foot-pounds is staggering to contemplate.

 

            That there are moral paradoxes involved in the expansion of our human power is almost too banal a point to make, and we don’t have to look to the age of atomic energy before recoiling from their glare.   Hand-picking the seeds from a cotton boll required no superhuman strength; but from any practical point of view it is impossibly difficult, slow and tedious.  The invention of a machine that could do it  revolutionized the textile industry, but also greatly extended chattel slavery in the southern parts of the nascent American republic.  Physical forces are indifferent.  Whether power liberates or enslaves is a choice to be made by rational moral minds.  Unfortunately history suggests that our power too often outstrips our wisdom. 

 

            Many very smart people think we are about to embark on a power trip of greater significance and much more rapid development than the old Industrial Revolution.  Even old-fashioned people like myself, who are far from fluent in such matters, may find themselves intrigued and hopeful.   Thus far human beings have gained much of our power by thinking hard about creating new machines and processes.  What we are calling “artificial intelligence” is the extrapolation and application of human intelligence in an effectively new way.  We have machines that can do some of our thinking, calculating, and computing tasks with the comparative ease with which Eli Whitney’s metal-fingered machine could separate cotton seed.   But brave new worlds require forethought.  Since even before the Luddites attacked the looms in Nottinghamshire and John Henry died with his hammer in his hand the relationship between industrial efficiency and perceived human felicity has been a contested one.

 

            Medieval thinkers often made a distinction between two kinds of knowing: scientia (factual knowledge) and sapientia (wisdom,  philosophical insight). The promise implicit in the former sometimes depends upon the exercise of the latter.  Does anyone think that the seriously mixed effects of what we call “social media” could not have been improved by forethought and a serious sense of social responsibility?  The avalanche of power on the horizon is inevitable, and it probably will require of us a kind of unconventional thinking at least in some degree commensurate with its own unconventionality.  I keep hearing that driverless vehicles will evaporate the livelihoods of a million truckers.  Such a massive dislocation of labor is hardly something that can be shrugged off as a necessary debt to social Darwinism, as it was when the advent of the motor car rendered obsolete half a dozen populous professions involving literal horsepower, including the legendary workers in buggy-whip factories, if there ever really was such a thing as a buggy-whip factory.  For decades now our high schools have been educating students in fewer and fewer skills for which actual employers are willing to pay, so we might just give that some thought while we are at it.  Without underestimating the malign effects of obvious social pathologies, including racial prejudice, the correlation of “inequality” (usually first thought of in financial terms) with the “education gap” should be obvious.  The idea of a guaranteed minimum salary for all Americans used to fill me with dread on doctrinaire grounds that now strike me as slightly beside the point—the point being that a happy and harmonious  society is more important than one with a few more billionaires and a lot more opiate addicts.  Though I shall not be around to see it, I imagine the possibility of a land both rich and very smart, smart enough to marshal its enormous new power not in a zero-sum struggle among “identities” but in wide webs of fraternal cooperation, battling not one against another but against the common scourges of the one human race.